If Ukraine is able to replace or recover damaged vehicles why is Zelensky still asking for more tanks (in Switzerland right now)? I thought the sanctions were going to trigger massive inflation and unrest in the Russian economy and their desire to support the war would disappear. I thought the Russians were out of ammunition last year and now they’re bombing relentlessly. I though their morale was so low they were going to capitulate when this attack happened, yet their first main line of defensive trenches hasn’t yet been touched. If Ukraine morale is high and Russian morale is low why are Ukrainians surrendering or refusing to fight on the front lines?
Austin told us all that he had high expectations for the counter-offensive two days before the Pentagon leaks revealed there were actually low expectations. Why believe the boy who already cried wolf, especially when his words don’t align with reality? There’s been too much lying. The war is costing too much in terms of tax payer dollars and Ukrainian lives. This Biden administration is stuck is a sunk cost fallacy and needs to stop.
Just because you haven’t been paying attention to developments doesn’t mean things don’t add up. You seem to be unaware that sanctions are only mildly effective, Iran and China and North Korea are helping Russia, Russia is losing ground and poised to lose all of their gains since this invasion and possibly even into the 2014-era holdings like Crimea, but they’re also entirely committed to it and Crimea specifically is a peninsula that will be very hard to take from the outside.
Sunk cost fallacies don’t apply when your side has achieved 80%+ of its objectives despite starting out in a situation where a full and immediate loss was expected on all sides. The sunk cost fallacy is actually on Putin’s side: just because he had tanks occupying large parts of Ukraine doesn’t mean that continuing to fight will ever result in substantial gains again. If anything he’s poised to maim every soldier-aged man in his country for nothing.
That’s precisely how sunk cost fallacy works. You’re using past results to justify continuing: it doesn’t matter if you had been steadily winning or steadily losing, the sunk cost fallacy comes in to play when you say that your actions to continue or quit are based on that history of winning or losing. You’ve fallen in to the exact trap of sunk cost fallacy but somehow you think you have managed to avoid it.
Now I’d also agree that sunk cost fallacy could be applied to Putin, but it’s simpler than you say. On both sides, identically, the idea that you must keep going because otherwise what you’ve already done will be wasted effort, is precisely where the fault lies. That is sunk cost fallacy.
90% of gamblers stop playing when they’re about to win.