Negative polarization is incredibly powerful. You can see all over the place how "X is bad" leads to people defining themselves as "anti-X" and then supporting the most extreme position against X rather than a moderate one, often leading them into supporting atrocities in the other direction. This is how we get people in the English Green Party (who I would like to support if they could be 10% less nutty fruitcake) ended up posting pro-Iran propaganda.

You also do have to keep track of internal factions. We're all, me included, using "country name" in this thread as a synechdoche as if all of a country had a unified political axis of action, when we know that's an oversimplification.

This is how we get Israel/Likud and Iran/IGRC who are practically co-evolved to escalate against each other, to which the only reasonable response of third parties is to acknowledge that both are bad and attempt to de-escalate, as in e.g. the Camp David Accords era, before either of those factions came to power.

> Right-wingers in Eastern Europe (who aren't obviously paid by Russia)

I don't think enough was made of https://newrepublic.com/post/209035/hungary-prime-minister-v... - the amount of money involved was a significant fraction of the Hungarian budget.