This chapter traces the evolution of thought on the causes of climate change from the early science on atmospheric physics to the adoption of the UNFCCC’s “common but differentiated responsibilities” (of nations) in 1992 to the responsibilities of non-state actors and a shared burden of mitigation and damages. The discussion then shifts to the responsibility of fossil fuel companies for their contributions to atmospheric carbon dioxide content and their early knowledge of their culpability for climate change, followed by corporate and trade association campaigns of deflection and disinformation in an effort to delay climate action. I discuss the emergence of litigation against Carbon Majors, which seeks redress for damages to property and injunctions based on human rights violations. Oil, natural gas, and coal companies face substantial legal (and moral) liability for the costs of climate change, even though other parties also share partial responsibility. Leading oil and gas companies understand that the climate crisis is existential and that, to retain their social license to operate, it is essential that they align their business models to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target by mid-century.

In January 2011, the anti-government protests which had started in Tunisia in the previous month were spreading to Egypt. To the astonishment of decision-makers and commentators alike, the protests could not be suppressed by the long-standing autocratic leaders in both countries, culminating in the downfall of both Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak of Egypt within the span of a month. Not long after, the protests spread across many parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in another unforeseen development. Three years later, a chain of events that had erupted after the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in 2013 evolved into a full-blown violent conflict after Russia violated Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by annexing Crimea in March 2014. This move caught both experts and decision-makers in the West by surprise, with Putin openly admitting in April that Russian servicemen had indeed backed the ‘little green men’ in Crimea, fighters without military insignia that had initially caused confusion in the West. Weeks later, in June 2014, the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham’ (ISIS) seized Mosul and its international airport while Iraqi security forces failed to counter the offensive and withdrew. The collapse of the Iraqi army at Mosul and the fall of the city to ISIS surprised many expert observers and reportedly even ISIS. Similarly unforeseen was the group’s rapid expansion beyond Mosul, which cemented ISIS’s rise as a powerful and destructive actor in Iraq and Syria.

Each of these events represented a moment of ‘peak surprise’ for Western professional analysts and decision-makers in three partly overlapping crises erupting in the European neighbourhood in the first half of the 2010s. In the aftermath, intelligence communities and policymakers were accused of failing to anticipate, warn, listen or prepare for these eventualities. In response, some intelligence professionals claimed that some of these events had been ‘inherently […] unpredictable’ because ‘there were no sort of secrets there which could have told us they were going to happen’ as the British Chief of SIS (MI6) argued in relation to the Arab uprisings. Strategic documents and reviews issued in Washington, London, Berlin or Brussels in subsequent years painted the picture of a new era of uncertainty.

Introduction

The core premise of this book was that we can learn more about estimative intelligence and the prospects for anticipatory foreign policy through a double comparison of cases and actors rather than single actor case studies. What are the distinctive features of each of these cases so that we can avoid misapplying potential lessons learned to future crises that may only superficially look similar? Or is it possible to discern also common and potentially novel challenges across all three of these quite different cases? Might such challenges constitute more enduring characteristics of future threats and opportunities in foreign affairs? To what extent are these characteristics novel, quasi-structural features of contemporary security threats that together constitute an era of surprise alluded to in the title of the book? Or conversely, are most of the diagnostic challenges in these recent cases well known from previous case studies and enquiries going back to the Cold War era, with the real problem being the inability to remember and update previous lessons? Which aspects of intelligence production and use are the most challenging for all three polities at the heart of our study? And what does this tell us about the most important lessons yet to be learned, the failures of previous attempts to reform and internalise lessons, or indeed the nature of common new challenges facing the three polities? Alternatively, can we discern significant differences between these three polities in how they handled some of the challenges in estimative intelligence production and use? If so, are any weaknesses and strengths identified unique to these polities given the way they organise, resource and target their intelligence and foreign policy? Or could practitioners in Brussels, Berlin and London benefit from learning innovative lessons from each other or mitigate each other’s weaknesses through closer collaboration?

