I feel it's something that the EU wants and we surely care more about the Western democratic culture, but not at the risk of our own financial ruin.
It could also be a continuation of the German "Wandel durch Annäherung" policy ("Change by Rapprochement"). People you do business with won't shoot at you, and will generally be more willing to talk to you about human rights, nuclear disarmament etc than people you don't do business with.
Except grain, which the USA provided in vast quantities to the USSR in order to prop-up its system in the wake of poor harvests.
There was a brief blip in 1980 when President Carter vetoed it, before resuming under President Reagan.
Why not use it as a lever to bring down the Soviet system 20 years earlier? Because the balance of power was quite convenient.
A civil war in the USSR at the time could have literarily ended the world as we know it.
The fact that the only major thing we got at the fall of the USSR was the attempted 1991 ‘August Coup’ is a miracle as things could’ve ended so badly for Russia and the entire world.
The level of confrontation now is nowhere close to that but that has been the usual state of the world for a longer time than the current open and free Internet and commerce. If we are heading into that direction (if!) all the major players (USA, China, Russia) will build some walls again and pull the strings of their allies. It's both a defensive strategy and an offensive one and it's going to reduce the flow of goods, people and information. Technology stacks will be rewritten and operated locally as barriers are raised. Factories will have to be rebuilt in the west. I wonder if the EU can survive being pulled in three different ways or each country will go its way toward the party that suits them best.
We can look at the 1946-1989 cold war as an experiment to predict how this is going to play out. The winner was who was able to create more wealth for the people in its block. Nuclear weapons were (and are) a strong enough deterrent to make a real full scale war impossible. Be prepared to hear more about them in the next years. However there were many wars fought by proxy, or against proxies.
Tangentially, you might be interested in learning about the origin of the words First, Second and Third World [2], which somewhat changed in meaning since their origin in 1952. They where USA + allies, USSR + allies, all the others. They were not about being rich or poor. Maybe we'll end up with more than three worlds this time or (I hope) business as usual.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
[2] https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=372684438