Why are so many Republicans opposing further aid to Ukraine? Paul Krugman says it's not about the money:
The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.
I think the answer is simpler than this: Over the past 40 years, Democrats have generally opposed Republican wars (Grenada, Nicaragua, Gulf War, Iraq) and Republicans have generally opposed Democratic wars (Kosovo, Libya, Ukraine). The only big exception has been the bipartisan support for the Afghanistan War, though even there Democrats lost enthusiasm for it sooner than Republicans did.
Note that "opposed" doesn't mean "unanimously opposed." Rather, the party in power has typically supported its president while the opposition has been split. That's exactly what's now happening with Ukraine, which makes it very normal. There's not much reason to look any further.
I'd side with krugman on this. And as I recall, many dems supported the the gulf war in addition to afghan, while the rest were simply terrible ideas. and in fact a lot of dems also support the iraq war, including i think yourself, kevin. so this whole take doesn't really hold water on a simple factual basis.
Wasn't Grenada over in about 12 hours? Nicaragua was about Reagan defying Congress, Iran-Contra was all about that. Seem to recall that the first Gulf War was pretty popular, and George the Elder didn't push his luck with it.
So, I'm with Krugman on this. The Republicans have thrown in with other rightist parties by supporting Putin. After all, it is what Trump wants.
I also recalled the first Gulf War as enjoying pretty broad bipartisan support… and apparently I was wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_1991?wprov=sfti1.
I do think that the Ukraine war would have had more republican support in prior decades (ala Krugman’s reasoning), but only modestly (ala Kevin’s reasoning, and based on the votes for the use of military force in Iraq War 1)
I'm with Krugman on this topic, too.
Have we forgotten the mass boner wingnuts had for Putin for a decade before this started?
That kind of boner doesn't go away overnight.
What percentage of the Republican Party do you think are made up of “wingnuts”?
Eighty, maybe ninety percent. "I'd rather be Russian than Democrat" has been a popular t-shirt caption.
You live in a fantasy world.
Trump is leading the polls for the Republican nomination by 50% or more. To support a lying incompetent hateful narcissistic like Trump you have to be some kind of nut.
And that 50% lead understates it. He's losing with voters who actually like him vs other incompetent hateful narcissists. Trumps overall positive numbers with republicans is in the 90's.
Somebody lives in a fantasy world. I don't believe it's me.
All of them.
You can't vote for a Republican without having significant deficits. The best you can say of any of them is it's a complete failure of character of any kind at all.
But that would be the best, perhaps the better 1% of them. The rest are worse.
The Republican Party has been completely captured by bugfuck insane radicals who view Trump as their once and future Führer. Where reasonable conservatives have gone in the meantime is another question...
More than their Fuhrer, more like a fusion of Jesus Christ with the Fuhrer.
the anti-christ
Enough of a majority to drive the metaphorical car, I suppose; otherwise, non-wingnuts would be able to rein in some of the current GOP excesses. But they can’t.
Did you see that John Kelly confirmed all the horrendous things Trump said about veterans? The percentage of Republicans who will still vote for Trump are the percentage who are “wingnuts”.
Have we forgotten the mass boner wingnuts had for Putin for a decade before this started?
This. Kevin doesn't seem to be aware of the history. Putin has long been valorized by the hard right. People like Steve Bannon and Pat Buchanan have frequently lauded Putin over the years for standing up for traditionalist (read white, Christian, culturally conservative) values against the globalist, cosmopolitan (read Jewish, liberal, non-Christian) "decadence" they believe plagues the West.
Then add to this the Trump-specific element: their God-Emperor was up to his eyeballs in hot money from Russia, which rendered him a Putin cuck. Which, because of Muller/impeachment, etc, coded "pro-Trump" as "pro-Putin" and thus the default position for large swaths of the party.
There is the added element of traditional, Taftian GOP isolationism—a instinctual aversion to foreign entanglements (this lot is also hostile to NATO, WTO, UN, etc) —but I think that's mostly a minor chord, given the fact that MAGA is practically jizzing itself to go to war with China or Iran.
Yes. Your first paragraph adds really important factors, which explain also the Right’s admiration for Viktor Orbán.
