What do you mean “we can’t tell”? For those who aren’t aware, the war against Iran (direct, they don’t have nukes yet) and Russia (via Ukraine proxy, Russia has nukes) as well as Venezuela (infiltrate their power structure and bribe off) are actually the same war: they are multi front (financial, energy, technical; ranging from soft to kinetic) geopolitical “containment” strategies. The US/UK/EU think tank and others influencing policy have written about it non-stop since forever, it’s not like a grand conspiracy - it’s all out in the public if you lift back the on the surface news narrative. You can literally pull down and read the policy papers, read the transcripts of those (in power and adjacent to power) pushing this “primacy” view of US led hegemony.
Russia is the odd one out here, in that it was started by Russian incursions as far back as 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_occupation_of_Crimea
The think tank argument is very valid though. You can no longer find "Project for the new American Century" online, but they laid out the invasion of Iraq before 9/11 (the pretext) even happened.