(OPINION) The war in Ukraine is another indicator of our new cold war, which pits the U.S. and its allies against what I label the alliance of evil, Russia, and China, which will create levels of anxiety not experienced since the end of the old Cold War.

This new cold war is different from the old war which was mostly about ideology, communism versus democracy, pitting the U.S. and the former Soviet Union in a death struggle. Today’s conflict is between opposing world views, liberty versus authoritarianism.

The old Cold War rose from the ashes of World War II. Recall that President Franklin Roosevelt aligned us with Soviet Russia only because Adolf Hitler attacked Russia, which temporarily put aside our concerns about the communist regime.

However, tensions quickly rose after the war when Russia seized much of Eastern Europe and detonated a nuclear bomb, which resurrected then-fresh memories of our devastating bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Cold War paranoia of a Soviet invasion and nuclear annihilation impacted our lives at school and work with mandated duck-and-cover drills, evacuations, and the sound of air raid sirens.

Families built backyard fallout shelters, communities designated air raid facilities and the government proliferated educational films on how to survive a nuclear blast. There were warnings about communists in government which fed suspicions even about our neighbors’ sympathies.

Tension increased as the nuclear arms race reached a pinnacle in 1962 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba. President John F. Kennedy responded by blockading Russian ships heading to Cuba. That confrontation was the closest the Cold War came to escalating to a full-scale Armageddon. READ MORE