By the end of his second term, President Ronald Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," was strolling through Red Square with Russians slapping him on the back.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

And how have we husbanded the fruits of our Cold War triumph?

This month, China's leader-for-life Xi Jinping stood beside Vladimir Putin as 3,000 Chinese troops maneuvered with 300,000 Russians, 1,000 planes and 900 tanks in Moscow's largest military exercise in 40 years.

An uncoded message to the West from the East.

Richard Nixon's great achievement in bringing Peking in from the cold, and Reagan's great achievement of ending the Cold War, are history.

Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO's quick march to Russia's ancient frontiers, is alive and well. 

Russia appears to have given up on the West and accepted that its hopes for better times with President Donald Trump are not to be.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is berating Russia for secretly trading with North Korea in violation of U.N. sanctions, saying, "Lying, cheating, and rogue behavior have become the new norm of the Russian culture."

Cold wars don't get much colder than defaming another country's culture as morally debased.

The U.S. has also signaled that it may start supplying naval and anti-aircraft weaponry to Ukraine, as Russia is being warned to cease its inspections of ships passing from the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov.

The three-mile-wide strait lies between Crimea and Kerch Peninsula. In Russia's eyes, both banks of the strait are Russian national territory.

With U.S. backing, Ukraine has decided to build a naval base on the Sea of Azov to "create conditions for rebuffing the aggressive actions of the Russian Federation in this region."

Kiev has several patrol boats in the Sea of Azov, with a few more to be transferred there in coming months. Russia's navy could sink those boats and wipe out that base in minutes. 

Are we going to send our Navy across the Black Sea to protect Ukraine's naval rights inside a sea that has been as historically Russian as the Chesapeake Bay is historically American?

Poland this week invited the U.S. to establish a major base on its soil, for which Poland would pay two billion dollars, to be called "Fort Trump."

Trump seemed to like the idea, and the name.

Yet, the Bush II decision to install a missile defense system in Poland brought a Kremlin counter-move: the installation of nuclear-capable Iskander cruise missiles in Kaliningrad, the former German territory on Poland's northern border annexed by Stalin at the end of World War II.