Well, you've got a view that's in some ways refreshing since it's really far removed from what the mainstream narrative says. But we're either discussing subtly different topics, or I don't agree with your central point. Not entirely sure which.

Democracy, freedom of speech, rule of law mostly a facade that hides the real power structures regarding the most important questions of the world? If we decide that "the most important questions of the world" is something other than what the citizens of democracies really care about, then sure, you can run a supertanker through that rhetorical opening. There's plenty of space for dubious foreign policy that supports a small group of people, outside of the space of topics that most people care about. As long as the country in question is so rich that it can afford a powerful military with only a small fraction of its tax revenue. In that case, the foreign policy becomes just a budgetary rounding error that most people don't care about. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could arguably fit that definition. But the USA couldn't have afforded those (and maintained enough public support) if it wasn't stupidly rich compared to everyone else.

The reason rule of law, democracy and civil liberties won out over totalitarianism after World War two is that those values turn out to produce societies that have more economic power. Not that they're inherently morally superior, although I know what sort of society I'd prefer to live in. I'm ignoring for the moment that the Soviet Union was one of the victors; they wouldn't have been if the USA hadn't been shipping them an incredible amount of home-produced weapons and equipment. It's hard to understate the power of the incentive of retaining most of the value of the valuable thing you created.

Regarding Ukraine, if we accept the extreme view that the USA in fact deliberately managed to goad Putin the idiot into making the biggest strategic mistake of the 21st century (invading Ukraine), the mistake is still on Putin. I'll agree it wouldn't have been a nice thing to do, but the moral calculus isn't easy to untangle. Wars are hell, but I have no illusions about what moral transgressions Russia is capable of, and an expanding empire with great power is certainly not a force of great net good in the world. Maybe it could be a net force for good in general, just by default, if the progress of civilization does not stagnate. But it certainly could stagnate and make a net negative. And it's hard to believe it would do a better job than a civilization with great individual freedoms.

If the most important questions of the world are greater quality of life for everyone, sustainably, then Western values certainly play a role in achieving that. But the calculus would be a challenge to figure out. The majority of the world's population doesn't live in liberal democracies, after all. Most scientific and engineering achievement has come from liberal democracies, but it's not completely obvious if that's just because what became the liberal democracies had a big head start with industrialization.