>it’s fine for the US to use it’s cultural and economic hegemonic power to crush those states for making the wrong friends or choosing the wrong ideology

There's making different choices and there's 'being friendly to the Soviets which were also very much into overthrowing the US' or 'Driving double digit percentage of your own population out to the point you're a foreign policy problem' or 'undermining neighbouring states due to your 'wrong' ideology'.

In the abstract, that sounds kind of right, but concretely, how about when that ideology is being actual Nazis? As in WWII and the Axis powers? Is the US wrong for lumping Italy along with Germany?

No policy is going to be correct all the time, just as no policy is going to be incorrect all the time. Choosing to apply economic and military pressure against Italy was the right thing to do in that specific set of circumstances. Just because it was the right thing to do in that circumstance doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do in every other circumstance. I would posit that broadly, this kind of guilty-by-association economic harm is the wrong choice more often than not.

Nothing happened to the US after Paperclip.