You make good points. Encouraging closer two-way ties might indeed do what you say. It certainly might make your "death to america!" chants a little less enthusiastic if half your country's pension fund was invested there. "Destroy the Great Satan! Except, uh, San Francisco!"

Another factor of course is "How much is this country actively trying to undermine/is a potential enemy of my own?" which probably for most countries we'd think of as "western" puts Russia, and to a lesser extent China, at the top of the list.