New Delhi, April 8 -- As the US-Iran war enters a fragile two-week ceasefire, with no clear endgame in sight, one may well ask how and why the world has reached this situation. Wars are rarely accidents.

At their core, they are bets, and can hence be viewed through the lens of risk-not in a vague rhetorical sense, but by means of rigorous psychological analysis of the kind that forms part of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's Prospect Theory, particularly its four-fold pattern of risk attitudes.

This framework maps human behaviour into four quadrants based on whether an outcome involves gains or losses and whether its probability is high or low. Applied to the US-Israel-Iran war, it reveals how every major actor is behaving as the theor...