The western empire will starve a country out with sanctions, murder their leaders, train groups to terrorize their people, and then if some people in the country are unhappy and go for social unrest, the empire will position someone of their choosing at the head of the social unrest and encourage revolution there. If/when the country flips, so as long as its leadership lets western capitalists do what they want with the country (e.g. pillage it), it will be called “democratic” by the empire in contrast to its previous “dictatorship.”

This isn’t to say countries never have problems of their own, even without imperialist interference taken into account, but the western empire will actively create mass suffering in a country in order to create the conditions for a ‘revolution’ that deposes a self-determining leader and installs a puppet.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I just wanted to outline how barbaric it is from start to finish. It is much like the line in The Music Man, a story about a con artist traveling salesman:

“Oh, they got no problems here.”

“Then I’ll have to invent one.”

And then he invents a problem in the form of pool tables supposedly being a corrupting influence in their society. This is the playbook that the CIA functions on, but on a much more violent level. The bloodied hands of the imperialist traveling salesman carry “liberal democracy”, which in practice, for the imperialized nation, means, “Gutting your land, resources, and labor for parts, as if the human beings and longstanding culture there are nothing more than unfeeling machines.”