And Mexico. Don't forget Mexico. Though Drumpf apparently plans to go to war with Mexico but deny that it's the US. Which they will believe because he is such a credible person. Like Putin denying Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
New York Times has an article on this. It’s not just Trump though, it looks like most of the Republican Party thinks it can resolve fentanyl with military force. So dumb. And those than don’t actually think just the threat of force will get the Mexican Government to crack down on the cartels. Here’s a link to the article though I’m sure it’s paywalled:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/us/politics/trump-mexico-cartels-republican.html
...it looks like most of the Republican Party thinks it can resolve fentanyl with military force.
Most of the Republicans Party says it thinks the fentanyl problem can be solved with military force.
A lot of these people are as dumb as rocks, there's no doubt of that. But a lot of them have their eyes on potential primary challengers 24/7, and constantly adjust their messaging accordingly. They're the most unserious people when it comes to public policy in human history—and some of the most disingenuous.
I do feel much of the time there's a big gap between what's coming out of a Republican official's mouth and what he or she is actually thinking, and I believe this should be pointed out.
It should be pointed out by our free press while it is still free.
I would point out that most Republicans couldn’t have cared less about abortion except as a campaign message. Yet, here we are.
Krugman is simply engaging in mindreading. You read your enemies minds and you find the worst motives you can dream up. This is all too common in today’s politics.
Republicans/MAGA world oppose money for Ukraine as a kneejerk reaction to opposing something Democrats support. It is crass, thoughtless, heartless politics. Trying to read more into it than that is pointless.
how is it mindreading when leading republican voices have been praising putin for years?
Exactly - & not just "leading republican voices," but trump's specific praise for Putin's invasion. The MAGA wing is not going to disagree with him on this after hearing similar support throughout trump's administration.
I'm just glad to see that there are sane voices left in the GOP to help get more supplies for Ukraine included in the final budget.
Which republicans? (Besides Trump.)
Here: https://accountability.gop/ukraine-quotes/
And here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/204191/putin-image-rises-mostly-among-republicans.aspx
Leading Republican voices, other than Trump, have not been praising Putin for years. Their voices have been muted when Trump praised Putin, but their voices are always muted as Trump goes about his daily madness.
Leading Republican voices, other than Trump, have not been praising Putin for years.
You're right in that the Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller/Pat Buchanon wing of the GOP hasn't been dominant ("leading") all that long—only a bit less than a decade at this point. Prior to 2016, they were viewed as eccentric, out-of-touch cranks.
Now the GOP nomination goes through them.
So it was just a figment of my imagination that a CODEL spent 7/4/2018 in Moscow with Putin? All GOP senators.
Playing word games to avoid the obvious fact that many in the MAGA camp are both prominant party voices and support Putin is....odd?
You accuse others of mindreading, then you insist that your own uninformed mindreading is accurate. Confusing isnt it?
OT: This news item is especially concerning now that many red states are following other other states' repressive initiatives, as in efforts to ban books, eliminate factual education from history & science,, & use similar court cases to further such efforts. I already have reason to mistrust the police & "constitution" sheriffs in my state & hope that this doesn't gain traction here.
The breadth of allowed justification for such investigations, without oversight, is pretty much unlimited.
https://truthout.org/articles/north-carolina-gop-passed-budget-creates-secret-police-critics-warn/
IDK about that. There have always been "America First" conservatives in the same party as the Establishment Chicken Hawks.
I must’ve missed all those Democrats in positions of power that opposed the Iraq War.
One of the lessons that the US ruling class learned from the Vietnam war (and from the resulting popular anti-war protests which rocked society in the late sixties) was that a draft army is a huge mistake if you are going to use it as an enforcer of ruling class policies in the world. The US draft was halted in 1972, and the US switched to an all-mercenary military.
Since then, there have been no significant protests (because whose ox is gored?) over foreign wars.
Personally, I'm deeply ashamed of most of the wars that the US has fought in during my lifetime, but it is really hard to do anything about them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUt0dZXPFoU
In retrospect, I think that the Vietnam war was an attempt to establish a Capitalist beachhead on the Asian mainland, but the perpetrators approached the problem entirely in the wrong way. They should have sent McDonald's restaurants over there, instead of troops. No force on Earth can stand against a McD franchise.
The Iraq War was started because Saddam said he'd accept a basket of currencies for his oil, breaking the tradition that the US had started with "Saudi" Arabia, in supporting their regime in exchange for them denominating their oil only in dollars. Saddam's action threatened the position of the dollar in the world, and the US was determined to show other countries what would happen to them if they tried to do that.
