While the competition of these priorities and plans for solving the Syrian crisis harks back to the Cold War, ironically these P5 antagonists may have provided the outline of a framework and some structural stability that the Annan plan has been lacking to date.

CNN: The only glimmer of hope for Syria

Some of the irrational pessimism currently pervading Japan seems to be the result of an identity crisis to which many Japanese have fallen victim since the end of the cold war and the achievement of Japan's goal of catching up with the West.

ECONOMIST: The once and future boom

Not since the war in the former Yugoslavia have we seen this many people exposed to cold like this in a displacement crisis.

CNN: Syria's 'urban refugees' struggle for survival

Fifty years ago, in the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. government dispatched a high-level emissary to ease tensions during a nuclear crisis: a jazz trumpeter known to most of the world as Dizzy.

NPR: Dizzy Gillespie's Cold War Jazz Diplomacy