"Si vis pacem, para bellum"
No place is perfect and how "bad" a place ends up, always depending on how much an individual adapts to the given circumstances of said place. This holds true regardless of where you are, a democracy, a dictatorship or anything in-between.
Btw: If you want to talk about Crimea then we first need to start talking about Kiev [0]. Of course, that won't happen because then the whole "Russia as aggressor" narrative wouldn't fit as neatly.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
That "better" is worth defending against the encroachment of the "worse".
does that get paid to the US directly or do we all fund our own militaries that work...under US control? or based on our own ideas?
i'm just trying to figure out how this is supposed to work.
What are countries supposed to "chip in" for? The deterrence of a future alien invasion like in Independence Day?
Why should the world chip in for US Ambitions that result in massive destruction, like destabilizing the Middle East, while dealing with most of the brunt of the blowback of such US foreign policy decisions, in the form of refugee waves?
Nobody asked you to be "the world police" no matter how much you keep telling yourself that, "the people there asked for US interventions", is a tale many US Americans keep telling themselves to keep the "We are the good guys" narrative intact, but it has little to nothing to do with reality.
Because reality knows no "good guys" or "bad guys", in reality such terms are purely subjective. As much as I like the US as a country and it's people, there's a huge difference in perception in how US Americans see their country vs how the rest of the world perceives their country's actions.