Libya did try the same thing a bit later, with the same result, although in their case, the bombing started within weeks of their announcement.
I suspect that the US support for Ukraine is partly based on the fact that a Ukraine allied with the West will break the Russian hold on the oil market in that part of the world. Personally, I support Ukraine because I hate the societies that Authoritarians build, but I'm not sure that that is a particularly popular or influential view in the halls of power.
Oddly, the vastly powerful fossil-fuels industry, that orders up US wars at will, couldn’t keep Sleepy Joe from canceling its leases in the ANWR.
Democrats largely opposed the Gulf War, which complicated/ruined their plans for running for President in 1992. It was their experience being on the wrong side of that vote that they cynically voted for the "Iraq War" to ensure that the same didn't happen again. Then Senator, and now President, Joe Biden is an excellent example of this.
And wasn't the Gulf War exactly the same kind of thing as Ukraine?
Brutal dictator arbitrarily invades a neighboring country claiming it's really their 'lost province' and isn't a real country after all, like it's some kind of mercy killing.
Not quite: For Kuwait we sent troops to bail out a human rights violating dictator crew who happened to be cronies of the President's family. In Ukraine we are spending money supporting a legitimately elected president and his country defending itself but we don't send any soldiers.
That description could fit nearly every regime in the Middle East then or now.
Saddam was the fascist aggressor pretending to be exerting sovereignty over a territory he had no right to and we acted against that, the comparison seems simple and uncomplicated
I've watched many companies merge over my lifetime, and what I repeatedly see is that companies which have similar sizes and philosophies tent to get together.
I think that a lot of Republicans are well aware of what Putin and his mafia buddies are like, and they like what he's all about.
Not all Republicans are too stupid to think for themselves, or are so desirous of revenge against their imagined offenders that they exhibit high levels of cruelty.
Both of my parents were life-long Republicans, but mercifully, and reasonably, they hated Trump. So, Republicans are not all alike.
However, as the extreme parts of the Republican party have been given a voice and a platform by Fox News, the hard-core (and willfully ignorant) advocates of violence are becoming the voice of the party. The intelligent and reasonable Republicans are finding that they don't recognize their party any more.
You might argue that these "reasonable" Republicans should have foreseen that this is the natural end point of Authoritarian beliefs, but no one specifically educated them about this. They looked for a society with law and order and found the Gulag.
As for the Republicans who want to tear down American society and rebuild it in the image of Putin's Russia because they cannot live comfortably in a liberal Democracy, well, these guys are a minority but are always going to be with us. We need to keep them from destroying us along with themselves.
I don't fall into either camp. For me the war scorecard is:
Grenada - merited
Nicaragua - bad
Gulf War - merited
Afghanistan - merited but limited to expulsion of leadership
Iraq - very bad
Kosovo - unsure (leaning to bad)
Libya - bad
Ukraine - merited
There was also the Panama action under George H.W. Bush to capture Manuel Noriega. Like Grenada, maybe merited, but mostly jingoistic muscle-flexing to boost sales of "We're Nr. 1" foam fingers around the country. I mostly agree with your list except for Kosovo -- there was a genocide going on and Europe and NATO had to respond somehow. Russia of course tried to fuck with things to show they still mattered, trying to relive the glory days of WW I and II, and this was I think the origin point of a lot of the crap we're dealing with now with Putin's regime.
Thanks for mentioning Panama. I was unimpressed with the theatrics and chest thumping. Noriega was a jerk but I'm wary of going in to "clean up" a nation-state unless it's really, really bad.
Kosovo: My concern was that the intervention didn't strictly adhere to the norms of the International Order (borders and treaties; e.g. Kosovo wasn't in NATO) but as you point out there was genocide. Retrospectively, Kosovo intervention looks like the right move. At the time though, I wasn't certain. Post Yugoslavia was a tumultuous time. Everybody seemed to be fighting everybody.
I remember when Senator Bob Dole, running for the presidency, disparaged WWII as a "Democrat war."
Yes, I was surprised to learn that a lot of Republicans were supporting Nazi Germany before the US entered WWII.
They only voted to declare war because Pearl Harbor was attacked by the "Yellow Menace." Fortunately, Germany declared war on the US days later, so that resolved the problem of getting Republicans to fight against the Nazis.
I think it's a case of "like seeks like". They recognize a kindred spirit.
As with Hitler, same with Putin, unfortunately.
