The US has succeeded via its puppets in the EU, in destroying the EU's ties with Russia, which makes the EU wholly dependent on the grace of the US.
As President Biden and U.S. national-security reports announced, China was seen as the major enemy. This despite China's helpful role in enabling corporate America to drive down labor's wage rates by de-industrializing the U.S. economy in favor of Chinese industrialization, China's growth was recognized as posing the Ultimate Terror: prosperity through socialism. Socialist industrialization always has been perceived to be the great enemy of the rentier economy that has taken over most nations in the century since World War I ended, and especially since the 1980s. The result today is a clash of economic systems - socialist industrialization vs. neoliberal finance capitalism.
That makes the New Cold War against China an implicit opening act of what threatens to be a long-drawn-out World War III. The U.S. strategy is to pry away China's most likely economic allies, especially Russia, Central Asia, South Asia and East Asia. The question was, where to start the carve-up and isolation.
Russia was seen as presenting the greatest opportunity to begin isolating, both from China and from the NATO Eurozone. A sequence of increasingly severe - and hopefully fatal - sanctions against Russia was drawn up to block NATO from trading with it. All that was needed to ignite the geopolitical earthquake as a casus belli.
Comment: Hot wars happen when the economic wars don't yield the desired results. John Perkins describes this very well and with many real examples in his book: Confessions of an economic hitman.
See also