>the US backed dictatorships and/or fascism over the course of the last >75 years or so - while framing our foreign policy, incessantly,
>as "promoting democracy" or some similar refrain - through
>red, white, and blue-tinted glasses.

Yep. And particularly during the Cold War you have a bunch of very broad, sweeping narratives that collide with each other in really messy, interesting ways. Socialism vs. Capitalism is just a story of competing ideologies until you have specific nations who embody those ideologies trying to figure out what that means on the fly - and often through the lens of a much more discrete story of US vs. USSR. But that latter narrative sometimes consumes the first, say when Stalin and Tito - both dedicated to communist ideology - fell out with each other. Or when the USSR put down independent labor movements in Poland.

Or when other countries, particularly outside the North American/European framework, started to see themselves as the embodiment of socialist values. China (mostly) giving the USSR the cold shoulder and the first world proletariat with some skepticism and tiny, insignificant Cuba sending thousands of soldiers abroad to help African revolutions with no clear, national benefit reframes the socialism vs. capitalism narrative as something independent of the traditional Cold War powers. But instead you get DIFFERENT overlapping narratives like Colonialism vs. Nationalism or De-Colonization vs. NeoColonialism.

And that invites a whole separate band of messiness into the analysis.