I suggest you read more about the post war occupation of Japan. The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale forcing Japan to accept democratization throughout. Unusual for the U.S. this included pushing economic democracy by supporting Japan's very successful land redistribution scheme.
More than a thumb. The Constitution of Japan was written by Americans. America stomped on the scale, and that time it seems to have worked.
Or maybe the post soviet Russia was dealt a bad hand. Hard to know (just like here, you can find infinite streams of contradictory arguments)
There were probably innumerable factors that went into it. But there are a lot of differences between that situation and the fall of the Soviet Union.
On the one hand, in the scale of brutality, every nation in history is at least 1 level below the Imperial Japan in WWII.
On the other hand, after the decisive show of force, beaconed by the nuclear bomb, Japan realized that brutality is going to cause the doom of that nation. So they naturally bowed down. After that brutality is no longer necessary, like a beaten dog that would not really need a leash.
I believe this is something they started doing before/during the war. Specifically I've heard that they started reverse engineering and producing copies of allied radio equipment during the war.
Look at China, Confucius is the God of Asia....
The US had the power to dictate whatever terms.
Japan was on it's back.
Russia in 1992 was it's own entity. Still a nuclear power. Making it's own decisions.
Not only would Russia not have tolerated US intervention, I'm extremely doubtful there could have been such a thing on any terms.
As it stands, much of the money used by Oligarchs to buy up Natural Resources firms was from the US private banking system.
Russia is Russia, they are 100% responsible for their own problems, and those have been roiling through history for 100's of years.
'Afghanistan' is barely a state, it never really was a nation. It's a 'border' around a chaotic gaggle of tribes living in the past. They'll ebb and flow given different kinds of leadership, most of which won't have anything to do with anything happening outside urban limits anyhow.
Iraq was a deeply corrupted and broken state, again, difficult to rebuild to, but possible. Absent ethnic tensions it probably would have gone a little bit better, and paradoxically, US forces were more of a stabilizing factor than not. Literally the day that US forces withdrew and US lost it's leverage in Iraqi politics, PM malaki basically launched a kind of political civil war. That scared the Sunnis who 'allowed' ISIL to come in, believing they were a better option than the Shia dominate government, unrestrained from American influence.
S. Vietnam was a bit incoherent, but it could have worked fine were the US to have been able to provide security. They did not, largely due to the historical insanity of refusing to attack the North. As Op. Linebacker I and II eventually demonstrated (but way too late), North Vietnam could be handily decimated at will with direct strategic bombing. Were those ops to have happened in 1965 instead of 1972, the war would have had a different outcome. It's unlikely that S. Vietnam would quite look like S. Korea, but it would be more like it. Instead, we have an ultra authoritarian entity that did some vastly horrible things in the past, but which has settled down a bit in subsequent decades.
'Marshall Plan' works where the Marshall Plan can be taken advantage of.
The IMF has tried similar things elsewhere after WW2, it didn't work out so well, because, well, Nigeria and Indonesia are not at all like Germany or Japan.
Russia has been 'backwards' forever, it's like part of their identity to be 50 years behind everyone but still antagonist about it i.e. aggressors and victims at the same time. I can't see how it will change.
Russians will happily exchange their own prosperity to save face to themselves, and live in a kind of delusion of their own making. They will literally lose the war in Ukraine, but believe they have 'won'. They will declare Ukraine 'denazified', have a parade about it, and 50% of the population will fully believe it, the other 50% will know the truth and go about their daily business, unable to really speak publicly about it.
South Korea has recieved as much ecobomic aid as all of Africa combined in the 20 years after its formation.
Arguably Kurds should get their own territory.
Afghanistan and Iraq are weak states dominated by sectarian violence. Vietnam is and was a strong state.
I guess we'll never know. Because there was a remaking of Japanese society after the war in a democratic image. That just doesn't even appear as though it was attempted in post Soviet Russia.
I don't kmow the origins of why America departed from its usual course of propping up the traditional land owning and wealthy bourgeoisie classes in it' s occupation of Japan. I know FDR personally held very pro democracy and anti colonialist views. He had ambitions to remake America's relations with the developing world after the war though how far he would've progressed on that front is unknown. And of course he was dead by the end of the war and Japan was in the more conservative hands of Truman.
Perhaps the Japanese people ran with this program because of their cultural tenacity. Or perhaps because their defeat had been so total that they truly considered themselves defeated and simply wished to move on whatever with whatever power structure was presented.
Ultimately though, America began a campaign to turn the "subjects" of the Japanese Empire into "citizens" of a Japanese constitutional state. They did not undertake a similar project to turn "comrades" of the Soviet Union into "citizens" of a Russian Republic.
Anyways even with that kind of power, the prevailing economic ideology at the time the Soviet Union fell was of extreme neoliberalism, so I doubt it would have helped anyway.
Today, we also know that they were backing Yeltsin for a long time, and supported his 1993 attack on parliament which decisively turned Russia into the dictatorship it is now.
So even with the US stomping the scale, it still didn’t make it some kind of European multi partisan parliamentary democracy.
There's a lot of evidence that US kleptocrats collaborated to help turn Russia into a kleptocracy. Practically encouraged rather than discouraged that outcome.
American consultants were instrumental in organizing the massive selloff of state assets, and quite a few of them turned around and used their knowledge of the system they created to become quite rich. Andrei Shleifer said as much in an interview on the topic, though I can't find it now.
edit: it seems like someone else posted the same link while I was looking for the interview.
The response to the fall of the USSR was neither, but I recall breathless reports in the US press of how Harvard MBAs were going to Russia to help it transition to a free market economy, and ruefully thinking it would be better if they aimed for emulating Western European economies.
And, outside of the former USSR, Europe had the most to gain if this could have been effected - as is now all too clear. Insofar as anything might have helped, this was not only the US's bag.
From what I can tell from history, our successes involved US taking sovereignty and ruling absolutely for a period of years while setting up a government of our choosing to replace us. Our failures involved quickly setting up a local democracy and allowing self rule while we tried and failed to help. It seems we lost the stomach to use power after military victory and the incompetent governments we set up doom the countries involved to decades of failure.
I really don’t think we should continue getting involved in places we don’t have the guts to set up a military government for a decade. It is clear you have to force societal change on a place at gunpoint in order to get good outcomes, if you’re just going to topple governments and hope whatever rises from the ashes is nice, you might as well not bother.
The only two that come to mind for me are Korea and Japan (I could easily be overlooking some), and really the former happened as a part of the latter (Korea was ruled by Japan for the 35 years prior to WWII).
As I understand it South Korea was at least nominally under local democratic rule from the start.
I'm not sure that's a big enough sample set to be making generalizations from, and even if you are happy with a sample set of 2 I'm not really sure south korea fits the mold you're describing.
That said, I could definitely be missing some examples that would make the argument more convincing.
Like Haiti, Cuba or the Philippines, right? Those were obviously great successes...
Given the utter unmitigated disaster of the Russian economy in the 90s, I'd daresay that it certainly had the ability to influence it away from the hard swing towards strongman authoritarianism that followed.
The Washington Consensus was a disaster, and strongly soured the country on working with the West.
Perhaps a bit of both. We can also give credit to both for it's decline/stagnation. It wasn't the Japanese people that wanted quotas for US made cars, semiconductor technology transfers to the US, economic policy that didn't fit em, etc