Rick, you doubtless saw my post last week where I took apart the whole cold war apparatus and what I wanna do here is explain to my (former) Republican friends (still my friends) why there's so much more unambiguous moral clarity about Ukraine on the left than there is on the right. It's not just MAGA.
Conservatism has a penchant for strongmen, as in its essence it is anti-democratic and that's a feature, not a bug. Our Framers were terrified of populist demagogues and the tyranny of the majority, and so designed a supremely countermajoritarian system. It would work by "civic virtue," which meant strictly limiting the franchise to men like them. But democracy marches apace and soon poor white farmers got the vote (and trapised all over the WH at the great demagogue Andrew Jackson's inauguration, copping the free booze and trashing the place), followed by black men with the 13th Amendment. Then senators were popularly elected. Then women got the vote. And finally, in a response to the Vietnam war draft, 18-year-olds, our most recent amendment. I'm not a Hegelian; just sayin' ;)
Anti-statism is not at the philosophical core of conservatism. It was picked up from the Jeffersonian anti-federalists during the ideological switcheroo that occurred around the Gilded Age which Clinton Rossiter, in The Thankless Persuasion, called "the Great Train Robbery of American conservatism." Conservatism picked up ideas from classical liberalism, especially on free trade, to bolster American business interests. Conservatism, at essence, is aristocratic, monopolistic and not entrepreneurial. Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive-era Republicans bucked this by going after the trusts in the name of Free Enterprise. But the Bull Moose was an accidental president and alienated his party.
So it's easy to understand why the Taft Republicans of the 20s and 30s were so juiced by European fascism and had such high hopes for Hitler and Mussolini. They were going to restore the Natural Order of Things. And then we won WW2 (thanks to FDR) and everyone was a statist, or at least (like Ike) a reluctant New Dealer. Can't lead the world against global Communism without being a statist.
I think George Kennan in his famous X cable was right. The Soviets were sated with western expansion by Yalta and we greatly overreacted to their threat. Vietnam is unified and still a Communist country. Vietnam is also one of our trading partners and we sell weapons to them. Makes you wonder a little about North Korea. Makes you wonder a lot about Iran, Chile, East Timor, Grenada and every other country whose dominating strongmen we gave aid and comfort to (and occasional help with coups) because we knew they'd never nationalize their extractive industries on us. Perish the thought.
So when I watch Russia invade Ukraine, I think of the US carpet bombing Vietnam. I think of the US invading Iraq over something they didn't do. I hear echoes of Ronald Reagan calling the Nicaraguan Contra death squads -- in a truly Putinesque Orwellianism -- "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers" (and it doesn't matter how bad the Sandinistas and Daniel Ortega turned out to be). I see Ukraine standing up to an implacable bully the way other countries have stood up to us.