The great promise of strategic foresight is the combination of more rigorous and imaginative thinking about likely and possible futures with ways of engaging and empowering decision-makers to better prepare for and shape the future. However, this promise is at best partially fulfilled. The reasons are found either in shortcomings of the analysis or, alternatively, decision-makers’ receptivity to and use of foresight. My argument is that both matter but receptivity and willingness to use are more important.
There are plenty of examples of strategic intelligence that turned out be right in retrospect. Whether these are the 1990 National Intelligence Estimate by the US about the break-up of Yugoslavia, a 2009 analysis by the EU-civilian Intelligence Hub INTCEN that correctly imagined an Arab uprising-type scenario, or the 2020 assessment of the German foreign intelligence service BND that deemed an Emirate 2.0 as the most likely longer term scenario for Afghanistan after the Trump-Administration’s Doha Deal with the Taliban.
Yet there are also many cases when intelligence services missed or hugely underestimated change, where underlying assumptions turned out to wrong, or were not even scrutinised. Sometimes analysts were too focused on a single country and thus missed events and dynamics between countries and that created ripple effects. For instance, ISIS utilising instability and weak borders between Syria and Iraq or Moscow reacting to events on Maidan square. Analysts also underestimated the impact of the arrival of new communication technologies and their strategic use by social movements, authoritarian states and terrorist groups. They listened more to establishment actors in foreign security services than to the “street” in many Arab countries, forgetting the lessons of the Iranian revolution. Many Western intelligence services underestimated the deep societal and historical roots of Russian imperialism and the drivers of its revisionism. At times, analysts where more surprised about the behaviour of “friends” and “partners” than what adversaries did, including Ukraine capacity and willingness to defend itself against the full-scale Russian invasion.
However, the main reason for why intelligence-based foresight has often not met expectations lies with organisational cultures, attitudes of senior decisionmakers and public discourses. The most useful strategic foresight is by its nature disruptive to existing assumptions, policies, and political narratives. Bureaucracies and decision-makers have found imaginative and sometimes problematic ways of stopping disruptive or troublesome foresight from emerging and becoming highly visible. Foresight may expose major vulnerabilities – whether this is in defence capabilities, sources of energy or global supply chains – that decision-makers feel they do not have the money or political capital to address. They may be too focused on short-term party-management and are afraid of hostile reactions from the media and public opinion. After major surprises, decision-makers and organisational leaders in many countries have showed a lack of interest in learning the rights lessons, for instance after the 2014 Crimea surprise.
We can use strategic foresight not just to better identify and warn about threats but also to highlight opportunities for shaping a better future – and to make it more actionable in the short-term. This would mitigate warning fatigue and shift the mindset of foresight users away from managing potentially distant risks and threats towards a sense of empowerment in what they can and should do today, how they can surprise adversaries and shape a more desirable European and international order. It is about convincing decision-makers that past strategic successes can be replicated – from the policies that won the Cold War to Eastern Enlargement. This can help to energise and mobilise political supporters and convince politicians that they build a positive legacy.
The second way is to promote future-literacy among policy-communities, the media and the wider public. Currently, public debates in some European countries are dominated by self-appointed futurist, grand strategists and think-tankers who churn out future-scenarios tailored to what clients want not what they need or what the public finds exciting or sufficiently scary to attract attention. It can be hard for lay-audiences to distinguish a scenario underpinned by thousands of hours of research by experts from those produced by generalist skilled writers who can produce scenario in a couple of days supported by the latest AI tools. These give foresight as a craft and a science a bad name and create erroneous perceptions of the limits and the potential of professional future-thinking. This is why it is important for analysts to develop a stronger consensus around how good foresight looks like and to challenge poor foresight. We should seek to learn from countries like Finland who have a strong reputation for state-of-the-art strategic foresight and integrating it into the political process. This also needs to happen between European nations and within multilateral organisations like EU and NATO.
Christoph O. Meyer
Full Professor of European & International Politics
King’s College London
UK
christoph.meyer@kcl.ac.uk
