Learning to Learn in an Era of Surprise? Intelligence Production and Use in Foreign Policy-Making in Britain, Germany and the European Union

TThe proposed project addresses salient concerns about alleged failures of anticipation, preparedness and response in national and European foreign policy against a backdrop of three 'strategic surprises': the Arab Spring, the Russian annexation of the Crimea (Bildt, 2013), and the rapid rise of the so-called Islamic State/D'aesh. Strategy documents identify rising levels of uncertainty and proclaim '[w]e live in a world of predictable unpredictability. We will therefore equip ourselves to respond more rapidly and flexibly to the unknown lying ahead' (EGS, 2016: 46). In response to these surprises and alleged failures, different public bodies have conducted performance reviews relating to the Arab Spring (2012), the EU's approach to Russia (House of Lords 2015), the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Committee of Privy Counsellors, 2016) and the confluence of different crises (German Foreign Office, 2014). Lessons identified from these episodes are likely to shape future foreign policy for years to come, just as lessons from the 1930s shaped the thinking of a generation of US and European policy-makers, for good or for worse (Lebow, 1985).

Yet, the few existing public inquiries differ substantially in their depth and scope, the criteria for judging success and failure, and how they handle problems such as hindsight bias. Moreover, not only do practitioners disagree about what is knowable and should be learnt, but public and mediatised debates follow their own logic in constructing failures (Oppermann & Spencer, 2016). The existing academic literature in the field of International Relations does not offer much help in addressing these questions either: It rarely defines what it considers successful learning, nor does it specify under what conditions such learning takes place in foreign policy decision-making. Part of the problem is the lack of engagement with competing conceptions of learning and intelligence in the broader field of International Relations (Levy, 1994) and evidence-based public policy in political science (Sanderson, 2002). Moreover, insights gleaned from US case studies may not be applicable in an organisationally and politically more diverse European setting. European countries may be affected by these old and new threats in different and more direct ways than the United States given Europe's close geopolitical proximity and distinct socio-cultural make-up.

Against this background the project aims to provide a better normative and evidential basis for learning the right lessons about warning and current intelligence in relation to these different kinds of threats. In a first step the project team will engage with the relevant literature as well as leading practitioners to arrive at a normatively grounded yet realistic expectations of good learning in foreign policy looks. This will form the basis for the empirical work which is based on a most likely research design. We focus on three of the most capable actors in European foreign policy with the UK, Germany and the EU, each with their distinct yet interconnected intelligence and foreign policy communities. The project team will look at how these actors have handled three cases of major strategic surprises by combining desk-based research and practitioner interviews to ascertain the actual dynamics of threat emergence and escalation with the knowledge claims over time and given substantial uncertainty. Thirdly, the project team will then draw mainly on interview data and comparisons between the actors to study performance and underlying causes of relative success and failure. In a final step, we will engage with practitioners on the Advisory Board and in a series of workshop to elucidate key lessons to be learnt from each of these cases and how to improve actors' capacities to better anticipate and react to new threats.

The project aims to improve the production and use of warning and current intelligence about contemporary threats in the foreign policy-making processes of the UK, Germany and the EU. Practitioners have admitted to being surprised about and unprepared for the strategic surprises and subsequent crises at the centre of this project. Under conditions of stagnant or falling budgets and interlocking crises, few internal lessons learnt exercises were conducted by foreign affairs institutions, especially none that systemically compared performance across polities and cases. Some claims have been made by external observers and, more rarely, public inquiries, about the extent of and reasons for failure of anticipation, preparedness and crisis management, some of them without a sound theoretical or evidential basis. We aim to measure performance in a fairer and more nuanced way to ensure that the right lessons are learnt and to propose realistic improvements.

Intelligence practitioners can learn:
- About the specific challenges inherent in the identification of contemporary threats given the rise of non-state actors, technological change, and new forms of deception and propaganda.
- How to recognize weak signals and avoid common problems arising from assumption drag and cognitive biases/heuristics
- About obstacles to the perception and communication of politically or bureaucratically inconvenient news given organizational cultures and their linkages to decision-makers
Decision-makers and policy-planners can learn about:
- how their own policy preferences and worldviews may affect and distort information processing
- how they can better structure the relationship and interactions with intelligence providers from within and outside of government to ensure more tailored, swift and useful intelligence.
- how to structure decision-making processes in a way to ensure timely responses and avoid both under- and over-reaction in responses to emergent or manifest threats.
Journalists and think-tank staff can learn about:
- the importance of having clear, persuasive and realistic criteria when judging the performance of intelligence providers and decision-makers
- the risks of hindsight bias and politicization distorting such judgement in a direction that will lead to overcritical assessments and unrealistic policy recommendations
- how to access reliable and nuanced information about each of the three cases and thus better understand the degree of performance over time and provide advocacy for realistic improvements.
Our approach to achieving this impact is based on engaging closely with practitioners from each of these policy communities from the start. This is necessary not just to overcome problems of access to information, but also to build up credibility and trust amongst this group in so far as practitioners will be involved in the process of drawing up performance indicators. We will rely on the highly-experienced members of the Advisory Board from the start and during two subsequent review meetings.
In addition, we will involve a broader set of actors through a series of three workshops in London, Berlin and Brussels to look at short and medium term improvements in areas such as procedures, structures, incentives and organisational cultures. These workshops will be prepared with an input paper combining insights about performance in each of the cases, their causes and conditions, and how particular changes could have made a difference to the outcome or are likely to do so in the future.
We aim to disseminate our findings more widely through policy briefs and open-ed/blog pieces that outline how our findings depart from the results of public inquiries and media commentary. In the process the project team will also exploit existing linkages with the King's-based ESRC-funded initiative on the UK in a Changing Europe given the potential for a reconfiguration of foreign policy and intelligence cooperation in the UK and EU.