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Notes -
Right-Wing and Left-Wing Wars
For the greater part of the twentieth century, being "anti-war" was strongly associated with the left, to the point where even identifying as "anti-war" was enough in the eyes of most people to brand you as a left winger. Though every war fought by the US since the foundation of the country has seen an anti-war movement spring up in opposition (of varying size and significance), the anti-Vietnam movement has a special place in American national memory, and opposition to Vietnam was massively left-coded. A few years earlier, Korea did not similarly divide the nation, seeing as it was a much quicker war and one waged in a much less turbulent time, but even so what opposition there was to intervention in Korea was decidedly left-wing. The initiation of the GWoT seemed to confirm this partisan divide, with those who opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq being, again, overwhelmingly left-liberal. I would venture to say nothing defined an early 2000s leftist so much as, and nothing was more non-negotiable for one's participation in the American left of that time, than opposition to Iraq.
Lately, with Ukraine, there is a change. Ukraine is of course not a 1:1 analogue to Vietnam or Iraq, not in the least because no actual US troops are engaged on the ground and don't look likely to be. But while the great majority of Americans are at least sympathetic to Ukraine and want them to win, the emerging trend is that gung-ho support of Ukraine and support for military aid to Ukraine are increasingly left-Democratic coded, and opposition to such aid is increasingly right-Republican coded. While actual pro-Russia sentiment is extremely fringe in the US, to the extent that it does exist it is mostly right-wing.
This baffles some who the 20th century conditioned into a belief that the left is always "anti-war" and the right is always "pro-war" but a broader look should disabuse one of the notion. In fact the pattern does not hold before the 50s.
Opposition to intervention in European affairs in the 1930s and then to entry into WWII was distinctly conservative. This was not entirely the case, and it's certainly not true that most (not even close) isolations were fascists or fascist-sympathizers, and there were also noteworthy left-wing isolationists like socialist Norman Thomas and progressive Robert La Follette. But for the most part, the people who opposed American participation in WWII were the same people who opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal at home. America Firsters were constantly guarding their right flank against accusations of Nazi sympathies (which were sometimes merited), just like anti-Vietnam activists had to constantly fend off accusations of communist sympathies (which were sometimes merited).
Going back into the 19th century, both the left and the right again have a record of "anti-war" and "pro-war" sentiment. The Mexican-American War was a very popular war in the more conservative southern and western regions of the US. States like Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas filled their volunteer quotas several times over. The war was much less popular in the north. In New England, at the time the most 'left-wing' (not that the phrase was used too much in the US at the time, but it's probably a fair descriptor--in New England abolitionism, Unitarianism, transcendentalism, etc. were more popular than anywhere else in the nation) region of the country, it was downright unpopular, and the whole region managed to raise only a single (understrength) regiment. Thoreau was famously arrested for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the war. Northerners sometimes saw the war (not wholly inaccurate) as a slaveholder conspiracy to carve new slave states out of Mexican territory, and one New England senator (I can't remember which one) even declared in front of congress that he was rooting for the Mexicans.
A few years later, the Civil War broke out, which was essentially a war between the half of the country that had supported war in Mexico and the half that had opposed it. While there was not much of an anti-war movement in the south, at least until late in the war, there was a significant anti-war movement in the Union states. That was the 'copperheads' who favored a peace with the Confederacy. This movement was distinctly conservative in character, being strongly skeptical of abolitionism and the supposed racial integrationism of the Lincoln administration. New England of course was the region of the Union most enthusiastic in the prosecution of the war, with Maine out of all the loyal states contributing the highest proportion of its male population as soldiers for the federal army.
What are the common factors here? At first blush it may appear simple, that the left opposes war when the enemy is leftist (Red China, USSR, North Vietnam) and the right opposes war when the enemy is rightist (Confederacy, Axis powers, Russia). But Ba'athist Iraq and certainly the Taliban were not leftist powers, and yet the opposition to those interventions was primarily left-wing. Neither was the Mexico of 1846. Another potential explanation is that left-wingers oppose wars where the enemy is viewed as an underdog, which Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mexico certainly were. Technically the Confederacy, the Axis, and modern Russia were/are all also weaker than the US, but it's less obvious and they gave/give at least the illusion of being formidable foes. So I'm actually not sure what the common thread is, or even if there is one. Maybe I'm trying to flatten too much nuance over a 200 year period. Either way, I find the question interesting.
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I've been trying to get myself to do a writeup of Walter Russell Mead's four traditions of American foreign policy, because he was confronting exactly this question in the late 1990s--the various conflicts involving the breakup of Yugoslavia produced an anti-intervention movement on the Republican side of the Senate, which lost to the pro-intervention faction led by President Clinton. This also seemed, on first blush, to be a reversal of the left-coded anti-war movements in earlier decades.
In short, Mead proposes a two-axis framework, where each quadrant contains the interplay of the axes and also an intellectual pedigree particular to the US. One axis is the usual hawk/dove; the other is nationalist/internationalist. (Here, "internationalists" favor more widespread and ongoing engagement with other nations, while "nationalists" prefer to interact with other nations only when necessary, and reserve most of their attention to domestic affairs.)
Hamiltonians are the dovish internationalists, who have a particular interest in expansive trade and the promotion of American business interests abroad. They don't have strong opinions about how other countries run their own affairs, so long as Americans have robust access to foreign markets.
Jeffersonians are the dovish nationalists, whose central ideal is perfecting democracy at home and avoiding foreign entanglements that might distract or corrupt American national purpose. These are your classic anti-war isolationists.
Jacksonians are the hawkish nationalists, who mostly don't care to have extensive involvement with other nations, but react with vigorous force to assaults on American interests and especially American honor. Unlike the other traditions, Jacksonianism is predominantly a grassroots/populist tradition, not elite.
Finally, the Wilsonians are the hawkish internationalists, who want to promote democracy, human rights, and other American ideals abroad whenever possible. The neoconservatives of the late 70s are a central example, but so are President Clinton's interventions in the former Yugoslavia in the 90s.
At different points in history, these traditions have individually been more or less popular, and have allied with each other in varying combinations. I think the overall framework makes a fair amount of sense descriptively, and a few thoughts towards refinement/critique.
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