Cold War and the Third World War bell.

A new Cold War.
But there is a modern public conversation about a new Cold War. This leads us to compare the current tense and ideological and military rivalry that is taking place with what has happened in the former Soviet Union and the West since the 1950s until the end of the 1980s. But such comparisons may be misleading.
Michael Kaufman, a senior researcher at the CNA Foundation and the Keenan Foundation of the Wilson Center, says: "The Cold War was a race between two political poles vying for shaping international politics, and both systems enjoyed economic and military advantages."
"Their totalitarian ideology has made that competition inevitable and power must be shared," Kaufman said.
Now, competition is not the result of a balance of power, or of a totalitarian ideology per se, but of conscious decisions taken by leaders, strategies followed, and a series of specific differences in international politics. This was not a "guided or inevitable".