I am watching Homeland season 4. It seems the authors employ a trope where protagonist makes a decision to save one US citizen life, but that decision then leads to loss of dozens of US citizens and potentially local assets:
In the season protagonists have several opportunities to kill bunch of baddies together with one of the assets or US citizen. For example, they could've dropped a rocket on Saul and Haqqani, or drone'd Haqqani and his nephew. Also Carrie could've let Saul kill himself. Instead it leads to baddies break into embassy and kill 36 people.
is it a trope? What is it's name?