Unless the goal of the Cold War was simply to dismantle the Soviet Union and its closest allies, I don’t think that it’s perfectly accurate to say that it ended (in either the 1990s or elsewhen).
The anticommunists continued to struggle against popular communist parties in the Russian Federation and elsewhere, they are trying and failing to dismantle the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Cuba, the liberal reforms in the People’s Rep. of China and the Socialist Rep. of Vietnam were poor substitutes for overthrowal, and so far the anticommunists haven’t balkanized the Russian Federation.
If we view the Cold War as essentially a complex class war (which would be quite reasonable), then it certainly never ended, or even been on pause.
I like to think about it as though it slowed to a near stop for a few years from 1992 to around 2008, and has only in the last few years ramped back up to the intensity it had when it was new.
For the most part, the cold war was a NATO war against the Soviets. Without the Soviets, the war lost its purpose but never really ended. And now that Russia has regained its strength and China is a real contender against American hegemony, the cold war’s regained a purpose.
So IMO it’s only a “second” cold war in the same sense that WWII was a “second” world war. Yes the main purpose of the aggression ended, but what picked up a few decades later in the case of WWII was the result of the same conflict.
The current cold war might technically be a new one, but only because the previous one was stagnant for long enough that people have lost the thread of it.
Agree with both you and anbol. Even the popular interpretation of the cold war as being a war between two economic systems: capitalist and communist, can’t be said to be “over” until every communist country is overthrown.
Most of their color revolutions succeeded, but they failed in Cuba, China, and the DPRK.
And of course even that interpretation isn’t fully correct, because they also overthrow any country that doesn’t bend the knee to the US, libya being the most recent.