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In this case it is about how military landgrabs are supposed to be a breach of rules enforced by western countries.
Likely because most equipment is being used in Ukraine. If Trump gets his way and Russia wins, equipment will be freed up that could be handed to their allies.
This is omitting a pretty important part about who the "rules" actually apply to (evidently Western countries and allies are not subject to them with respect to targets who are not). Between Israel, Kosovo and North Cyprus, and dozens of smaller examples (Pakistan/Afghanistan, China/India...) that simply don't matter, it's clear that there were never any uncircumscribed rules; beyond that it's just a matter of putting the wordcels (or, perhaps nowadays, LLMs) to work to convince the general public that all is kosher.
Since Ukrainian tolerance for casualties is much higher than American or Israeli, the same piece of gear would go further in Iranian hands (and thereby allow the Russians to extract concessions from the Americans). It is in fact conceivable that something like this happened.
Even if the rules in practice were more like "protect the stability of the western block using all means necessary", Trump's actions still mark a drastic shift away from this. And considering how the west, America included, has flourished under the old order it seems strange to brake it up.
His supporters claim that they have moved to only protecting American interests, and that helping Europe has too long been a drain on the American economy. I think that throwing away alliances seem short sighted. Fighting China economically would surely be much easier if the US took coordinated action with the EU. But the more that the EU is pushed away, the harder such coordination becomes, as the EU has to look towards their own immediate interests.
A somewhat fair criticism of the "rules based international order" is that it was always kind of a real-countries-only club. Practically speaking, this meant democratic states and their key allies. The flip side of this is that most of the objectors were/are autocratic states complaining that they're denied the legitimacy accorded to democracies. They could have that status in an instant by reforming into actual democracies, but unsurprisingly their autocratic governments are not terribly interested in the proposition that only democracies (and their client states) get to have real sovereignty.
It is short-sighted, but one of the (many) flaws of Trumpist thought processes is that they are extremely concrete thinkers. They don't understand benefits that are not literal, material transfers. The US receives massive financial/material benefits from its international position, but that takes the form of things like access to cheap credit and deference to American preferences in allied policymaking, but these benefits are all too abstract for the populist mind. They're not tribute checks or retinues contributed to American military expeditions, so they might as well not exist. Instead, they live in a world where the US is being relentlessly exploited by its allies because it doesn't get everything it wants immediately for free.
Explain what actual democracy is. Please. Any case recently in the democracies where the vox populi was heard and not implemented in a way that perverted it. Especially in immigration. Brexit being one of the worst offenders.
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Azerbaijan is the most important other recent example. Western countries didn't kick up much of a fuss because the victim, Armenia, was a Russian ally.
Western countries didn’t kick up a fuss because Azerbaijan is an Israeli ally. It’s the only Muslim country Israel sells military equipment to.
It being a Turkish protectorate surely played a role too. The Turks previously got away with North Cyprus as well, and have even been getting away with shamelessly whopping the arses of America's Kurdish girlboss proxies, because they are too important to let flip and have too well-developed national consciousness to subvert. (Honestly, I'm surprised there isn't more of a chorus of "based" cries cheering them from the Right.)
Tfw no Kurdish girlboss gf 😔
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Western countries didn't kick up a fuss because they can't locate either country on the map. To the extent they can, Azerbaijan is more brown-coded than Armenia so it was merely evicting a colonial power.
Theories are fun.
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