“Commitment Escalation” isn’t some newfangled prescription for making marriages stronger. Rather, it’s a psychological malady that besets the U.S. foreign policy blob and results in throwing away good money and blood after bad in losing causes. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:
International relations professor Andrew Latham opined in a recent piece that the idea of total Ukrainian victory is delusional.
Unfortunately some people, predominantly in Europe, still stick to the delusional idea:
In professional journals, on influential websites and across the full spectrum of media outlets, observers, analysts and pundits alike continue to inform us that, yes, there is a way for Ukraine to prevail over Russia, expelling the latter from all of its territory, including Crimea.
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[That’s nonsense.]
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In short, Russia is winning the war and there is little to suggest that any foreseeable political, economic, tactical or technological developments are likely to alter that fundamental reality. So why are we seeing arguments about an ultimate Ukrainian battlefield triumph, in the face of all the devastatingly contradictory evidence?Well, applying Occam’s razor — the principle that “other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones” — I would suggest that the delusional belief that there is a pathway to total victory for Ukraine is based less on evolving military or geopolitical realities than on a simple psychological dynamic, one best summed up in the concept of “commitment escalation.”
According to this concept, individuals or groups sometimes exhibit a tendency to persist with a failing argument, even as that argument becomes increasingly untenable in light of the facts. This behavior is marked above all by an adherence to prior commitments — sunk costs, as the economists might put it — regardless of their present plausibility or rationality. It is a psychological dysfunction.
The German government under chancellor Scholz is one group which has stuck to the fallen argument. There is no way the Ukraine can win or that Russia could lose that war and any additional price paid for attempts to invalidate that is just wasted.
