In the great game around Ukraine, Joe Biden seems like a player who is going to have trouble distinguishing between sunk costs and pot commitment.
In the great game around Ukraine, Joe Biden seems like a player who is going to have trouble distinguishing between sunk costs and pot commitment.
S ometimes in a game of poker you feel compelled to throw more chips into the middle of the table even when you know you’re likely to lose the hand. Usually, it’s a psychological trick you’ve played on yourself. It’s the sunk-cost fallacy. You’ve already invested so much on the opening bet, then more on the subsequent flop, and more still on the turn, that your pride or your fear moves your hand forward at the end. You’re just hoping to get lucky.
But sometimes, throwing more chips in at that point is the mathematically correct decision. The combination of your own and others’ circumstances conspire to make throwing good money after bad the most rational decision. Perhaps you’re running low on chips altogether, and a number of players acted irrationally at the start of the hand, over-betting at first but folding once they suspected that another player had drawn the top possible hand. You didn’t make your straight and are stuck with something no better than a high pair. But the pot has grown to a size 30 times larger than your remaining stack of chips. Nothing can be undone. You suspect the last remaining player has a full house. All that’s left is your small remaining bet and the potential large prize. This is what’s known as “pot commitment.” You have every reason to believe that you’re going into the final card well behind in the hand, and your chance of “sucking out” at the end is small. But the pot is too large now. Mathematically, your small chance of winning is overwhelmed by the prize itself. You can’t turn away now. You just have to push your chips in and hope it works out.
Many players never quite master the math that allows them to distinguish between falling for a sunk-cost fallacy and recognizing the actual pot odds. Sometimes they coincide — playing like a sucker for sunk costs leads one to be pot-committed. In each situation, the play was likely driven by improbable turns of play and the consequent emotional swings. A hand that was developing well may sink in the end.
In the great game around Ukraine, Joe Biden seems like a player who is going to have trouble distinguishing between sunk costs and pot commitment.
He doesn’t seem to know his own redlines. For weeks, he tried to draw them. No MiG aircraft for Ukraine — Biden himself scuttled that in March. By April, with Ukraine doing better than expected and Russia on the back foot, NATO began delivering ready-to-assemble MiGs. More recently, Biden has gone back and forth about sending certain rocket systems to Russia.
In Biden’s March speech in Poland, the drafted remarks were about limiting U.S. commitment to Ukraine and restating the depth of U.S. commitment to existing NATO members. He vowed that the Kremlin was wrong “to portray NATO enlargement as an imperial project aimed at destabilizing Russia.”
But late in the speech, Biden’s emotions got the best of him, and he departed from the text to call for regime change in Russia. Putin “cannot remain in power,” he said, a comment that had to be promptly walked back by the White House. Though later, Defense secretary Lloyd Austin explained that the U.S. wants to “see Russia weakened” in this war. This reflected a lot of loose talk from the administration at the start of the war that the hope was to force Putin’s downfall.
At the flop, Russia’s war against Ukraine looked like an absolute dud. And the U.S. has started investing its chips: our treasure, and our nation’s honor and credibility. In recent weeks, Russia has limited its operations, settling on a devastating form of artillery attack in the Donbas that is yielding results.
This presents the unattractive possibility that Putin may be able to claim some kind of victory out of this war, perhaps a smaller one than he imagined, but one that he can reasonably say was over not just Ukraine but NATO itself. Putin is not just “demilitarizing” Ukraine but depleting America’s stock of Javelin missiles in the bargain. All the current talk of NATO rejuvenated will sour on that turn of the cards. And Joe Biden would face a Republican Party that would unite instantly on his weakness if not his recklessness. When players get emotional in poker they go “on tilt” and start playing hyper-aggressively and irrationally. There’s danger ahead.