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Some of the people replying here seem completely out of touch with the right wing. I have no idea where they are getting some of these ideas.
The right doesn't like the war in Ukraine because they don't feel like it serves the vital national security interests of The United States. They suspect that it is a handout to the defense industry. As far as why they don't support this when they did support the war in Iraq/etc.: they talk pretty extensively about how the Cheneys lied us into this war, and how Ruper Murdoch (and fox news) helped. They feel betrayed by this.
They talk about it all the time.
Tucker Carlson, who was previously one of the (if not the) most popular host on cable news talked about this extensively.
I don't think it's complicated.
I am not on the left, so can't comment on why they seem to support it so strongly. My suspicion is that 4 years martingaling[1] the claims about Russian interference in our elections have built Russia and Putin into something resembling a Marvel comic villain and/or the nazis.
[1]Martingale betting strategy is just that every time you lose, you double down. Eventually you win and you win big. This applies to compulsive lying in: every time you get caught in a lie, you just double down and make the claims even more fantastic. Conspiracy theorists do this. It's basically how you get qanon.
Most charitable themotte.org explanation ever! It can't be that people on the left genuinely don't agree with the idea of a war to annex territory or conquer another sovereign nation, it must be that they have a childish and wrong view of Russia.
It actually can't be, because they observably didn't give a shit about any of this during the Obama years! This was unironically one of the things that disillusioned me a lot about the left at the time. Where was this principled objection when Libya was destroyed? While you could claim that the Libyan intervention wasn't technically a war to conquer or annex the country, that still leaves the left in the unfortunate position of supporting the bombing of a nation until it regresses to the point of having open air slave markets.
I didn't say the left were avid geopolitics followers. I just said they didn't agree that nations could invade others without damn good reason.
My understanding of the Libyan intervention was that Gaddafi was attacking civilians, which is very much Not Okay under the morality and rules of war that have developed for a century now. If you want to claim the left was duped, that's one thing, but I think they would 100% agree that you can invade a nation if it is doing something like that.
Then, of course, there is the question of putting US personnel on the ground to handle post-intervention Libya, something people would probably be wary of given how long the US had been in the Middle East by that point.
Except they greenlit the Saudi invasion of Yemen too. My point is that they don't actually give a shit about nations invading others and are motivated by more local concerns, because otherwise their actions don't make sense. They aren't insisting that we invade China over their actions in Xinjiang, they aren't even proposing military action against France due to their active maintenance of a colonial empire in Africa (this includes multiple military interventions!). One of the reasons I became disillusioned with the left was their sudden reversal on the forever wars and overseas adventurism once Obama took power.
And what does Libya look like now? I'm not going to say that Gaddafi was a saint, but I feel very confident in saying that he was better than the open air slave markets and violent unrest that is still plaguing the region. Military intervention in Libya was a terrible idea and made the world a worse place, and I steadfastly disagree that something being "not okay" is enough to justify an invasion, especially when we can see the ruinous outcomes that actually resulted in the real world.
???
What's the source on the broad left doing that?
Xianjing may be a just cause, but a just cause doesn't compel people to go to war. War with China would have severe second-order effects and US or US + Allies victory isn't guaranteed either. Also, what is this French empire you're talking about?
That's a separate criticism. Failure to consider "and then what?" isn't the same as having a Marvel-esque view of heroes and villains as the original comment implied.
Much of former French Colonial African is still de facto even if not de jure under French influence with the exception of the successful* "Coup Belt" countries. France is the poster child for the definition of neocolonialism.
You're talking about Francafrique? I don't know much about that, it seems like they're trying to reduce their footprint there. You got a source?
Source on what aspect? I was noting that characterizing francafrique as French (Neo)Imperial maintenance is not outside the overton window and that French armed forces do deploy regularly both to "provide security" to French aligned regimes and "peace keeping" in the less French aligned areas. Someone who might use the term Empire to describe the actions/area might use different terms than the quoted ones I used. I'm not aware of the French proactively reducing their footprint so much as being forced to given civil conflicts and anti-French attitudes of newer regimes.
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