They're too fuckin dumb to understand nuanced material critique, so all you're doing is giving them ammo to justify their own anticommunist biases from a left lens. There is no nuance in mainstream politics and the discussions therein, only extremes of black and white, with freedom countries on one and evil dictatorships on the other. Stop it.
Totally reasonable to go with the anti-war direction, I agree that has a good balance between anti-imperialist action and pipelining libs.
I was working under the assumption that you wanted to talk to libs but radicalize them carefully by avoiding defending AES, but I think I misunderstood.