This chapter seeks to answer these questions by drawing on the evidence and arguments presented throughout this volume and in closely related publications of the underlying INTEL research project, including the case timelines based on open sources. It builds on the theoretical discussion in Chapter 1, in which we have outlined the normative model of anticipatory foreign policy, the taxonomy of surprise, the overview of performance criteria together with mitigating or aggravating factors, and the discussion of underlying problems and challenges of organisational learning.

In late December 2012, diplomats and experts convened at Wilton Park, the secluded sixteenth-century home in the English countryside run by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to share insights and assessments on how the newly built European External Action Service (EEAS) had already met expectations and where there was room for improvement. Already at that early stage, Wilton Park made the point in demanding joint analysis and assessment as core prerequisite for qualified EU decision-making. In view of Nikki Ikani’s and Christoph Meyer’s findings on the Arab uprisings and Ukrainian crisis, it is of interest to discuss whether lessons have been learned or are overdue to be learned by European institutions and member states in order to achieve the kind of strategic autonomy as a global actor that has been invoked by numerous Council Conclusions and the EU Global Strategy.

Major Post-mortem based Findings and Lessons

Nikki Ikani’s insightful analysis of the situational awareness inside the emerging EEAS and the dynamics of the Arab uprisings shows that anticipation of possible disruptive events in the Middle East and North Africa had been available in principle though not subject to stringent and comprehensive analysis and without being put in structural and organisational contexts that would have enabled decision-makers to take due note in time. Ikani’s conclusion already provides a significant starting point and outline for defining lessons to be learned from the collective underperformance in situational awareness and foresight:

Introduction

Events related to the Arab uprisings, ISIS’s rise to power and Russia’s aggression against parts of Ukraine in 2014 posed complex, though distinct challenges for the Federal Republic of Germany. How well were German leaders and officials informed about nascent as well as short-term developments beforehand and once these crises erupted? The widely shared appearance of sharp discontinuity in the way related historical processes unfolded raises questions about the degree to which decision makers and officials in government were taken by surprise. Just like a realistic question cannot be framed based on a surprise/no-surprise dichotomy, it will not be possible, also under ideal circumstances with access to pertinent government files and documents, to justify a flat answer to the question of the degree of surprise (see Chapter 1).

Thus, when considering the case of Germany, we are wise to appreciate humility as an analytic virtue and when we try to understand how little we can ascertain about relevant processes based on documentation which is hitherto available in the public domain. Moreover, we must be cognizant of the fact that we would need to study the knowledge and beliefs of leaders and officials when seeking to examine how well informed or surprised government officials were in each of the three cases. This will remain difficult even when the archival record permits deeper insight into government thinking at the time. We do not wish to obscure the point that the question of how much German leaders and officials were surprised cannot now or in the next two or three decades be examined with a reasonable level of confidence based on publicly available sources. This also holds true for scholarship which seeks to reconstruct analytical judgements of intelligence analysts as well as leadership receptivity to secret intelligence products. By definition, those products are secret and mean to inform the perspectives of a selected, and at times very small, number of political and military leaders and civil servants.

It is obvious that questions related to ‘good governance’ raise formidable difficulties when they ask about lessons learned, not learned, or yet to be learned by the German government considering the cases under study here.

