Why are some unwilling to take half-a-loaf by forging a less than satisfying deal or even reverting to the status quo, making not getting the optimal outcome into an embarrassing defeat?
While the conflict with Iran lumbers onward through an admittedly bizarre non-ceasefire ceasefire, some are arguing that we have only two options: Either accept defeat by forging a less than ideal compromise to end the war sooner rather than later, or pursue complete victory by re-engaging combat operations and ultimately achieving complete regime change. To them, the idea of reverting to the diplomatic status quo between the United States and Iran – tensions, sanctions, squabbling, and all, assuming free navigation of the Strait of Hormuz is part of that status quo – is a humiliating defeat. While I would readily admit this is a less than ideal option, it’s also a bizarre way to describe the outcome of a conflict where the side that lost their Supreme Leader, at least two ranks of leadership below, saw their navy sunk, their air force destroyed, and their capacity to fire missiles and drones reduced to a tiny percentage of their original strength, the winner. At best, I would say it’s a stalemate, but it does prompt an interesting question: Why are at least some unwilling to take half-a-loaf, making not getting the optimal outcome into an embarrassing defeat?
Obviously, I cannot look into their minds to say for sure and we can assume no small amount of the sort of polarization President Donald Trump inspires is at least partially responsible, but for those we might consider more objective observers, I’m reminded of the classic “sunk cost fallacy.” If you are unfamiliar with the concept, The Decision Lab defines the fallacy as “our tendency to follow through with something that we’ve already invested heavily in (be it time, money, effort, or emotional energy), even when giving up is clearly a better idea.” From there, they provide an individual example of the concept in action. Imagine you purchased a concert ticket for $50. In addition to the cost, all of your friends are going and it’s one of your favorite bands, but on the day of the show, you come down with a serious cold and it’s raining. As a result, it will take much longer to get to the concert with the increased traffic and you are aware it might make you much more sick, not to mention that you are not likely to enjoy the concert as much as you normally would, assuming you wouldn’t be downright miserable. Objectively speaking, the costs likely outweigh both the investment and the benefits, but many of us – myself included – are likely to suck it up and go anyway. Why? No one really knows for sure, but it produces some bizarre effects, where some aspect of our emotion takes over our reason. In the case of the concert example, the $50 is already spent and unrecoverable, but we invested the money in the first place to have a good time, a good time we are unlikely to achieve considering we aren’t feeling well and getting there in the rain will be an unexpected hassle. In principle, the money is gone and shouldn’t be a factor in the decision, but it is. As The Decision Tree describes it, “If we acted rationally, only future costs and benefits would be taken into account. Regardless of what we have already invested, we will not get it back whether or not we follow through on the decision.” Further, the sunk cost fallacy isn’t limited to a financial investment. In the next example, imagine you have registered for a new class at college, but after the first week, you realize it isn’t what you expected. You can still drop out without any issue, but you’ve already handed in your first assignment. Do you stick with it because you have put in a little work or do you change direction in hope for a larger return in another class? “The sunk cost fallacy means that we are making irrational decisions because we are factoring in influences other than the current alternatives. This fallacy affects many different areas of our lives—such as our relationships, investments, and career paths—leading to suboptimal outcomes.”
Relationships, in general, make for any number of additional examples. Even if we have not experienced it directly, we all know couples that stay together long after either makes the other happy. Career choices are another area where examples abound, people either sticking with a specific job or field even when they are aware they’d be better off pursuing another option. Nor are the examples limited to individuals. Institutions can suffer from the same fallacy, continuing to invest time and energy long after they should. Companies, for example, are prone to keep spending money on projects that have failed, whether they be new products or marketing campaigns, believing that somehow they can “make it work” rather than choosing to invest in other opportunities. Governments also spend what we may describe as good money after bad on initiatives that either aren’t as effective as they should be or have long passed their usefulness. Here, The Decision Tree provides a real life example of the intersection of both, known as the Concorde fallacy related to the famous supersonic plane. “The Concorde fallacy is a famous example of sunk costs impacting large-scale decisions. In 1956, the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee met to discuss building a supersonic airplane, the Concorde. French and British engine manufacturers and their governments were involved in the project, which was estimated to cost almost 100 million dollars. Long before the project was over, it was clear that there were increasing costs and that the financial gains of the plane, once in use, would not offset them. However, the project continued. The manufacturers and governments followed through on the project because they had already made significant financial investments and dedicated a lot of time to the project. Ultimately, this led to millions of dollars wasted, and the Concorde operated for less than 30 years.”
