When I was 18 and just beginning my study of the classics, I was astonished when I read in Thucydides that when the Peloponnesian War broke out, most of the Greeks wanted Sparta to win. Was not Athens a democracy and Sparta an oligarchy? Athens was the home of Socrates, Pericles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Sophocles. Sparta was rural and backward with no navy or beautiful temples or walls. It represented Doric severity as opposed to the Ionic cosmopolitanism of Athens. Why would the Greeks prefer that Sparta win? I didn’t understand the anomaly when I was 18, but the simple answer soon became clear: Sparta was not then imperial—or at least not as imperial as Athens. Empires like to think of themselves as having a lot of friends, but they are often naive in forgetting the depth of the ill-will they incur.
I've noted this, and the current conflict in Ukraine is an example. There are huge swaths of the world (Africa, India, China, most of South America and the Middle East, and a few pockets of Eastern Europe like Hungary and Serbia) cheering for Russia, not because they think there is anything glorious about Russia but because they have accepted the notion of Ukraine as an American proxy and therefore, out of bitterness toward America, will nod along with any allegation made against that so-called "proxy" and wave the flag of whatever nation is up against them.