Was there ever really a time when Americans took the cause of helping people outside the US to build and defend Democratic societies or that is just a myth built on false perception?

Americans? Yes, American individual people have personally donated to, for example, Tsunami victims in Indonesia in 2004, where the government there happens to be a republic, though I don’t know how much the form of government had on their charity.

The government also has had many foreign aid programs which at least in part have genuine humanitarian intentions, though the government as a whole and foreign policy always include many considerations including some terrible ones, so may never have been “pure” in an absolute sense, and certainly in many cases have been largely terrible and not even so much directed by our government as by the interests of multinational corporations and even higher-level non-governmental and undemocratic forces.

It has always been self-interest.
For example, helping Germany rebuild after WW2 was about preventing the Germans being driven right back into the hands of extremists, as it happened after WW1 with the Versailles treaty.
Plus you are building up a market to export your products to, and a buffer zone against the Soviets.

If it had ever been about “spreading democracy”, they would not have actively supported and engineered coups to topple democratic governments, just because they had the wrong political alignment, as they did to Chile and Iran.

I wouldn’t call the Korean War or the Vietnam War a myth…

You could certainly call the idea that they were wars for the preservation of democracy a myth, and an absurd one at that.

I would call it “denying the soviet union proxy access to the Indian and Pacific ocean.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a pretty sad tale of US foreign policy and global corporatism. Spoiler: we did it to get access to their resources.

^^Guess there’s no resource in HK right now?

@mazingerz88
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/04/politics/trump-xi-hong-kong-protests/index.html

^^Yes, thanks. Saw that news before. That orange guy is useless I think.

Freedom loving people in HK are asking for American help but I’m not seeing Americans marching or rallying in support. Even a small number of Americans gathering in public to say to HK residents they are not alone. Jumping into conclusion here. I haven’t googled it yet. Lol

At one time we could at least believe that the US was a force for good in the world even if it was not always true. We can’t believe that any more now that “deals” are all that matter.