A lot of this thinking stems from the brief unipolar moment after the dissolution of USSR. The west saw this as the ultimate victory of the liberal world order led by the US. Russia was on its knees, and there was no other nation that could come even close to challenging the US. There was no need for diplomacy in that environment since the US was able to simply subjugate countries to their will.

This period constitutes the formative years for most of the managers of the empire like Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan, and so on. The only world they've known is the one where the US can simply dictate terms to the rest of the world. As the world evolved in the past decades, their thinking never adjusted to new reality. They bought into their own narrative of Russia being a gas station with nukes and China being constantly on the verge of collapse. Now it's just an echo chamber of people telling each other what they want to hear.