How could this have happened? We often ask this question in the aftermath of unforeseen fiascoes, whether on a small or grand scale. We wonder how we could have made what in retrospect look like dumb mistakes, failed to anticipate unintended consequences that appear obvious upon reflection, or ignored pivotal interconnections between factors that seem as clear in hindsight as they were obscure before things went bad.
Unforeseen developments have figured prominently in the course of my career. I began work as an analyst of the Soviet Union in 1986, not long after Mikhail Gorbachev began his tenure in the Kremlin. Much of the next three decades was filled with events that surprised many of us in the foreign affairs profession: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the collapse of the Soviet Union; the failure of liberal reforms in Russia under Yeltsin; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the futile search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the so-called Color Revolutions in several former Soviet republics in the early 2000s; and the Maidan uprising in Ukraine, followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the estrangement and growing hostility in the US-Russian relationship over the next several years.
These developments impressed upon me how difficult it is to anticipate significant discontinuities from prevailing trends, how often experts can be wrong about facts and forecasts, and how important it is to approach the challenges of understanding and navigating the realm of foreign affairs from the basis of humility. They have made me sensitive to the tendency we all share to see news and information through the prism of our expectations, and how critical it is to expose and examine our key assumptions. They have shown me that avoiding surprise and defending our own national interests require trying to see things through the eyes of adversaries and competitors, without endorsing their perceptions as necessarily valid. Most of all, they have taught me the importance of wrestling with this question—How could this have happened?—before disasters strike, if we are to have any hope of averting them. This book is born of that wrestling.