The lesson of the 21st century should be that you can’t speed-run civilizational development. Bangladeshis (to use my people as an example) aren’t just Americans who eat curry. They’re different humans. They do not want and cannot handle what americans call liberal democracy. They lack hundreds of years of predicate social development that made liberal democracy possible in the west. The same is true for Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Chinese, etc.

When America tries to encourage liberal democracy in these countries, it just immiserates the people. The authoritarian but relatively popular government in Bangladesh was overthrown recently by activists. (I was actually planning a trip to see family at the end of the last year and it got scuttled.) This will not lead to more liberal democracy. Instead, it will derail the economic growth we had been enjoying. Crime and instability have already skyrocketed. Islamists, who had been banned, are re-entering politics. Ultimately, the cost of delayed economic development will be something you can measure in hundreds of thousands of dead children.

People in the third world regard America as a villain because of its interference in foreign politics. Despite tremendous effort by USAID in Bangladesh (much of which my dad personally worked on) what everyone remembers about the U.S. is that Nixon opposed Bangladeshi independence because he was worried it and India would be aligned with Russia.

Liberal internationalists are bad people. I don’t think Samantha Powers or Blinken directly overthrew the government in Bangladesh, but their liberal-democracy fetish certainly caused them to pressure the previous government in a way that was not helpful. Not helpful either to Bangladesh, who needs stability and order more than anything higher on Maslow’s hierarchy, or the U.S., who benefited from the previous government’s human rights violations (killing Islamists without due process, etc.)

I don’t think Trump or Elon are great egalitarians. But their self interested approach is vastly superior to that of ideological nutjobs like Powers.