@Cassiodorus I think this is implicit in the clash of civilizations frame. Adam Tooze in the Wages of Destruction, referred to it as a "now or never" attitude- "the odds will only get worse later." Japan clearly had the same the attitude as Hitler's Germany. Their thinking was to go for broke. "Beat the US in a Pacific war?" Maybe we'll get lucky. Once we take over the entirety of the western Pacific and East Asia, they won't we be able to stop us. If we don't get rid of their navy now, we will fail. All or nothing. This is the underlying perspective in the US posture against China.

My point of view is that each of the US area commands feels their bailiwick is the most important in the US strategy to dominate the world. So the European command goes with this Ukraine gambit among others. Centcom emphasizes control of the Mideast, and IndoPacCom wants the conflict with China to take priority. The war industry has no problem selling as much as they can without a concern about the overall conflicting interests and lack of a coherent or workable foreign or national security policy. The inability to coordinate these different priorities as well as the fundamental erroneous assessments in each theater cause an unfolding disaster of monumental proportions. It does look like the unfolding of a world war in the making, but the masters of the universe in DC have tunnel vision. They only see their immediate interests which are destructive in nature. fwiw.

Heaps of dead bodies! Big prizes for the weapons corporations!

From December of 2020, when Joe Biden was assembling his cabinet:

Biden Defense Secretary Nominee Lloyd Austin Comes Under Fire for Industry Connections

Key paragraph:

But on Tuesday, Biden announced that he will nominate retired four-star Gen. Lloyd Austin III, once the top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and now a member of the board of directors at Raytheon. The company has been in the spotlight during the Trump administration in part because it supplies air-to-ground munitions for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and Austin’s role with Raytheon could be central to his confirmation fight.

More weapons! More war! More profits! More Yemen! So that's where this idea comes from.

Oh, and don't you worry about the collateral damage or the losses thus sustained or the new global regime thus created. Least of all you should worry about the status of the US dollar, since said dollars are being printed in great quantities to make all of this activity possible.

Here one recalls reading Volume 2 of Volker Ullrich's biography of Hitler, Hitler: Downfall. One of the more interesting things about this book is its repeated metaphor of Hitler the "political gambler and his all-or-nothing approach" (183). Another passage discusses in more detail the tendency Ullrich thinks he sees in Hitler:

His rigid orders to hold territory and the nonsensical attempts to turn the tide with the Battle of Kursk in 1943 and the Battle of the Bulge the following year reflected the mentality of the all-or-nothing gambler who had always played for high stakes and could never imagine folding. (626)

Granted, the neoconservatives are gambling with other people's armies here, and the stakes are much smaller than Hitler's. But the neocons seem to have at least some of the gambler mentality Ullrich attributes to Hitler.