Yeah, we unfortunately tend to forget that "America First" pro-Nazism was a fairly robust movement in the US up to 1941. Aviator Charles Lindbergh was one of their celebrity spokesmen.
I agree with Krugman -- Zelensky rebuffed Trump's attempt to extort him over Biden and it got Trump impeached and the MAGAts have never forgiven him for it. On top of which, they -- like Trump -- admire Putin's ruthless fascism and are eternally pissed the Ukrainians, with NATO's help, have taken him down a peg. It's not that complicated.
Which Afghanistan war? The Ukraine War should be compared to the Afghanistan war in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson was a Democrat and Reagan was a Republican and both of them worked to provide weapons to the Afghans.
The Afghanistan War was widely credited as an important factor in the fall of the Soviet Union. The aid supplied by the U.S. and its allies kept Russia spending money and blood while increasing dissatisfaction at home. And the cost was rather low for the U.S.
The Republican support for ending foreign aid to Afghanistan really can't be seen as anything other than Republican support for Putin.
Also, how is the Libyan war a Democratic war? Reagan bombed then in '86.
And the cost was rather low for the U.S.
Unless you count empowering the radical Islamicist mujahadeen that Osama Bin Laden later assumed control of and turned into Al Qaeda. But anyway...
The "Libyan War" Kevin mentions refers to the NATO/EU action that toppled Qadaffi's regime in 2011 that the Obama administration also supported, if somewhat tepidly. Remember this is where the whole Benghazi nonsense that embroiled Hillary Clinton got started.
The Republican Party is a fifth column working for the benefit of Vladimir Putin.
I think that's the best way to understand what's going on. After the Cold War, Russia had no chance to compete with its old nemesis through traditional economic or military means. It escalated attacks on America through sabotage and subterfuge, and with the help of new technologies (and the demise of traditional media gatekeepers), through an information war. Russia has invested heavily in driving division and social unrest here. Its greatest success was the election of Trump, who governed not only as an ally of Putin but as his puppet. As Trump goes, so goes the GOP. Immediately after last year's invasion of Ukraine, Trump was one of the few voices in praise of Putin. Now, it's becoming hard to find GOP voices in strong support of Ukraine.
Putin launched the might of the Russian army on its overmatched neighbor Ukraine and is now mired in a way he cannot win. Putin brought the GOP to its knees without firing a shot.
"Putin ... is now mired in a way he cannot win."
True, but also "mired in a war ...."
Fifth column is exactly what is happening and Kevin is in denial about this. It's 1939 all over again and Roosevelt now Biden has to get America to see the light and support helping Europe so the war doesn't spill over to here.
Krugman was once one of my favorite writers; but now, like so many others on the Left, he a.) engages in the most reductive social analysis imaginable, and b.) he simultaneously fails to stand up for Liberal principles. It is absolutely tragic.
To be clear, I still consider Krugman the economist to be a genius. I'm not qualified to comment on any of his economic analyses. But, at this point in his career, he should just stick to his economic expertise. Because, when he engages in socio-political analysis, he comes up with this sort of narrow-minded and shockingly condescending type of blind and unimaginative Leftist orthodoxy:
"Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad."
For goodness sake, we are discussing human beings. And human beings, even our opponents, are complex. This description may apply to the cartoon villains commonly dreamt up in Leftist fever dreams, but it does not even so much as attempt to actually engage with the complexity of real human behavior. And, as a result, Krugman is recklessly adding to the dangerous radicalization of both the Right and the Left
There are extraordinarily few Americans who actually think "cruelty and repression" are "admirable features that America should emulate." Sure, there are some real psychopaths in the world, and some of them may be Republicans in Congress (some of them may also be Democrats in Congress). But, no, as a general explanation of group behavior, this description reveals far more about Krugman's paranoia, radicalization, and life inside an echo chamber than it does about Republicans.
So, what might be a more realistic interpretation of what's going on? Kevin comes out head and shoulders above Krugman in this case:
"[T]he party in power has typically supported its president while the opposition has been split. That's exactly what's now happening with Ukraine, which makes it very normal."
I would add, however, that Krugman's utterly unhinged, if not outright fanatical, rhetoric on this topic may very well serve the entirely counterproductive goal of hardening the Republican resistance to Ukraine. Shockingly, it turns out that our fellow citizens don't actually like it when an NYT columnist with national exposure casually dismisses them as irredeemably evil. Who knew?
