The cold war helped fuel many conflicts, for instance in Angola and Mozambique, where superpowers backed rival factions.

ECONOMIST: Failed states

The end of the cold war, the local conflicts that followed and the growing threat of international terrorist networks have all redrawn old notions about the limits of foreign intervention.

ECONOMIST: From Bosnia, East Timor, and other fragile places

And the best news is that, since the peak of the cold war in the 1970s and '80s, organized conflicts of all kinds civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, terrorist attacks have declined throughout the world, and their death tolls have declined even more precipitously.

WSJ: Steven Pinker: Why Violence Is Vanishing

In effect, more nuclear weapons states today threaten to use nuclear weapons in non-nuclear conflicts than was the case during the Cold War.

NPR: Nuclear Weapons Gain Importance for Regional Powers

Three times since the end of the Cold War, the United States has found itself involved in major theater conflicts.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center for Security Policy | The Measure of a Superpower: A Two Major Regional Contingency Military for the 21st Century

ASEAN, founded in 1967 as a bulwark against communism in the Cold War era, has often been caught in the crosscurrents of major conflicts.

NPR: Sea Disputes, NKorea In Spotlight At ASEAN Summit

Most important of all, the nature of most conflicts has changed over the past decade, from cold-war face-offs between well-supplied proxies to regional free-for-alls.

ECONOMIST: Controlling the world's guns | The

The conflicts of Central America died down in the years following the end of the cold war.

ECONOMIST: Failed states: Fixing a broken world | The

Regional Settlements: The Bush administration has been assiduously working to develop agreements with Moscow that will end various regional conflicts between former superpower proxies now viewed by Washington as expensive throwbacks to the Cold War.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Too clever by half