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Russia: Murphy’s law or Sunk Cost Fallacy
Or a little bit of both
It was a bit confusing.
To choose between Murphy’s law — anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and Sunk Cost Fallacy- where a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.
Russia’s current status is a bit hard to box into one single phenomenon. The Russian administration did not simply overestimate their abilities. They went way over the top.
They destabilized the US democracy by sowing misinformation. They enabled Brexiters from deep behind the screens. They helped right wing populists around the world to rise to power and then to hold on to that power. And they keep eating into the territory of their eastern neighbors.
A gas station with nukes. A nation that was so dependent on a single source, energy, for its income, believed that it could topple the entire west. Each victory- Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the no response reported by the west after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, fueled the myth of Russian invincibility.
They convinced themselves that they are an unstoppable super-power that is on one mega roll to turn the world upside down and create a new world order…
