His first thought would no doubt be that little had changed. The West was still threatened by communist expansionism. Authoritarian governments still despised open societies. There was still a global struggle between freedom and collectivism, a struggle that could lead to nuclear catastrophe if it got out of hand.

Rip would be on the right track somewhere. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, old fault lines still exist. Russia is now orthodox and nationalistic instead of atheistic and revolutionary, but is still governed on the basis of dictatorship, exploitation and the subordination of the law to the whims of the elites.

China has abandoned Marxist economics, but not Leninist politics. Since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, the country has become terrifyingly autocratic, with independent journalists, bloggers and lawyers silenced and tech companies called on to create a surveillance state.

Look around the world and marvel at the extent to which Cold War alignments continue to shape geopolitics. Only the countries of Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states, have shaken off the legacy of authoritarianism and become pluralistic.

Elsewhere, states allied to the old Warsaw Pact are still generally friendly to post-communist Russia. In the Middle East, Syria remains the Kremlin’s strongest ally. Although the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen ceased to exist in 1990, the Houthis have taken over as the West’s local enemies.

Farther east, Vietnam and Laos never stopped being communist, but post-communist Mongolia remains friendly to Russia and China. In Africa, autocrats generally draw support from old Cold War allies, such as Mali. In the Western Hemisphere, three states are reliably anti-Western, and two of them, Cuba and Nicaragua, date that stance to their membership of the anti-capitalist bloc in the 1980s. Only Venezuela is new to the party.

Marxism, in the sense of common ownership, may have lost ground. But the coercive societies it created have proven depressingly durable. Consider North Korea, the state that has reportedly changed the least since our henpecked hero went into an alcoholic stupor in the 1980s, perhaps from too many Blue Hawaiians. It is still socialist in theory. But it is also a dynastic autocracy of a kind that would have been recognizable to any Iron Age slave emperor. We see in North Korea what many Western intellectuals refused to see at the height of the Cold War: that revolutionary socialism is a scam, a way of maintaining what Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson call an “extractive state.”

Extractive states have been the norm throughout human history because they are inherently suited to the people they govern. But the worst kind of extractive state is the totalitarian state because it does not tolerate civil association.

When they seized power, communists nationalized or banned every voluntary group that filled the space between state and citizen. For example, when the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party seized power in 1948, Janos Kádar, as Minister of the Interior, abolished more than 5,000 independent associations: churches, charities, chess clubs, boy scout groups, and village bands.

After such vandalism it is hard to rebuild. Totalitarianism teaches people to disbelieve, to distrust, to dissemble. Sir Roger Scruton rightly called it “the great sin at the heart of the communist system — the sin of isolating individuals from their fellow men, and then turning the spotlight of interrogation on them to watch them squirm.”

The surprising thing is that some post-communist states have managed to become open societies. It turns out that Estonians, unlike Eritreans, and Czechs, unlike Chinese, had just enough democratic muscle memory to fall back on. But after the first rush to freedom in 1990, things stalled and began to go backwards.

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Since 2012, more states have ceased to be free than have gone in the opposite direction. Unfree states now, as during the Cold War, hate open societies because they don’t want their own serf populations to pick up dangerous ideas. Hence the invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and hence the need for continued Western vigilance and deterrence.

Two things have happened in the past few weeks that could easily have sparked a full-scale nuclear conflagration during the Cold War. First, Israel and Iran have engaged in combat. Second, NATO weapons have been used directly against Russian forces. The Cold War, it seems, is not over. It is not even cold yet.