A bit of meta commentary but I’ve noticed in recent years a phenomenon where people will adamantly defend something because they associate attacking it with their political opponents . You see this very clearly in the conservative response to US support of Ukraine. You’d expect to see more conservative support for simultaneously defending a free people while also destroying a primary adversary for pennies on the doll…
Perhaps, but these two things are very very different, and while I think your observation is apt it only exists at the margins (i.e. on twitter). You can steelman an argument for supporting Ukraine in their war that goes something like "bleeding Russia dry means they won't be able to enter into the Pacific as a co-belligerent with China in a potential WWIII scenario". Similarly, you can steelman an argument for banni…
1. It provides security for Europe, which benefits us.
2. Our military expenditures are massive in general, we have sent roughly $50B in aid thus far which is around 3% of our 2022 DoD budget. If you consider the military a tool to destroy specific enemies, of which there are two main candidates, spending a marginal 3% (or more!) to destroy one of them is incredibly cheap. Personally I would invest 3-5x as much without blinking. The returns look great.
3. War is bad, starting wars is bad, and invading smaller neighbors to set up puppet regimes or annex them is bad. The best way to prevent this in general is to make starting wars look like an extremely bad idea which will definitely destroy your country.
4. Showing that we will doggedly defend countries to which we owe no special allegiance is an extremely good deterrent and raises the expected costs of invading (for example) Taiwan. China might see a more limited investment in the defense of Ukraine and say “ok, well Russia couldn’t afford to match that but I can. Expensive but on the table” whereas open ended support till Russia collapses is substantially scarier.
And this is only reasoning from an America-first perspective. Considering only how these are good for us, I would expect conservative support to be more full-throated. That said, it is true that mainstream conservatives are definitely much more normal on this front.