© The History Channel
The Cold War began during the Truman administration and lasted through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations and was ended in Reagan's second term when Reagan and Gorbachev came to an agreement that the conflict was dangerous, expensive, and pointless.
The Cold War did not cease for long—only from the last of Reagan's second term and the four years of George H. W. Bush's term. In the 1990s President Clinton restarted the Cold War by breaking America's promise not to expend NATO into Eastern Europe. George W. Bush heated up the renewed Cold War by pulling the US out of the Anti-ABM Treaty, and Obama has made the war hotter with irresponsible rhetoric and by placing US missiles on Russia's border and overthrowing the Ukrainian government.
John Foster Dulles (right) and his younger brother Allen Dulles
Allen was the head of the CIA, and John Foster was the Secretary of State, positions that they held for a long time. The brothers had a vested interest in the Cold War.
They used the Cold War to protect the interests of their law firm's clients, and they used it to enhance the power and budgets associated with their high positions in government. It is much more exciting to be in charge of foreign policy and covert activity in dangerous times.
Whenever a reformist democratic government appeared in Latin America the Dulles brothers saw it as a threat to the holdings that their law firm's clients had in that country. These holdings, sometimes acquired with bribes to non-democratic governments, diverted the country's resources and wealth into American hands, and that is the way the Dulles brothers intended to keep it. The reformist government would be declared Marxist or Communist, and the CIA and State Department would work together to overthrow it and place back in power a dictator in bed with Washington.
Comment: There seems to be no economic, social or political sphere of Russia's that the West will not nitpick at, vilify or attempt to undermine.