Introduction

The annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia in March 2014 was a strategic surprise for the EU of the most negative kind, not least as it was followed by Russia’s increasingly direct military interference in eastern Ukraine that sparked open warfare with thousands of people being killed. The events marked a fundamental reassessment for the EU of the threat Russia posed not just to its immediate neighbours, but also to current EU member states with substantial Russian minorities and a history of being occupied or controlled by the Soviet Union. For the wider EU, it removed the already rather minimal basis for cooperative relations with Russia as fundamental international laws and diplomatic norms were broken in the most blatant way and it raised concern over whether the EU’s approach to the region was still fit for purpose. When taken together with other Russian coercive and aggressive actions vis-à-vis some EU member states, it signalled for many observers nothing less than an undeclared new ‘cold war’. In contrast to the Georgian-Russian seven-day-war of 2008, the Ukraine-Russia conflict of 2014 triggered a number of post-mortem studies by governments or parliamentary committees, individual academics, think tanks and, of course, journalists to assess the performance of ‘the West’, the EU as a whole, or specific EU member states, and what lessons they should take away from this crisis. The overwhelming majority of these reviews focus on decisions and policies vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine. The question of intelligence is typically treated as part of the wider question of whether ‘the West’, ‘the EU’ or particular states should have been surprised by what happened and whether or not these actors bear some responsibility for causing these Russian actions. Those who are more critical of the EU’s policies vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia also tend to claim that Russian military actions should not have come as a surprise. Other scholars claim that the EU at least played a causal role and should shoulder some responsibility for the crisis, while Richard Sakwa is even more critical of EU and NATO.

Introduction

Most actors and commentators across the West were caught by surprise when anti-government protests started in Tunisia and then spread across the Middle East and North Africa in the winter of 2010–11. The events became known as the Arab Spring, the Arab revolutions or, as will be used in this volume, the ‘Arab uprisings’.

This sense of surprise when the uprisings started applies to the institutions of the European Union and its major allies in the region – the US, France and the UK, with their dense network of contacts, embassies and intelligence operatives. Nor, as will be discussed below, did any of the big NGOs or mainstream media working and reporting on the Middle East and North Africa emit clear warnings on the prospect of such an event. Even once the protests started in Tunisia in the third week of December 2010, the rapidly growing discontent in both Tunisia and Egypt initially went largely unreported in Western media as well as in reporting from the big NGOs, some of whom were at the time largely focusing on the impasse in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This volume, amongst others, asks to what extent and when ‘being surprised’ is to be expected, and when it indicates failures in intelligence collection, analysis, communication or receptivity. In this chapter it will be argued that only after investigating in detail which characteristics of the Arab uprisings were particularly surprising to the European institutions and to what extent, and whether these degrees of surprise were spread evenly across analysists and decision-makers, is it possible to properly explain why the Arab uprisings were so surprising. In keeping with the aims of this volume, this subsequently serves to identify to what extent the surprising nature of the Arab uprisings, and any potential errors made in anticipating this event by the European Union, were excusable given the complexity and diagnostic difficulty of the Arab uprisings, or whether they point to broader structural problems and shortcomings in the European intelligence-policy nexus.

Such an improved understanding of who was surprised, about what, and when, allows for a better evaluation of the EU’s performance.

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to identify lessons arising from the UK’s experience of the three case histories examined in this book. Drawing on the framework set out in Chapter 1, it especially highlights the intelligence/policy interface from the perspective of a former senior intelligence practitioner. Focusing on the UK’s key intelligence assessment bodies, the Joint Intelligence Committee and Defence Intelligence, it argues that only Crimea can really be characterised as a case where there was a failure to warn. Even that is against an environment where the policy community in the UK was focused on better relations with Russia and the UK’s intelligence capacity was directed at counterterrorism in Syria and Afghanistan. Overall, it concludes that surprises are more likely in areas which are a low priority for intelligence collection and assessment – and can never be completely avoided. The provision of effective warnings requires long-term and detailed understanding of a region or issue. Early warning needs to be treated as a specific discipline, with products that clearly stand out as such to the customer. Also, as highlighted by numerous studies, and as in Chapter 1, this chapter stresses the importance of open-source information to build a picture that should not rely on secret sources alone.

Few UK intelligence assessments, or extracts from them, relating to these case histories have been released into the public domain. This chapter therefore draws heavily on reports on the events and the UK intelligence community (IC) and wider government’s reaction to them by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security and Foreign Affairs Committees, as well as the British government’s response to those reports. It also reflects the author’s personal experience as Chief of the Assessments Staff from 2009–12, preparing papers for the Joint Intelligence Committee, and attending meetings of the National Security Council and its sub-committee during the Libya crisis, NSC(L). Finally, in early 2021, the author was able to interview a number of Defence Intelligence and Cabinet Office analysts who were in the relevant posts at the time. Unfortunately, time and COVID-19 restraints meant that policy staff were not able to be interviewed.

