The answer to this is related to the answer of: "would you prefer to be in the lower class of Norwegian society or the lower class of nearby Belarussian society?"
At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy.
> At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy.
That attitude with the associated American power was a complete catastrophe for:
A catastrophe for America (Americans) or for the countries listed and their people? Only one of those is relevant.[0]
My greater point here is that global politics is an inherently amoral game. By extension a morality-based strategy is inherently sub-optimal.
[0]addendum: To be clear there are definitely arguments to be made that some or all of them weren't good for Americans (e.g. loss of global goodwill may have resulted in less favorable trade agreements).
Given how easily corruption rots things.... I'd say definitively yes.
I remember, I took part in a modeling competition trying to create a sustainability index for countries. During my analysis phase I realized that almost everything measurably bad you can think of correlated astoundingly well with the corruption index for that country. Even what seemed like very distant externalities.