Krugman's self-discrediting commentary reveals an astonishing blind spot. And, in that sense, he is simply one example of a phenomenon now seen almost everywhere on the Left: we are hyper-sensitive to the mistakes and/or extremism of the Right while utterly blind to the extremism of the Left.
On the topic of Ukraine, did Krugman even comment on the letter that the Progressive Caucus sent to the Biden admin one year ago? The letter in which dozens of "progressive" lawmakers urged the Biden admin to capitulate to Russian aggression and seek an end to the Ukraine war? Yes, I know they didn't phrase their letter that way; but that was how many people across the political spectrum understood it. And, yes, they withdrew their letter. But only under pressure. So, are they irredeemably evil too? Of course not. But how does Krugman manage to draw any distinctions here? If he treats Republicans who want to cut Ukraine funding like one-dimensional James Bond villains, then on what grounds does he proceed to treat progressives (who demand the same thing) with nuance?
All this being said, Ukraine is not my main point of contention with Krugman and other Liberal commentators. As indicated before, my biggest disappointment is with their abandonment of Liberal values. Krugman is the guy who wrote The Conscience of a Liberal. And the Left desperately needs that conscience right now. So, where is it? Where is the condemnation of censorship when it is practiced by Democrats to compel state sanctioned speech in Colorado (through public accommodation laws) or California (through Community College speech codes)? Where is the outcry when Leftist mobs at colleges literally chase disliked speakers off campus? Where are the denunciations of violence when radical trans rights activists issue death threats?
Krugman is at one and the same time applying an inept analysis to the failings of the Right while turning a completely blind eye to the failings of the Left. And it breaks my heart. Where the hell have all the Liberals gone?
zzzzzzzzzzz
X Infinity
That has something to do with my ISP but no one can explain what.
How did you get many 'z's? I fell asleep after the second.
lol
“There are extraordinarily few Americans who actually think "cruelty and repression" are "admirable features that America should emulate." “
When it comes to immigrant children, that “few” include the Republican Party.
Trump's entire platform is cruelty and repression and has the enthusiastic support of the Republican party.
@bebopman:
Jon Chait @ NY Mag provides a more eloquent response than I could come up with:
"To dismiss all actual or potential Trump supporters as incorrigible racists or white-adjacent or as the unwitting pawns of racists is to choose ideological purity over winning."
There may be no better way to self-isolate, politically self-destruct, and intellectually atrophy than to write off approximately 70 million Americans (a rough estimate of trump voters in 2020) as one-dimensional villains. That perspective reveals nothing about your opponents and nothing good about you.
Avoid reductive fallacies, ditch the Leftist echo chambers, and, perhaps most importantly, keep an eye on whatever it is you might be projecting onto Republicans.
Jon Chait is a hack who is little better than Jonathan Turley when it comes to carrying water for the GOP while pretending to still be a liberal. The GOP is now being controlled by Pro-Putin politicians who parrot Russian propaganda talking points either they are true believers who want a Putinesqe regmine or they are being controlled by compromat that Putin has collected on them.
"compel state sanctioned speech in Colorado"
You mean oppose homophobia. Please take your crocodile tears about "liberals" and go.
Compelling others to oppose homophobia is illiberal. The idea that illiberal means do not justify liberal ends is Liberalism 101. And I find it terrifying when Leftists happily renounce such notions ...
If you cannot bring yourself to love and respect one another even if the person is in an age appropriate same sex relationship you deserve all the scorn heaped on you.
“If he treats Republicans who want to cut Ukraine funding like one-dimensional James Bond villains, then on what grounds does he proceed to treat progressives (who demand the same thing) with nuance?”
I don't think it's entirely nitpicking to point out that (1) progressives didn't demand the same thing (cutting Ukrainian funding), and (2) there’ no evidence that Krugman wrote about the progressives’ letter at all, much less wrote about it with nuance.
Boy, I thought that you would get slammed far more than you did; this comment area has a fair number of orthodox liberals enforcer types.
By the way, while I do not 100% agree with you, I think that you are definitely on the right track. I have found Krugman and others who were responsibly left kind of went off a bit into tribal land after the election of Trump. NPR and the Washington Post included. Another thing to be angry at what Trump has done to my country.
There is some politicking going on for sure and like several have done you can do a scoreboard. Every battle action has many reasons (we cannot ignore Europe’s revanching on Libya), but to ignore Russia’s influence on the GOP is a folly.
