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{{quotebox-float|I’m reliably informed that there are people in Washington and other western capitals who were “surprised” by the ineffectiveness of the recent US/Israeli campaign against Iran, and by the effective surrender of the US as demonstrated in the very one-sided Memorandum of Understanding agreed last week. I put “surprised” in quotation marks, because it’s a word I will come back to several times, and it’s a kind of leitmotif for western policy and western misunderstanding over the last couple of generations. It’s not unique to the West, to be fair, but the West has been the most powerful politico-military actor of modern times, and we’ll concentrate on the West for the most part.

{{quotebox-float|I’m reliably informed that there are people in Washington and other western capitals who were “surprised” by the ineffectiveness of the recent US/Israeli campaign against Iran, and by the effective surrender of the US as demonstrated in the very one-sided Memorandum of Understanding agreed last week. I put “surprised” in quotation marks, because it’s a word I will come back to several times, and it’s a kind of leitmotif for western policy and western misunderstanding over the last couple of generations. It’s not unique to the West, to be fair, but the West has been the most powerful politico-military actor of modern times, and we’ll concentrate on the West for the most part.

In fact, governments experience surprises all the time, in the sense that things happen which were not expected, or things happen that were thought possible but very unlikely, or things that were thought inevitable don’t happen at all. This is sufficiently common in [[international politics]], and sufficiently serious in its implications, that I thought it might be useful to devote an essay to the question of Why such surprises happen: a subject which hardly anyone takes an interest in, since politically it’s usually enough just to condemn you opponents for being [[naive]], [[ignorant]] or [[stupid]], demand an enquiry and the job is done.}}

In fact, governments experience surprises all the time, in the sense that things happen which were not expected, or things happen that were thought possible but very unlikely, or things that were thought inevitable don’t happen at all. This is sufficiently common in [[international politics]], and sufficiently serious in its implications, that I thought it might be useful to devote an essay to the question of Why such surprises happen: a subject which hardly anyone takes an interest in, since politically it’s usually enough just to condemn you opponents for being [[naive]], [[ignorant]] or [[stupid]], demand an enquiry and the job is done.

The only way to deal with the problem of information saturation is by structured analysis of each piece of information, but this takes far more time than most government people have. What’s the source? Is it reliable? Has it been reliable in the past? Is there collateral for it? Does it sound logical and reasonable? Is it what I want to hear, rather than what is necessarily true? And so on. These sorts of questions—part of the training of intelligence analysts and for related disciplines— are just not feasible at scale.}}

:Excellent summary & analysis. [[User:RobSmith|RobS]]^{[[User talk:RobSmith|WWJD? Would he claim 2 gay bathhouses in Russia compared to 300 in America justifies nuclear war?]]} 12:20, June 24, 2026 (EDT)

:Excellent summary & analysis. [[User:RobSmith|RobS]]^{[[User talk:RobSmith|WWJD? Would he claim 2 gay bathhouses in Russia compared to 300 in America justifies nuclear war?]]} 12:20, June 24, 2026 (EDT)