Disturbing echoes of the Cold War

Reading about things like North Korea's rocket tests, and Russia getting involved in destabilizing actions in Syria, among others, in recent days, one gets a distinct sense of déjà vu, as though the Cold War really never went away in the late 1980s.
I have been doing a Coursera university course on 20th Century Word History just recently, and part of the lecture materials includes 1950s nuclear war preparation public service broadcasts, and viewing movies like The Day After, which seemed like such a credible possibility in the early 1980s. Watching these today, they seem like quaint notions from the distant past, and seem to have little or nothing to do with the modern world.
But recent news has dredged up those memories and anxieties all over again, a real "blast from the past", so to speak. Maybe history really does repeat itself, and dictators and other idiots continue to invent themselves. But surely we have learned something from our past mistakes.