When Donald Trump tried to do illegal things, the people that worked for him mostly refused and obeyed the laws and the Constitution. When Xi Jinping wants to do some illegal thing, like arresting the guy who lead the group voting against Xi’s continuing rulership, most people just bow and do it even though it goes against the laws and publicly stated positions of the nation.
The reason why nation building is so problematic is that nearly everyone assumes that stable government comes from a framework - the right rules, the right laws, etc. - and nothing else.
The US isn’t lower on the corruption scale because we have laws against corruption. Nations famous for corruption also have those laws but it works in America because Americans are raised to think that you should work faithfully for your employer and accept the wage that you’ve been given. That’s something that has come to us through a long path of historical events and great thinkers that produced some culture, and that culture has been passed down from our predecessors to us.
Japan, in the 1850s was, culturally, closer to Renaissance Europe than it was to being like the Maori of the 1700s.
By the time of WWII, Japanese culture had pulled in and adopted a lot of European thought on governance, law, art, etc. They had already created a semi-functioning Republic. Destroying a lot of their physical stuff didn’t change the culture and they were ready and able to take in the US-imposed Constitution of Japan, without much issue. It jibed with their pre-existing modus-operandi well-enough.
But if you had a culture of people that rests on “The strong are right” and “The weak will be eaten and enslaved” - where even the losers in all of that still adhere to the correctness of the social laws - and try to tell them, “You should vote for who you think should be boss!” They’ll all just vote for the strongest, scariest mofo and he’s liable to continue running things for as long as he remains the strongest-scariest mofo on the island.
If you destroy a country that has a strong tradition of rule of law, of representative government, etc. then nationbuilding is easy. You rebuild their buildings, hold elections, and let them get back to what they were doing before.
If you conquer a country that’s full of people who don’t understand the difference between corrupt and faithful diligence in their duties, don’t understand putting law above force, etc. then any true nationbuilding means that you first need to change their culture. That means replacing pretty much everyone in a position of power with someone with the “right” culture - all of the teachers, all of the police, everyone in government, etc. Eventually, you might start bringing in the people who grew up under this regime into these positions but it will take a lifetime or two before you can fully remake the country.
And, through all of that, how do you separate “right” culture and “wrong” culture? Sure, by the views of what is good and bad in our culture, the way that things are going in Haiti are bad. They have low education, high murder rates, poor equality between men and women, etc. But likewise, I might personally point at all the potheads in America and say, “Well, pot smoking is bad and these people are all smoking it. Clearly, I have the right to stop them all.” Maybe those people all disagree. Why am I right?
The only way around any of this is to make one assumption, which is that the Humanist cultural idea - that people should be able to have access to the information that they need to make a decision and to be able to make that decision, freely on their own, without coercion - is “right”. If we can reasonably give the people of Haiti a sense for what options are in the world, how those options work, and give them the choice of whether they want that option (protecting their vote from coercion) then we will move or not move as they’ve requested. And if they say that they’re happy as-is, then we leave them alone.