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On the one hand, I'm inclined to believe you! Everyone overestimates government competence.
On the other hand, here's some excerpts from a 2019 RAND report:
Obviously RAND hedges their bets here, and I don't mean to claim that they were clairvoyant, or anything. But while Western analysts underestimated Ukrainian resolve, RAND was able to correctly point out the very serious downsides to sending Ukraine more weapons well before the escalation of the conflict. And then...we sent them more weapons...and the war escalated exactly as RAND predicted it could.
Now, supposing that you are a member of the US diplomatic-security apparatus that is concerned about Russian strength (and, let's say, sharing the common belief that Ukraine will not stand up to Russian might), but also nursing the unspoken (but very defensible) belief that a united Europe with an independent foreign policy is more of a threat to the United States over the long term than Russia will ever be. Just going off of this report, all of the things that RAND outlines as "risks" might look to you like "benefits," since you suspect that Russia invading and annexing more of Ukraine will "spook" Europe and increase diplomatic pressure on Germany to stop placing nice with Russia. Now increasing military aid looks like a win-win: you either weaken Russia or you spook Europe and with any luck you manage to thread the needle and do both by making the Russians look boorish and violent without them actually committing. And, as a strategist, an option where the worst plausible scenario has hidden benefits is a good option.
Things, in this postulation, DON'T go to plan: you're not omni-competent, the needle isn't threaded, Putin actually invades instead of just suffering from the weapons you've been shipping to Ukraine. How do you spin that situation?
I think what we've seen out of DC is consonant with that – pressuring Europe to give away their arsenal to Ukraine and buy American-made weapons systems instead.
Now, to your point, I don't even know that it requires the level of conscious thought I've put into it, just a sort of self-advantage-maximalizing sensibility, to get the most for the least. Maybe there's no grand strategy, just a sort of shrewd subconscious impulse. But I do find it very interesting that the "US diplomatic and military failure" DOES seem to have turned out in a way to have maximized US leverage over Europe and weakened them considerably. We replaced reliance on Russia for natural gas with reliance on the United States. We persuaded our NATO allies to give away, what, 500 tanks (many in service) while we have a few thousand Abrams in storage, of which we sent...1% (31). (Incidentally, I believe the reason given for not using more Abrams was that the logistics tail was too long. And while I do believe the logistics tail would be long, if we take this at face value it seems to suggest that we wouldn't be able to support Abrams in Europe during a conflict with Russia, which seems...problematic if true!)
So while I'm very uncertain as to how much of what has developed was planned, and I definitely agree that neither side was smart enough to correctly foresee the exact twists and turns of all these events, the extent to which it's undercut Europe to the benefit of the US is worth asking questions about, I think, but I rarely see it discussed.
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