No, but if one of those countries had invested billions of dollars and thousands of lives defending our country, I suspect they'd leave something behind to protect their investment. Just not forever, as we seem to be doing.
Protecting our interest do you mean protecting the oil? How can some of these small countries be a threat to the USA? It seems funny that all this oversea presence has been after ww2 and the advancement of the CIA and military industrial business. The thousands of live that have been lost have they all been to protect the USA or for protecting oil?