The criticisms are well captured in Jeanie Kirkpatricks essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards".
Let's do some more reading on Kirkpatrick, shall we?
Maybe from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkpatrick_Doctrine ...
The doctrine, while generally applauded by conservatives, has been strongly criticized by some historians and intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, chiefly on the grounds that it was a cloak for protecting the interests of American corporations abroad and especially in Central America. He suggests that for this reason the Reagan Administration actually worked to undermine democratic government in Nicaragua and to suppress democratic movements in El Salvador and Guatemala. Chomsky referred to Kirkpatrick as the "Chief sadist-in-residence of the Reagan Administration" and went on to sharply criticize what he called the "hypocrisy" of supporting brutal military regimes that showed no respect for human rights or democracy, while claiming to be protecting the region from communism.
Chomsky has also disputed another basic tenet of the doctrine by arguing that the supposed communist regimes, such as that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, were actually more humane and democratic than the forces Kirkpatrick supported, such as the Contras.
Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute has also disputed the doctrine, noting that while Communists movements tend to depose rival authoritarians, the traditional authoritarian regimes supported by the US came to power by overthrowing democracies. He thus concludes that while Communist regimes are more difficult to eradicate, traditional autocratic regimes "pose the more lethal threat to functioning democracies."
This part was funny, too:
Kirkpatrick's tenet that totalitarian regimes are more stable than authoritarian regimes has come under criticism since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, particularly as Kirkpatrick predicted that the Soviet system would persist for decades.
So she thought it would persist for decades, and instead it made it only a few more years?