In my opinion, we see at least some of these tendencies at work in evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of the variety of ways the conflict in Iran could end. First, if you are not willing to concede that there is a status quo option, you are forcing a binary choice of either success or failure. Once you accept that there are only these two options, it’s natural to want a win whatever the cost, but framed this way, what are the costs of a win in truth and are they objectively speaking, something we would be willing to bear? While the old adage about past performance not guaranteeing future results certainly applies, the recent history of regime change wars is far from promising and indeed, can be said to illustrate the sunk cost fallacy in action. In Afghanistan, we deployed between 100,000 and 110,000 troops at the peak of our efforts, over 2,400 of whom were killed and 20,000 injured, and in Iraq up to 170,000 with over 4,400 deaths and almost 32,000 injuries. Afghanistan is believed to have cost over $2.2 trillion in both direct military expenditures and aid. The total costs for Iraq remain unclear, but are estimated at up to $3 trillion. In comparison, Iran is about two and half times larger than Afghanistan and three and half times larger than Iraq, suggesting that significantly more troops and the resulting deaths and injuries, plus potentially even more money would be required to remove the regime and secure the country – assuming we could successfully secure the country in the first place. In Afghanistan we were not able to do so though we remained there and kept spending money for almost 20 years. Despite our efforts, the Taliban regained control after we abandoned the country in August 2021. While we will never know for sure, the same outcome likely could’ve been “achieved” if we left 10 or even 15 years earlier with a lower cost in blood and treasure. Though Iraq is often regarded as a failure, we ultimately succeeded in both removing the regime of Saddam Hussein and installing a reasonably friendly government after close to a decade of fighting. We might call that a qualified success, but many – myself included – still wonder if it was worth the cost. Perhaps if the same scenario were to unfold completely independent from the failed effort in Afghanistan, we might conclude the effort justified the outcome, but taken together it’s a hard argument to make at least in my opinion.
Whatever you make of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and whether or not you believe either rises to the level of the sunk cost fallacy, these questions still need to be answered before we consider any further commitment of resources to pursue a similar, presumably superior outcome in Iran, and herein lies the fallacy. There is no way to answer these questions with any accuracy. All we know for sure is that full-on regime change would be an incredibly expensive endeavor in money and lives, and we can’t even be sure if it would work in the first place whatever it costs, making it something even worse than the standard sunk cost fallacy. Rather than spending more than warranted chasing a guaranteed return of some kind, we would be spending an unknown sum on potentially no return at all, the equivalent of a company agreeing to invest an unknown amount of money in a product or project while fully knowing they might never succeed in creating what they intended. While I have no idea where you work, I am pretty sure if you were to ask your boss for an investment in something and couldn’t answer how much money you needed or whether it would work, they’d laugh you right out of their office for obvious reasons. This would be doubly true when there is a possibility of either preserving the status quo or making an incremental improvement. It’s one thing to double down on a risky strategy with no guarantee of return when you have no choice. It’s quite another to do so when there are options with both controlled costs and controlled outcomes. Whatever I may wish to happen – and in that regard, if I could snap my fingers and make the remnants of the regime disappear, I certainly would – the reality is that some, particularly detractors, are already griping about the cost of the war. There is no reality where spending orders of magnitude more to support a ground invasion is feasible. In this case, the only feasible option is to accept something less than ideal, and take half a loaf.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 