Nah, they just set their own dictators, and if they stopped obeying the americans, they violently replaced them. Just look at latin america, Iran, etc. Just scrolling through the wiki article takes a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Perhaps I'm biased, because I'm from a country (Poland) that's actually actively protected by the US from a murderous dictator (Putin). Even when Poland was on her knees in the early ninetiess, the US never tried to install their dicator here, but instead actively promoted democracy and protected us from Russians. The only benefit that US takes from that is that Poland became a part of the global trade network, we pay for US companies for their intellectual property (i.e. piracy is no longer legal) etc.

Amoral countries can still in some cases be a lesser evil. I agree in the case of Poland the US is a force for good, but on the scale of the world the US definitely gives Russian destruction a run for it's money.

The benefit the US gets from protecting Poland is that in doing so it helps keep Russia boxed in, it keeps great influence over the EU (Poland is a pivot of US influence on the EU), thereby greatly helping curtail 2 out of 3 threats to the US's position as the most powerful country on Earth. It's not done out of benevolence but it's quite great for Polish people.

Same can be said for Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea. That's hundreds of millions of people enjoying great lives thanks to being or having been protected by US from the beasts across their borders. At the same time, is there any nation on Earth that's actually grateful for what Putin's Russia did for (to) them?

Yes. Syria and Iran would likely be wastelands if it wasn't for Russian intervention and assistance allowing them to hold their own against Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey, which would have undoubtedly implemented much greater invasion or intervention plans in Syria than they already have. There is also Armenia that isn't Azerbaijan only because of Russian defence guarantees (that don't apply to Nagorno Karabakh), and the Stans would be greatly vulnerable to China if it wasn't for Russia as a counterbalance.

That's, by the way, a result of a 12 year period, compared to the list you gave that's over 80 years.

Those aren't great lives by any means, but avoiding Iran-Iraq V2, or Turkish invasion of most of Syria, a complete Azerbaijani victory, or complete subservience to China, is genuinely a positive. On the greater balance, simply existing as a counterbalance to the US is something that's useful for most of the world, which explains indifférence over Ukraine.

I suppose the issue is that there is precedent for the USA to support democracies until they decide to side against American insterests. Then the US supports a local dictator instead.

Making them US citizens would be too problematic. It's better to make them subject of an easily controllable puppet. And yes, that means killing everyone who resists. A million people if that's what it takes.