Correction with Suharto's name. Indonesians commonly only goes by one name. His birth name is Suharto and he died Suharto. He was never called Bambang. He had a son called Bambang Trihatmodjo. He's also never goes by the name Bambang Suharto and most certainly never ruled Indonesia in any capacity. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is one of Suharto's successors and have no relations with Suharto.

Name aside, that is the real story. American foreign policy recognized that Communists in some places had an edge in organizing the people and that if you wanted to keep Communism out of power you needed an authoritarian and not a democrat in charge.

Was this view correct? Hard to say, in part because we don't know what an (unresisted) Communist world would have looked like. Had Americans handed South Korea, South Vietnam and Indonesia to the Communists without a fight, would Malaysia and Thailand have remained free? Would the communist parties of India risen to power? Same basic question about Latin America -- we know how influential Chavez was able to be at his peak, so how much could Allende have done with Soviet money and resources available to him?

And of course, with all of these added wins, would Communism have fallen in the Warsaw Block 1989-1991 or have been abandoned ideologically by the Chinese shortly thereafter?