Im not so sure about that.This is real armchair philosophy for me mixed with first hand experience, including my original comment - right - so nothing to be taken as gospel.

My experience is that our media here is more so used to make things that we do overseas socially acceptable without any public protests, visible online dissent from the public, and outrage. You’re right - you could argue that yes there is some level of required acceptance from USA citizens before the USA takes action, but for example - the USA just assassinated some “terrorist” Ayman al-Zawahiri but I never even saw mention of him once in the news. They simply named him a terrorist and killed his ass… I’d prefer if we didn’t just ping off randoms in other countries but because the american populace is fine with killing anyone who gets labelled “Al Qaeda” they don’t really need to promote any of that. Its the same thing as them randomly killing that guy as we were evacuating our forces out of Iraq. I can’t even fucking find a link because the news reported it as “US forces kill terrorist attacking airbase” at the time while reddit had security cam video of the “alleged terrorist” who was holding a chicken and walking to his car/similar circumstances.

I think my point is that the American people are really disconnected and on the ground level, talking to other civilians here - we prefer to be. A lot of sentiment is that “just dont watch the news” because its mostly world-on-fire level events. The average sentiment is that people would prefer to focus on their daily routine and “live life” as they put it, rather than be fixed on news and feel shitty because they watched the news.

Edit - I would also add that many republicans view the Ukraine escalation as a fault of Bidens or other insanity such as some “deepstate CIA” thing. IE they’re very busy blaming their gas prices that they feel in their wallets on the other political side here, in hopes that they see things “return to normal” rather than face value evaluation of news as it comes out of Russia, Ukraine for example…because thats not what serves them or interests them.