Firstly, You are conflating two wholly different issues.
You asserted that of certain Asian countries only thrived economically when they adopted western democratic liberal values and then you said that only happened because of "western military protection".
South Korea is really not a "much poorer" country. Have you ever been there? It has amongst other things, the highest rate of broadband penetration in the world. Granted there is pretty tiny living space in Seoul but their apartments, at least those i went to, are really hi tech.
You have actually engaged in a logical fallacy here.
All WESTERN liberal democracies are rich(relatively speaking). However, not all liberal democracies are RICH. In fact, this is the shocker, only western liberal democracies (as defined by you, let's exclude east Asia for now) are wealthy!
Democracies which have been around for the last fifty years after the end of the second world war, such as India, Jamaica, Botswana, Bangladesh, the Phillipines, Mauritius have had very low growth rates and endemic poverty. Take a look at India and the Phillipines, the rate of growth for almost 4 decades was only about 3% as compared to over the same period by authoritarian or semi authoritarian states like Singapore and South Korea, where they virtually eliminated poverty and reached stratospheric growth rates. Most non-western liberal democracies if not all, after the second world war simply have not done well.
Yes I know India,etc ahve their own problems(corruption,etc) and might not fit the ideal of a liberal democracy but why have non-western democracies universally SUCKED? Therefore we have to conclude there are other factors at work. Yes things like property rights and a competent and just judiciary are all important but what made Europe so rich is not some fancy notions of individual freedom. That's hogwash and you know it.
Europe's prosperity was garnered by centuries of mercantilism and colonialism. The resources that these colonial empires amassed afforded them such material and intellectual progress that even a wholesale destruction of infrastructure during the 2nd world war did not abrogate this. The knowledge and technological gap that western countries possessed remained even after the Germans ran havoc all over Europe.
Do you have any idea how much wealth went over to Europe during this period?
Entire civilizations in South America were destroyed and stripped of their wealth, 30 million Indians died in the three great famines as the British governor generals hoarded grain for their own subjects in India. The British planted tons of poppies in India, sold a useless drug to China(Opium) in exchange for very tangible goods. Even a teeny weeny country like Belgium could enslave the Congo and wiped it clean of its minerals.
Look at the Netherlands, It is widely acknowledged by historians that the industrialization of Holland came from the colonial exploitation of the Dutch East Indies. My god, a tiny country like it controlled up to half of the spice trade in the WORLD at that time by just taking it from the Indonesians. Do you know how much frigging sugar, coffee, pepper and cocoa that is for a tiny nation? LOL. This was the LARGEST wealth transfer in human history, probably never to be equalled again and that, my friend, is the main cause of Europe's prosperity not some idealistic airy headed notion of human rights and freedom.
What it seems to me is that you are some kind of cultural taliban, the white European who goes off to a faraway land to spread his "civilizing" values to the unenlightened natives and who takes secret satisfaction that somehow your values triumphs over everybody else.
Me, I take no such view. I recognize there are two ends of the spectrum, one which is an authoritarian, repressive shithole as epitomized by Kim Jung Il and his fruitcakes. The other end is the crazed European liberal who believes that individual freedoms triumphs over all and that is ideologically speaking, the endpoint of history. And of course look what has happened in certain European countries, where the rights of criminals now surpass that of victims. In my opinion they are both extremist ideologies, no different in intensity from Osama and his ilk.
What I do think is that there is a happy medium , a middle path, where individual rights can be safeguarded with certain exclusions and when necessary, a state can choose to exercise a semi-authoritarian guiding hand again with certain modifying characteristics and sometimes, the interests of the community can triumph over that of the individual. Congratulations to the East Asian countries, I think they have reached such a medium.
It is far better for South Asia and Africa to follow this tried and proven model than jump headlong into western liberal democracy.
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BTW, do you know that BHUTAN which ranks at the top or near the top of happiest countries rankings is a clerical fascist state?
