The first comparative study of estimative intelligence and strategic surprise in a European context, complementing and testing insights from previous studies centred on the United States.

This book provides the first assessment of the performance of three leading European polities in providing estimative intelligence during an era of surprise. It develops a new framework for conducting postmortems guided by a normative model of anticipatory foreign policy. The comparative analysis focuses on how the UK, the EU and Germany handled three cases of major surprises: the Arab uprisings, the rise to power of the Islamic State (ISIS), and the Russian annexation of Crimea. It considers not just government intelligence assessments, but also diplomatic reporting and expert open sources and how these assessments were received by organisational leaders. The book tests and develops new theories about the causes of strategic surprises, going beyond a common focus on intelligence versus policy failures to identify challenges and factors that cut across both communities. With the help of former senior officials, the book identifies lessons yet to be learnt by European polities to better anticipate and prepare for future surprises.

Have Western intelligence experts fundamentally failed to understand the dynamics, leaders and culture of the Middle East? Using the most recently declassified documents, interviews and Arabic sources, the book examines seminal case studies to explore how the most knowledgeable and powerful intelligence agencies in the world have been so notoriously caught off-guard.