Yes, the Cold War is over

SINCE the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union 2 years later, members of Washington's foreign policy establishment have suffered from what former US ambassador Chas Freeman has described as the "Cold War Deprivation Syndrome".

After all, during the Cold War, the geo-strategic rivalry and ideological struggle between the world's 2 greatest superpowers - a global confrontation that could have ended with the destruction of the human race in a nuclear exchange - US decision-makers saw themselves as the central players in an historical epoch when "the fate of humanity was hanging in the balance", and believed that the choices they made would be recalled with awe by future generations.

My guess is that most Business Times readers were born after the Berlin Crisis of 1961 or the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and probably do not recall the sense of drama, a pre-apocalypse fear that one may not live to see the next day, that engulfed the entire world whether you lived in Washington, DC, or in Singapore.