It's not simple. Plenty of Republicans are supporters of Ukraine, like most of their senators. Then there are fanbois like Trump and Tucker Carlson, and they bring an army of followers with them.
The Democrats aren't that easy to explain. Biden, of course, is a stalwart, and perhaps the rest of this famously disorganized party is simply falling in line behind him. I'd say it's more likely that the Ukrainian cause and its champion Zelenskyy are irresistibly appealing, a matter of values, if you wish.
What a surprise. Paul Krugman is absolutely right and contrarian Kevin is, as usual, clearly wrong. Not that it takes a genius to figure out the blindingly obvious--MAGA-dom loves them some shirtless Vlad. (Krugman himself notes that the reason for MAGA opposition to Ukraine aid is obvious.) But it takes a special kind of talent and personality to deny the blindingly obvious.
Kevin goes for a simple explanation, but it's not simple enough.
Dems in Congress tried to impeach Trump over his interactions with the government of Ukraine. That government failted to back him up.
It's just that simple.
This seems like a very misleading take from Kevin. Insisting that all types of opposition be grouped together so that every opinion can be neatly grouped into 'support' or 'opposition' is a pretty blatant logical fallacy.
Arguments that rely on this should probably be discarded as dishonest and considered to be in bad faith.
Similar dishonest fallacies are used to draw a comparison between Al Gore's legal actions and Donald Trump's call for Mike Pences death. They are both objections and actions related to an election, so they are the same!!
Bzzt, wrong.
I think a factor that is ignored is how much trump loved dictators long before Putin appeared on the scene. He already praised China for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1990 (https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-donald-trump-1990).
The preference for Putin is because he is more "palatable", and also because Putin took a democracy (at least trying) and replaced it by a dictatorship, and that is what Trump wants to do in the US.
I spend a lot of time among Republicans of different stripes and I would say Krugman is describing a small fraction of them. But I think he is right on for this fraction (also not mentioned, is Putin's growing gay bashing, there's a flavor of conservative that loves that).
But I'll say that a disproportionate amount of seemingly anti-Ukraine feelings also seems to come from families that have either active armed services personnel or someone who served in Iraq/Afghan wars in their family/group. They are genuinely worried about our personnel/their families getting sucked into this thing because they have people in the military.
There is also a left group that is not mentioned and they are the peace at any cost folks. They are worried that this will escalate into a nuclear war and would rather see Ukrainians defeated than have that happen. That's a jarring discussion to have as it suggests we will watch country after country invaded by wanna-be dictators. They seem fine with this..."Pray it won't happen" is what a hippy-flavored Christian told me.
Ah, yes, Kevin, god forbid that we acknowledge that conservatives are horrible people.
They are returning to their isolationist roots i.e. Lindbergh and the Bund. That in addition to their faux budget concerns (while planning further corporate tax cuts), and yes because in a way Putin is their guy.
In doing this they signal to Putin that other excursions into former SSR’s will be tolerated and maybe Xi will get the idea that Taiwan is fair game as well.
It doesn’t take much to encourage these guys.
It's simpler even than that. Trump likes Putin, so they like Putin.
Krugman use to be my "go to" read. Slowly NYT has been bustling itself to the right or bothsiderism and I cancelled. I must suspect that Krugman may have slid to the right a little to comply. Just sayin.
Seriously, Kevin, you don't think that the Trumpers take their cues from Trump? That they even remember all of those pre-Trump wars.
BTW the Dems have a slightly better score for their wars; they have one success against zero for the GOP: Kosovo turned out to be successful (thanks to the dangling of EU membership by the EU; for once we had a valuable carrot to offer; I was opposed to it at the time, considering as way too risky). All other wars were abject failures with the exception off Grenada which served no purpose whatsoever and could therefore never fail to meet its objectives.
Ukraine is actually the only truly defensive war we have undertaken or supported since the Second World War. A good reason to support it.
Republicans for the last what 20 years now? have always loved Putin because he's a big ol' meanie just like them. And all the social media propaganda Russia's been putting out doesn't hurt either. In fact, they're apparently planning more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-next-target-u-support-173151349.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-next-target-u-support-173151349.html
The republicans are suckers, basically, and fall for any boot that kicks them in their faces and stands on their necks. The fact we have yet to hold social media co's to account for allowing this to derail our democracy will probably be our undoing.