By “some on the right “ you mean your presidential candidate and most of your party.
Some fringe leftists are isolationists, to be sure. Liberals? No.
Going neocon agro W-style won't improve America's geopolitical status. Maybe he's having trouble coming to terms with China rivaling America's economic power and military projection that vaguely resembles what America did, albeit more flagrantly aggressively.
Would it have been justified for Europe to intervene militarily when the US wrested California and Texas from Mexico? Maybe or maybe not, but it certainly wasn’t the first step in the US taking over the world.
In both of those cases there had been decades of nation wide, protests, insurrections and guerilla movements in favor of creating a sovereign nation to prevent domination by foreign powers, Austria in the case of Italy and France in the wake of napoleon for the minor German states.
In Ukraine there has been a decades of nation wide protests insurrections and guerrilla movements in favor of creating a sovereign Ukrainian nation so that they will no longer be dominated by Russia.
Putin is not garibaldi, he is not unifying a people who have shown they want to be part of some wider national project, he is an imperialist.
Putin obviously has expansionist aims. But regional expansionism is widespread, and rarely something countries on the other side of the world need to be involved with. Kuwait certainly didn’t want to be part of Iraq, but that wasn’t any of our business either. Same for South Korea and south Vietnam.
You avoid mentioning NATO and the reasons Putin views it as a threat, probably because it would undercut your claim that there are no worthwhile parallels to WWII here.
I know you understand how alliances work, so I'm really fascinated that thus far you appear to be studiously avoiding mention of the most consequential alliance in history, one which happens to have significant bearing on US involvement in the war in Ukraine.
Absolutely hilarious and ahistorical. Anyone playing the silly rhetorical games you're playing isn't trying to convince anyone with reasoned arguments.
Disagree, again: Back in the day, many leftists — especially the radical ones, who not infrequently were Communists or sympathizers — proclaimed loudly that Pax Americana and its small wars were facets of an allegedly-rapacious capitalist-colonialist imperialism, extracting resources from the poor and redistributing them upward to the wealthy, and suppressing popular revolutionary movements that professed to want to even things out.
(I recently re-read David Halberstam's magisterial The Best and the Brightest about the origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, including backing the French efforts to stay as the colonial power after liberation from Japanese occupation. Highly recommended.)
> And when I was a mainstream young liberal in the 1990s and early oughts
It's not your fault you missed the 1960s and 70s.
You want to talk about history? How about: for 70 years American interventionism has resulted in an unbroken streak of mistaken wars that have sapped America’s wealth. Thats where your definition of “ally” has gotten us.
If only we had a Star Trek TOS "Guardian of Forever" time portal to show us what wars were avoided by what you call American "interventionism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Foreve...