Spreading civilization and human rights has long been used as an excuse for state-building through colonialism and imperialism. This idea dates back at least to early Spanish and colonial efforts in the New World, and the rationale was initially employed as just one of many.
During the 1980s, millions of American children pored over the Toys 'R' Us catalog, daydreaming about what toys we hoped to receive in a few weeks on Christmas morning. After all, by the mid-twentieth century, Christmas for countless middle-class households with children had become more or less synonymous with an enormous number of gifts for children in the form of toys and games. Barbie playsets and a myriad of action figures were routinely advertised during Saturday morning cartoons and in Sunday print ads in the weeks before Christmas. We kids of the 80s were sure to tell our parents what toys we "needed."
Over the next several years, puppet regimes and states that were independent in name only broke away from Soviet domination and formed sovereign states. Some states which had completely ceased to exist such as the Baltic states declared independence and became states in their own right. In its heyday, the Soviet Union had been three times the size of the United States and was controlled by a regime with nearly untrammeled power consolidated in a centralized state. In its place rose a number of new regimes that were smaller in size and smaller in population.