Estimative Intelligence in European Foreign Policymaking: Learning Lessons from an Era of Surprise

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.

Christoph Meyer is a Professor of European and International Politics at King’s College London. He authored with De Franco and Otto Warning about War: Conflict, Persuasion and Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 ISA best book award.

Eva Michaels is a Beatriu de Pinós Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. Her research has been published in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Media, War & Conflict and Intelligence and National Security.

Nikki Ikani is Assistant Professor in Intelligence and Security at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. She has published in the field intelligence, International Relations and European foreign policy and is the author of Crisis and Change in European Foreign Policy (Manchester University Press, 2021).

Aviva Guttmann is a Lecturer in Strategy and Intelligence at Aberystwyth University. She is the author of The Origins of International Counterterrorism (Brill, 2018) and contributed several articles to refereed academic journals of history, intelligence, strategy, and security

Michael S. Goodman is Professor of Intelligence and International Affairs in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and Visiting Professor at the Norwegian Defence Intelligence School. He has published widely in the field of intelligence history, including most recently The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Volume I: From the Approach of the Second World War to the Suez Crisis (Routledge, 2015), which was chosen as one of The Spectator’s books of the year. He is series editor for Intelligence and Security for Hurst/Columbia University Press; and for Intelligence, Surveillance and Secret Warfare for Edinburgh University Press; and is a member of the editorial boards for five journals. He is currently on secondment to the Cabinet Office where he is the Official Historian of the Joint Intelligence Committee.