Introduction

ISIS’s rise to power in Syria and Iraq in 2013–14 was a slow-burning crisis whose effects turned out to have significant implications for European security. The situation escalated while European decision-makers were handling other foreign crises, notably in Ukraine. Many expert observers perceived the Iraqi army’s defeat at Mosul and the fall of the city to ISIS in June 2014 as a political-military shock. While this was a key turning point, as has been discussed in the US-centred strategic surprise literature, little attention has been paid to earlier experiences of surprise and to European contexts of estimative intelligence production.

This chapter explores how British and German intelligence communities and external experts anticipated ISIS’s expansion in Syria and Iraq and its reach into Europe during an early phase of the crisis (July 2013–June 2014). To answer this, we look at three interconnected sub-questions: what were knowledge producers surprised about as the crisis unfolded, how did they perform, and what were the underlying reasons for performance problems? Both sections of this chapter, on Germany by Eva Michaels and on the UK by Aviva Guttmann, are structured the same way along these questions. The identical structure allows for a cross-actor comparison at the end of this chapter. Throughout, we pay special attention to the conditions under which knowledge producers in both countries operated, by considering factors that hindered or enabled their ability to forecast risk-related developments.

For both countries, we systematically reviewed open-source knowledge claims by selected non-governmental experts about ISIS’s activities and structural vulnerabilities that were published between 1 July 2013 and 9 June 2014. Choosing this period allowed for a reconstruction of expert knowledge once ISIS had started activities in Syria and Iraq that were of strategic consequence (for example tightening its grip on Raqqa, expanding its footprint in northern Syria, escalating violent attacks against predominantly Shia targets across Iraq) and before a prominent event (fall of Mosul) occurred. Towards the end of this period, Europe also experienced its first ISIS-inspired terrorist attack by a radicalised returning foreign fighter which highlighted the potential for ISIS to cause serious harm in Europe.

Introduction

What can we realistically expect from estimative intelligence and anticipatory foreign policy? What are appropriate yardsticks to use when retrospectively assessing the performance of governmental and external analysts, policy planners and decision-makers? To what extent and when is being surprised to be expected and excused? When do performance shortcomings point to underlying issues that might be avoided or addressed through learning the right lessons without creating great problems elsewhere? And how can obstacles to lesson learning and remembering in intelligence and foreign policy be overcome? This chapter will try to engage with these questions as it sets out a common conceptual and theoretical framework for the post-mortems analysis and identification of lessons to be learned in this volume.

Even though the intelligence studies literature has engaged with some of these questions, there is no suitable framework to take off the shelf that provides a persuasive normative grounding and one that works for the three European polities at the heart of our study – rather than the frequently studied US context. This chapter draws not only on the relevant literature in the core areas of strategic surprise and post-mortems in intelligence studies and foreign policy, but also considers insights from foresight and forecasting studies, crisis, risks and emergency management, and public administration about the role of experts, expertise and learning. We first develop a normative model of evidence-sensitive anticipatory foreign policy within which we situate intelligence and political receptivity to it. A second section looks at the specific challenges for estimative intelligence when seeking to minimise surprise in foreign affairs. We provide a taxonomy of different degrees and types of surprise and discuss when being surprised might be condonable or expected. Thirdly, we investigate how to identify the most important causes of any performance problems in intelligence-policy nexus. Finally, we look at the specific challenge of identifying and learning the right lessons and how to prioritise among recommendations for change and reform.

Normative Expectations towards Intelligence in Anticipatory Foreign Policy

It is helpful to reflect on whether and to what extent we can learn from the role of experts and expertise in fields beyond foreign policy, such as migration policy or public health.