while right wingers are more attached to cultural relativism: Judeo-Christian values, muslim values etc.
The perhaps great exceptions to this have been imperialism and more modern attempts by America to export its values. In the debates over intervention in, I want to say, Sudan in the 1880s, Liberals (in the formal party sense) argued against a war of Christianity against Islam in North Africa while Conservatives wanted, of course, to maintain the Empire. In a strange reversal of conventional wisdom, the George W. Bush administration did make the argument that American values could be universalized, and that freedom was something every soul strove for. Liberals on the other hand were forced to argue about the merits of "democracy at gunpoint" and debate sort of got distracted from more conventional arguments (such as whether or not America could even be called a force for democracy). There is a certain sort of conservative arrogance involved in thinking that the "Judeo-Christian West" could march anywhere and remake that place in its own image. In many casses (of course), conservatives themselves, as I'm sure you know, have long derided this approach, but it nevertheless has a historical current.
I would argue, though, that the distinction between idealistic conservatives and pragmatic conservatives are less important than you would think. Both the Bush administration and imperialism are good examples of that. Although both the invasion of Iraq and the imperialists had their share of people who truly believed that they were helping spread civilisation, both were also supported by conservative elements who believed that the US would be placed in an advantageous position by intervening. What unites them together (along with paleoconservative strands) is the belief that the nation state has a right, or even obligation, to make moves unilaterally. The fundamental difference between liberal interventionists and the Bush administration was that the former bases its values on a "universal human rights" system that (in theory) is shared by all peoples, while the latter believed that the United States acts as vanguard for such rights. To a liberal or left mindset, a nation using force without consent from the international order and its structures is a rogue bully; to a conservative, a nation that kneels before other countries is a cowed and controlled one.