It's not so much WW1 they're looking at, it's 1991. They believe that they were responsible for defeating and shattering the USSR. They believe if they keep "containing", "overextending" and "pressuring" Russia it will eventually implode like the USSR did. Then they can repeat the wave of plunder and colonization that they enacted in the 1990s in Eastern Europe but this time across the entire corpse of the Russian Federation.

You have to remember that at the time, the international capitalist system itself had been in a deep crisis since the 1970s. The wave of neoliberalism in the 80s was a response to that crisis, a way to kick the can down the road just a little longer while hollowing out the social and economic base. They desperately needed that infusion of plunder that they got in the 90s, the expansion into new markets, new sources of cheap labor, newfound access to raw materials to exploit that were previously locked behind the iron curtain.

That allowed them to stave off the crisis for a good two decades, right up until the 2008 financial crisis.

But now, with the rise of China and the global south, they are in an even more desperate situation than ever before, hence the reckless urgency with which they are trying to recreate that 90s situation, to bail out the capitalist crisis in the West by getting their hands on the wealth, labor force and markets that they again lost their easy and cheap access to after Putin pulled Russia out of the 90s catastrophe.

If they don't succeed, then the Western capitalist system will have to begin to self-cannibalize. The US core will need to begin to consume the peripheral European vassal economies to keep the US's own system afloat. I believe that this process has already begun. The moment the US blew up Nordstream it became clear that this is what would happen.