Decisions are based on the anticipation of the most likely scenario that then often fails to materialise. This gave rise to a number of notorious historical misjudgements.
I will always remember the first session of a course on scenario planning I took many years ago. To illustrate the point that decisions are most of the time based on the anticipation of the most likely scenario that then often fails to materialise, the course presented a number of notorious historical misjudgements.
These included a forecast allegedly made by the president of IBM in the early days of IT that the total world market for computers would peak at five (!) units. Then there was the assessment of the then unknown band called The Beatles by a musical manager who auditioned them. “These boys will never get anywhere,” he said. Last was the anecdote of a general’s comment about the enemy on the front line — “These people wouldn’t hit an elephant…” — a fraction of a second before the enemy’s bullet reached his head.
By focussing exclusively on what, at a given moment, appears to be the most likely future, plans are not made for alternative scenarios.
The problem is not only that the scenario for the future might be wrong, but that by focussing exclusively on what, at a given moment, appears to be the most likely future, plans are not made for alternative scenarios. In the case of the general, this would have meant to stay away from the line of fire just in case and even though he had such a poor opinion of the enemy’s abilities.
Brexit is yet another, more contemporary, obvious example; even those who were promoting it seemed to believe it would never happen.
Looking at the West-dominated “International Community” as some kind of unitary actor – a very debatable assumption in itself, but very practical for the purpose of description and analysis – , we can see how often it has acted on wrong assumptions.
The last 25 years of the Westdom’s hegemony can qualify as a period of “missed opportunity”.
During the last 25 years, the “Westdom” has benefited from a situation of hegemony like never before in the twentieth century and, probably, like it will never profit again in the twenty-first. And it has miscalculated often, with very negative consequences. So negative that we can qualify the entire period as a “missed opportunity” with very long-lasting consequences. A missed opportunity for peace, universal rights, democracy, development and the whole set of values and objectives that the Westdom claims to pursue for the world.
The mistakes have been many, ranging from apparently minor to big issues of global consequence. One example is giving encouragement and support to and pushing for a disastrous economic transition and privatisations scheme in the former Soviet Union. It was driven by an irresponsible ideological naïveté. Did the economic gurus of the time really think that they could privatise the assets of that centrally planned economy and liberalise prices overnight and land in a fair, productive, competitive, merit-based, democratic and socially-oriented market economy? Well, maybe they thought so but, obviously, something went wrong.
Did Westdom’s decision-makers really think they could support a notoriously despotic regime in the Arabian peninsula and a number of West-friendly dictatorships around the world while demonising others whose sins were not necessarily worse? And all this without creating a kind of schizophrenic contradiction both in the peoples targeted by these actions and in the very Western countries implementing them? And without generating a criminal resentment in many? Maybe they were not so innocent but only, wrongly, thought they could handle the situation by force.
The Iraq invasion deserves a category of its own, for anybody with a minimal background in previous military-backed regime change operations knew that, the way things were done since day one of the occupation, chaos would ensue. After all, it was not the first time that an international operation removed by force the leadership of a country or territory. It was known that abruptly removing order-enforcement structures – no matter how tyrannical these structures may have been – without having a credible replacement leads to anarchy. Yet they did it anyway.
The list can go on…
It is, however, not truly honest to exclusively point at mistakes once time has made them apparent – it is all too easy. Even if the warning had been issued ex ante. For, applying the logic of alternative scenario planning, no one really knows what would have happened if this or that decision had been taken differently. No one, in true honesty, knows where we would be today if the Iraq invasion and occupation had not taken place. No one really knows what would have happened if the West, and NATO in particular, had taken a different approach to the disintegration of the USSR. On these two accounts, many believe we would have a better world today if things had been done differently, but it remains a speculation.
The only thing we can say with certainty is that a particular course of action has proven to be wrong. And we can identify those who were leading it and attribute responsibility.
