When survival makes the past impossible to defend: Iran’s reverse sunk-cost trap

Turkey is offering a screen, not a summit. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, arrives in Ankara on Friday, 30 January as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tests an idea that suits Donald Trump’s taste for theatre: a teleconference between Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian. The call may never happen. The point is what it signals. Tehran is being invited back to bargaining at a moment when every option looks forced.

It is tempting to tell this story in the language of hardware: enrichment levels, warships and sanctions lists. Yet the decisive battlefield may be psychological. The sunk-cost fallacy describes leaders who keep investing in a failing course because they have already paid so much. Iran now faces an inverted version. The losses already absorbed make the least-bad exit politically poisonous unless the instinct for survival overrides the need to prove that yesterday’s sacrifices were worthwhile.

There is also an asymmetry built into Erdoğan’s proposal that matters more than the optics. For Trump, a call can be the beginning of a binding decision because the American chain of command is short. For Pezeshkian, a call is at best a signal that must travel upward through a system where the decisive authority on war and peace sits elsewhere. That does not make the screen meaningless. It makes it a tool of narrative management, not a mechanism of commitment.

Turkey is selling sequencing, not mediation

Ankara’s motive begins with geography. Turkey shares a 530-kilometre border with Iran and senior officials have spoken openly about reinforcing it if renewed strikes trigger instability and displacement. Turkey is not mediating out of sentiment. It is trying to contain a shock wave that would reach Turkish towns, markets and security services first.

Turkey’s more important offer is a method. Foreign minister Hakan Fidan has urged Washington to handle disputes “one by one”, starting with the nuclear file, because bundling every grievance into a single package would make any agreement harder to sell in Tehran. Sequencing does not change concessions. It changes what those concessions mean at home. A bounded nuclear arrangement can be framed as risk management. A deal that also demands changes on missiles and regional posture reads like a surrender list.

The external environment has hardened quickly. European ministers have now agreed to move towards designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation and have paired that step with fresh sanctions linked to repression. The political effect is immediate: any European de-escalation begins to look, domestically, like leniency towards a newly labelled terrorist actor.

Washington has reinforced its warnings with visible posture rather than fresh language. A carrier strike group and accompanying destroyers have been deployed at standoff range under US Central Command, close enough to signal capability and far enough to preserve reaction time and self-defence. The aim is not only deterrence. It is cumulative pressure. Time, in that sense, works in Trump’s favour: each week of delay allows deployments, coordination and air-defence reinforcement to mature into a posture that is harder to ignore and easier to use.

Tehran has replied with signals designed to remind outsiders that coercion carries costs. Notices to shipping have pointed to planned live-fire drills in the Strait of Hormuz, a reminder that escalation threatens an oil chokepoint no major economy can ignore. Even Moscow has introduced an unusually stark note, with Russia’s state nuclear corporation indicating it could evacuate staff from the Bushehr plant “if necessary”.

Put together, these moves compress the space for quiet bargaining. Turkey’s screen fits inside that narrow corridor. Trump would get optics of direct engagement and pressure vindicated. Ankara would claim it steadied the region. Tehran would get something different: a chance to explore de-escalation without narrating it as surrender. That is what Turkey is really selling, not a miracle compromise but a way to make an off-ramp politically survivable.

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The reverse sunk-cost trap inside Tehran

Any workable arrangement now will require verifiable constraints: restored access for international inspectors, limits that can be measured and enforcement that produces proof rather than private assurances. None of that is new. What has changed is what agreeing to it would mean inside Iran after a year in which loss piled upon loss.

On the external front, last summer’s twelve-day air war and subsequent strikes reshaped the argument about leverage. The conflict killed more than a thousand, including at least 35 senior military commanders and more than 11 nuclear and missile scientists, losses that strike at expertise that cannot be rebuilt on a timetable. Whatever one makes of the claims and counterclaims that always surround such episodes, the strategic lesson absorbed by outsiders was simpler: calibrated force could narrow Iran’s options without necessarily tipping, immediately, into a full-scale regional war.

On the diplomatic front, the snapback mechanism returned from theory to reality. In October, France, Germany and the UK triggered snapback, reinstating the pre-JCPOA UN sanctions architecture. That step matters for more than legal reasons. It demonstrates what was always implicit: any deal worth having will include inspectors, and any refusal to accept inspectors eventually invites the very sanctions shock Tehran says it can ride out. A sanctions shock of that kind is not a surprise event. It is a foreseeable one, and in an economy already under strain, its domestic aftershocks are not difficult to predict.

Those aftershocks arrived. Protests that began amid economic freefall widened into a national challenge and ended in mass arrests and a near-total communications blackout. Officials and rights groups have described a death toll measured in the thousands. One does not need to litigate a precise number to grasp the political consequence: a catastrophe in the thousands leaves grief far beyond the circles that usually bear the brunt of repression. It also leaves a residue of anger that no subsequent communiqué can dissolve.

This is where sunk costs invert. In the classic fallacy, leaders cannot stop because stopping admits error. In Iran’s case, the admission sits inside the agreement itself. If Tehran now accepts intrusive monitoring and enrichment constraints under carrier pressure, critics will ask an unforgiving question: why were these constraints refused when the country still had more leverage and less to mourn?

That question is not merely about face. It is about cohesion. A system that relies on a narrative of strategic foresight and resistance struggles to absorb a settlement that reads as retrospective acknowledgement that much suffering might have been avoidable. The deeper the trauma, the louder the question that accompanies any compromise: why not earlier, before the price of compromise rose so high?

Scope makes the trap tighter. Turkey’s sequencing model aims to keep talks confined to the nuclear file, allowing Tehran to describe concessions as technical risk management rather than strategic retreat. Yet Trump’s incentives push the other way. A build-up that grows more credible by the day encourages broader demands, not narrower ones. From Washington’s perspective, pressure appears to compound so the menu can expand. From Tehran’s perspective, that same widening turns compromise into confession, because it implies that a year of pain produced no better deal than the one available before catastrophe raised the price.

That is why time cuts in two directions. It strengthens Trump’s leverage as posture and coordination consolidate. It weakens Tehran’s ability to frame any eventual “yes” as voluntary. Delay does not preserve dignity. It tends to multiply costs and then hands those costs back to decision-makers as an argument against cutting losses.

There is an exit, but it is not a theatrical “win”. Tehran cannot plausibly sell renewed nuclear constraints as triumph. It can only sell them as prevention: preventing follow-on strikes, slowing isolation, creating breathing space for an economy under sanctions and reducing the likelihood of another season of mourning. Turkey can help craft that survival frame, using sequencing and symbolism to lower the political cost of cutting losses whilst losses remain cuttable.

The reverse sunk-cost trap teaches a bitter lesson. Past sacrifices do not become meaningful because leaders insist on their meaning. They can become anchors that drag future choices into catastrophe. Erdoğan’s initiative tests whether Iran’s leadership can choose unglamorous survival over vindication. If it cannot, the region may discover that the most dangerous sunk costs are not the ones that tempt leaders to continue, but the ones that make stopping feel impossible.

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