Ending the Cold War was a formality to 'restore' public faith in cohesive global organizations. Free-trade agreements and other major economic blocs shatter borders as a matter of policy -- the fact that such tight unity, solidarity, and uniformity between nations has gone unnoticed is probably more disturbing than actual acts that verify this unity (ie: Snowden having nowhere to run to).

Multi-generational voter apathy has culminated to a point where most people are so disconnected from reality that they thought Snowden could escape the long arm of the US Government.

Of course it has never ended. The War part was about who gets to be the top dog (i.e not specifically about communism vs capitalism), and that never stops.

Before the cold war it was the colonial powers fighting it out, for the same reasons (when the US was still an emerging world player at the time). This gave us the 19th century wars, and WWI and WWII.

After France, UK, etc lost any chance to the "top dog" position, and Germany failed quite spectacularly, they stopped fighting altogether. (Not because of any "hard lessons" learned during WWII -- if it was that, they would have stopped at WWI and even earlier. There was just not much to fight about anymore).