Yes, and it also depends on priming with negative sentiment. The premise must always be, “X is a bad country” whenever X is mentioned. An entirely different lexicon is uses for liberal-designated enemy countries and most people don’t even recognize the ways in which they have been manipulated to think this way. The enemy has regimes, dictators, strong men, censorship, and are very dangerous and bloodthirsty. In contrast, liberals have governments, elected leaders, decisive action, combat misinformation, and only take careful “interventions” to preserve “freedom and democracy”. They even use these terms to describe fascists and even monarchies so long as they are currently on the “friends” list.

Many words are perfect synonyms except with positive or negative connotation and this is effective for manipulation and messaging. They literally have no additional meaning aside from the connotation but people read into it as if it is insightful. For a term X, it’s “X but it is bad” or “X but it is good” and someone using the term thinks they have reached a salient point just by using the term. Russia has foreign agents, we have NGOs supported by official democracy funding, and in fact if a country tries to force our smol bean NGOs to register they are an anti-democracy regime. When an enemy state restricts the press or creates its own networks, it’s censorship and propaganda against the free press. When our friends in the UK create and run the pro-genocide BBC and allow full corporate control of all other media, well that’s just freedom and democracy.