Just spitballin' and speculatin' -
What if provoking Russia to war was the point?
The US war propaganda machine was spinning up in 2016 to go to war in Syria, and it was pretty obvious that fighting Russia there was going to be part of the fun. That was cut short by Trump's election, which was treated as a catastrophe by the US government. The government then accelerated anti-Russian propaganda, accusing them of everything from power outages to having subverted the Office of the President itself. After failing to have the President removed for treason due to the laughably bad quality of their frame-up job, they later tried to have him removed again for exposing corruption in Ukraine.
The same officials involved in all of this have been behind what, to me, looks like bewilderingly stupid diplomacy in Ukraine. But the reality is, these people have been stoking conflict with Russia since at least 2014. Given how fast all these sanctions spun up, maybe cutting Russia out of their global cool kids' club is a much older goal, and they've been probing around for an opportunity to make doing so politically popular. Washington didn't just sanction Russia; they organized a total excision of Russians from participation in anything we have the slightest bit of control over. As we see, ordinary Americans are taking a hit. Our businesses are being disrupted, oil and gas are going up, and we're generally being made somewhat worse off. So they needed political capital for this, and what better than an "unprovoked" invasion of a "democracy" by a country that "interfered in our 2016 election?"
I don't really know why this would be their goal, but maybe this is what they wanted.
