Maggie's Farm

I guess it depends on your point of view. It can also be the case where our intervention makes things worse, either due to incompetence and/or the law of unintended consequences.

From the article titled The White Messiah Complex:

Well-intentioned but ignorant Westerners weren’t able to anticipate the way their influence would interact with Chinese culture. The missionaries found, for example, that some of their converts were motivated by personal gain—deeply impoverished “rice Christians” wanted food; others attempted to use their status as Christians to play local and Western powers off one another to their own advantage. The most disastrous unintended consequence was the Taiping Rebellion—one of the deadliest wars in human history—in which a Christian-influenced messianic cult took up arms against the Qing dynasty in a bid to establish a utopian “Heavenly Kingdom.” As would be the case with the Boxers, the West had to intervene to clean up the mess that its initial involvement helped provoke.

Now as then, our high-minded efforts can provoke local resentment. Rival interests—from Russia to Islamic extremists—have worked to stoke such sentiments to their own benefit. And our new evangelists seem as oblivious to unintended consequences as they are certain of their own righteousness. The advance of NATO? Unrelated to Russian anxieties. Attempts to promote democracy? They won’t harm diplomatic relations with autocracies or create instability. Humanitarian wars? They won’t erode national sovereignty. And of course, local actors would never mouth liberal shibboleths to get us to support their parochial interests—never mind Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq; the Mojahedin-e-Khalq and the old royal family in Iran; or Alexei Navalny, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and even Boris Yeltsin in Russia. The old missionary impulse, the spirit of voluntourism, the desire to build a White Savior Industrial Complex with embassies and cruise missiles—these are all alive and well in certain circles of America’s foreign-policy elite. Is this good for America or for the world? Alas, that might not be the point.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/white-messiah-complex/