The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is approaching, but has the Cold War really ended and is it really a historic relic of the not too distant past?

The Soviet Union may no longer exist and the Warsaw Pact may have long been dissolved, but many of the remnants of the Cold War still exist, like the conflict in the divided Korean Peninsula, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and finally the issue of missile defense.

In the last few years the relations between NATO and the Russian Federation have become tense and described in terms reminiscent of the Cold War.

One of the main impetuses for this resumption of Cold tensions has been the U.S. missile shield project in the European continent.

The Russians have consistently made no secret about maintaining that the missile defense shield, above all else, is a threat to them.

The idea of a missile shield project in not new. During the Cold War, the idea was inaugurated by Ronald Reagan as part of a grand strategy to deploy missiles, technical facilities, and military bases around the world and in space, which led to the project being called “Star Wars.”

Since its inauguration the Pentagon has spent billions of U.S. dollars in research and study for the project.

While the U.S. government has claimed that the intended purpose of establishing a missile shield is to protect America and Europe from the threat of hypothetical North Korean or Iranian ballistic missile attacks, the Kremlin regards the missile shield project as a serious threat to the national security of Mother Russia.

Moscow is adamant on calling the justifications for deploying the missile shield as mere pretext to get closer to Russia.

Has the Cold War really ended?