A “New” Cold War?

When I was born in 1950, the US and the Soviet Union had already begun its first proxy contest: the Korean War. In grammar school, our teachers regularly herded us into the school basement, a futile attempt to safeguard us from the eventuality of a nuclear attack. In high school, the Vietnam War was raging and boys my age were being drafted to fight. In the mid 1970s, while serving a two-year stint with the Peace Corps in Chad, I was exposed to the Cold War proxy fight there between the Soviet-backed north and the US-backed south. The official end of the Cold War took place in 1991, when the Soviet Union was broken into pieces. But now that Russia is trying to put some of those pieces back together, I have to wonder whether it ever ended at all.