Introduction

Events related to the Arab uprisings, ISIS’s rise to power and Russia’s aggression against parts of Ukraine in 2014 posed complex, though distinct challenges for the Federal Republic of Germany. How well were German leaders and officials informed about nascent as well as short-term developments beforehand and once these crises erupted? The widely shared appearance of sharp discontinuity in the way related historical processes unfolded raises questions about the degree to which decision makers and officials in government were taken by surprise. Just like a realistic question cannot be framed based on a surprise/no-surprise dichotomy, it will not be possible, also under ideal circumstances with access to pertinent government files and documents, to justify a flat answer to the question of the degree of surprise (see Chapter 1).

Thus, when considering the case of Germany, we are wise to appreciate humility as an analytic virtue and when we try to understand how little we can ascertain about relevant processes based on documentation which is hitherto available in the public domain. Moreover, we must be cognizant of the fact that we would need to study the knowledge and beliefs of leaders and officials when seeking to examine how well informed or surprised government officials were in each of the three cases. This will remain difficult even when the archival record permits deeper insight into government thinking at the time. We do not wish to obscure the point that the question of how much German leaders and officials were surprised cannot now or in the next two or three decades be examined with a reasonable level of confidence based on publicly available sources. This also holds true for scholarship which seeks to reconstruct analytical judgements of intelligence analysts as well as leadership receptivity to secret intelligence products. By definition, those products are secret and mean to inform the perspectives of a selected, and at times very small, number of political and military leaders and civil servants.

It is obvious that questions related to ‘good governance’ raise formidable difficulties when they ask about lessons learned, not learned, or yet to be learned by the German government considering the cases under study here.