A typical cold war intervention is the alleged role of the USA embassy in Jakarta, in the years up to 1965, in supplying the names of perhaps 5,000 members of the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, to the Indonesian army under General Suharto (later President). The Communists were hunted down in the largest massacre since Hitler and Stalin, which crushed the party and left hundreds of thousands dead (the incident partially caught in the movie [The Year of Living Dangerously]). It is probable that the "attempted coup" in 1965 against then President Sukarno was staged as a pretext for wiping out the PKI. The resulting rift between Indonesia and China, as presumed supporters of the communists, was only healed in 1990.
2. The collapse of the United States -- Soviet bipolar system in the 1980s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s opened the door to deeply rooted sources of conflict that had earlier been kept in check by the USA-Soviet balance.