In January 2011, the anti-government protests which had started in Tunisia in the previous month were spreading to Egypt. To the astonishment of decision-makers and commentators alike, the protests could not be suppressed by the long-standing autocratic leaders in both countries, culminating in the downfall of both Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak of Egypt within the span of a month. Not long after, the protests spread across many parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in another unforeseen development. Three years later, a chain of events that had erupted after the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in 2013 evolved into a full-blown violent conflict after Russia violated Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by annexing Crimea in March 2014. This move caught both experts and decision-makers in the West by surprise, with Putin openly admitting in April that Russian servicemen had indeed backed the ‘little green men’ in Crimea, fighters without military insignia that had initially caused confusion in the West. Weeks later, in June 2014, the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham’ (ISIS) seized Mosul and its international airport while Iraqi security forces failed to counter the offensive and withdrew. The collapse of the Iraqi army at Mosul and the fall of the city to ISIS surprised many expert observers and reportedly even ISIS. Similarly unforeseen was the group’s rapid expansion beyond Mosul, which cemented ISIS’s rise as a powerful and destructive actor in Iraq and Syria.

Each of these events represented a moment of ‘peak surprise’ for Western professional analysts and decision-makers in three partly overlapping crises erupting in the European neighbourhood in the first half of the 2010s. In the aftermath, intelligence communities and policymakers were accused of failing to anticipate, warn, listen or prepare for these eventualities. In response, some intelligence professionals claimed that some of these events had been ‘inherently […] unpredictable’ because ‘there were no sort of secrets there which could have told us they were going to happen’ as the British Chief of SIS (MI6) argued in relation to the Arab uprisings. Strategic documents and reviews issued in Washington, London, Berlin or Brussels in subsequent years painted the picture of a new era of uncertainty.