What successes are you thinking of?
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.
Post-WW2 Germany, too. Although that was a joint effort.
It depends. Pulling out of afganistan earlier would have saved us a lot of time and money.
> 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
Like Haiti, Cuba or the Philippines, right? Those were obviously great successes...
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.