sunk cost fallacy

Jiang applies it to billionaires who cannot accept death because their accumulated wealth and life advantages would vanish.

A geopolitical force where prior investment makes a power keep throwing resources into a losing war because it appears too close to victory to stop.

Jiang uses the term to explain why converts become committed after sacrificing prior identity, community, and tradition.

The refusal to leave a losing war because too much has already been invested and admitting loss would be humiliating.

Wealthy people seek Satan, immortality, or a frozen world because sunk cost fallacy makes death feel like losing all accumulated capital and status.

Jiang suspects Putin is setting a trap in which America loses only by sending ground troops, getting bogged down, and triggering domestic crisis through sunk cost escalation.

New converts are often the most fanatical believers because conversion forces them to surrender community, tradition, history, and identity, making sunk cost bind them to the new religion.

He says the United States stayed in Vietnam because of credibility, which he reinterprets as the sunk cost fallacy: having invested too much, leaders refuse to leave and admit the loss.

He concludes that all major participants want an invasion of Iran but want different outcomes, and Saudi Arabia and Israel benefit most from U.S. troops becoming trapped because U.S. sunk cost then forces further commitment.

He says sunk cost would push America to put all its resources into Iran, making the country a black hole, while Putin's nuclear taboo prevents the United States from using nuclear weapons.

Jiang predicts that if the United States sends ground forces into Iran, sunk-cost logic will lock it into another Vietnam because it lacks the manpower, manufacturing capacity, and political will for a long ground war.

Jiang uses sunk cost fallacy to explain why Europe will keep prolonging the war even though the rational move would be to cut losses.