For example places like Singapore and South Korea have had positive and close relations with the United States, both diplomatically and economically, and specifically in the case of South Korea, have been the recipient of an immense amout of US foreign aid in the context of the Cold War.

On the contrary, places like Cuba and North Korea who favoured political self-determination, and economic policies that focused on bolstering the local population over trade with the US, have very quickly turned into advesarial relationships. In both these cases they ended up aligning themselves with the alternate superpower. This uneasy situation proved tolerable for a few decades (for example, North Korea's economy actually recovered quicker - intitially - than South Korea after the Korean War despite sustaining far greater damage from the bombing campaign), but once the USSR collapsed, Cuba and North Korea entered into the sad state they are today being completely isolated, economically and politically.

And then there's also the issue of governance. Both South Korea and North Korea were brutal dictatorships for decades, but eventually South Korea liberalised their political system, whilst on the other hand North Korea is, well, North Korea. (The same is true, to some degree, of Cuba as well but I would like to qualify this by saying that the depiction of the despotism of Cuba's government in western media tends to be unfairly exaggerated - due to obvious reasons - compared to other regimes of similar or worse nature such as Saudi Arabia).

But this can't be soley due to a difference in ideology, since most of the countries the US supported during the 20th century where infamous for the brutality of the regimes (Park Chung-hee, Samoza, Noriega, House of Saud, Ferdinand Marcos, Pinochet, Papa Doc, Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco and so on). Or even more covert campaigns of support and influence such as Operation Gladio in post-war Europe, the Free Albania National Comitee, Iran-Contra, et cetera.

However this is a far more controversial topic and it's not my intention to start an argument around politics and ideology. I simply want to make the point that the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of a given government has far more to do with historical and economic context than the merit of any particular policy or competency of a governing state. Of course this is still a very valid and important topic, just one that I feel is given undue weight relative to other factors.

All of this is of course a huge over simplification and doesn't do any of the numerous topics I've skimmed over any justice.