State dept brainworm holdovers and a desperate belief that things can be simple and easily sorted into good vs bad, and that the US can and should play a role in this. I don’t personally see how adding more fuel to the fire would help, but that’s just me. And hey, maybe if the last 20 years of foreign intervention hadn’t been so awful, criminal, and absolutely loaded to the brim with unnecessary murder, maybe there’d be some stomach to actually try and intervene as a force for good, for once.

If I were more conspiratorially minded, I’d say this is a great way to divide “the left” over a bullshit lost cause that they have zero personal stake in or any means to affect the outcome of, much like the Uighurs in China or any other hot-button topic of foreign policy. Then I remembered “the left” doesn’t exist and that there are probably more active never-nudes in the US than any semblance of an organized “left” to warrant such a conspiracy in the first place.

In either case, antiwar groups have been consistently more right about all these hot-button issues than any politician promising “committments”, “guaranteees”, or vague “standing withs” (but mostly behind) about Ukraine.