[amw]

The West invests money in things that it expects to see generate a return. Sometimes this results in the Marshall Plan, a massive development effort whose main strategic goal was to isolate newly allied Russia and China in the post-WWII era, and gave the foundation forward strongholds for capitalism could use to thrive at the doorstep of the powers challenging our assertion of a ruling world order.

(Never mind what Chiang Kai-Shek was doing to the citizens under his government-in-exile. Never mind that killing some 200k people in a nuclear conflagration in Japan was already known to be unnecessary, and that those people died as a simple show of force against the USSR. Never mind that the Korean War that devastated that country didn't have to ever be fought in the first place. The Bad Communists™ must be fought.)

Usually, the investments don't have those happy endings--I don't think anyone who frequents this site could be completely blind to the abysmal record US interventions have for world stability and economic development, that three relative successes in that mass of bloody failure counts as barely a drop in the bucket.

Finally, I think taking statements about the CIA or NED or the Open Society Foundation or Radio Free Asia or VOC (etc, etc, etc) doing the work they do as statements that "remove local agency" misunderstand how the "West" works: Nobody in the countries that color revolutions happen in has to be given orders from the CIA to make their own country a horrible place to live, the investment is always structured as finding the people _most_ willing to seek an extreme solution and amplifying their voice and reach further than it would get on its own, if left to itself in the local context. We always propagandize this as "supporting democracy", but we absolutely know that a reverse effort of a theoretical CPC-affiliated NGO funding some adventurist Commie group with millions in ad funding and logistical support would be treated as an enemy attack against our government, and that that treatment would _be correct_.