USSR strategically never needed carriers in the first place, their enemy was NATO and by the time soviet could build carriers they had NATO except USA in their land based aircraft and rockets range anyway, and the main theater of sea battle would be North Atlantic. So to reach USA soviets developed the submarine technology more. And US also never needed carriers against the USSR specifically, since they did have Iceland, UK, Japan, Germany, Turkey.

So yes, imperialism and antiimperialism as you can see have big meaning for the military doctrine.