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When the secret service chiefs of two of the most powerful countries in the world, who also happen to be allies, together write an article warning that the international order is “under threat” in ways we have not seen since the end of the Cold War, the international community should pay close attention.
Unless one has taken a long leave of absence from following news reports, one can hardly argue with their observation. However, to highlight the perilous times in which we live, as important as that is, is not necessarily the same as presenting us with the root causes of this state of affairs or the remedies for it.
Bill Burns and Richard Moore, the heads of America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6 respectively, wrote in a joint op-ed published by UK newspaper The Financial Times that their countries will continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in efforts to fend off global dangers, as they have done for many decades.
This was a rare occasion on which the heads of major intelligence agencies opted to speak out together in public, an unusual decision for people more used to operating in the shadows.
Why they did this is not entirely clear. Perhaps they hope simply to raise public awareness at a time when many people feel fatigued by years of political discord at home, by a global pandemic that took a heavy toll, by fears of a climate cataclysm and, perhaps most importantly, by the effects of wars and other conflicts that appear to have no end and require massive resources to prolong them at the expense of the needs of their communities.
It might also be the case that Burns and Moore felt impelled to publicly warn their political masters of the need to remain steadfast in face of this fatigue, despite the political pressure to concentrate on domestic requirements.
They assert that more than two-and-a-half years into the war in Ukraine, most of the West, justifiably, still stands together in “resisting an assertive Russia and Putin’s war of aggression.”
Moreover, they provide a chilling confirmation that there was a moment in the fall of 2022 when there was a genuine risk of “the use of tactical nuclear weapons,” suggesting the nuclear option is never too far away, especially considering the constant shifts in momentum during this war.
What was surprising, disappointing even, about what these two top security officials had to say, however, was their over-emphasis on the mechanics of modern warfare and conflicts at the expense of any discussion on the causes of such conflicts, or how they might be averted or quickly resolved.
It seems Western intelligence communities are concentrating on identifying threats, but they give the impression that they lack the vision or ambition to move beyond simply warning of dangers to also identifying the root causes so that they can attempt to nip them in the bud before they endanger international stability.
It is all very well to assert that “the rise of China is the principal intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the 21st century, and we have reorganized our services to reflect that priority.” But why is this the case and how can we solve the problem?
The same questions apply to other sources of instability — including the actions of non-state actors such as Daesh or Hezbollah, or the ongoing war in Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more generally — that threaten to destabilize the region and beyond.
It might be the case that those who lead intelligence communities perceive themselves to be in charge at the operational level, rather than the policy-strategy level, and so they emphasize the use of new technologies, such as drones, cybersecurity, cyberattacks or artificial intelligence in order to maintain a technological advantage, and leave it at that.
There is a widely shared sense that we live in volatile times in which rather than seeking cooperation, increasingly aggressive international competition and friction are creating fragility.
Yossi Mekelberg
There is no doubt that the race for superiority in AI, as in cloud technology, is already enabling improved intelligence cooperation, including the gathering and sharing of information. But ultimately it is people’s needs, necessities and motivations that dictate their actions and how they behave.
Unless these factors are properly analyzed, interpreted, and fully understood, even the most sophisticated gathering and sharing of intelligence will continue to provide only a very partial answer to the problem of how to improve a country’s proactive ability to fend off threats, rather than being surprised by them when they arise and are forced into a reactive stance.
Time and again, the emphasis on technology or the use of force ignores the human side of conflicts, including the paradoxes, unpredictability, and all-too common examples of illogical and irrational behavior that cause leaderships to act against their own best national interests.
It is this failure to understand the human factor that can cause intelligence communities to fail to identify dangers and threats until it is too late. Examples of such failures range from Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, from Al-Qaeda’s devastating terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, to Hamas’s atrocity on Oct. 7, 2023.
In most of these cases there was sufficient evidence, sometimes observable for years, of an imminent attack but misperceptions, cognitive closure, and groupthink resulted in colossal intelligence failures.
Before Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, you could hardly find any credible warning from anywhere other than Ukraine itself that suggested this was a realistic possibility. Nor could you find any analyst who truly believed Ukraine would be able to fight so heroically to fend off such aggression, never mind to now also hold an expanse of Russian territory.
The reason for such miscalculations is a failure of analysis, not of information gathering. It is not only Israelis who are keen to understand how the misperceptions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers led them to believe they might pacify Hamas in Gaza by allowing huge amounts of money to be funneled to the group. Or to understand how one of the most sophisticated and expensive border barriers in the world, between Israel and Gaza, collapsed in less than an hour, while nearly a year later the war continues to rage with no end in sight.
There is a widely shared sense that we live in volatile times in which rather than seeking cooperation, increasingly aggressive international competition and friction are creating fragility, and not only between the major global powers.
It is in the efforts to address the challenge of defusing this situation — and more importantly resolving it without resorting to military means — that governments and international institutions are failing to provide adequate answers.
For such solutions to be found there is a need to establish effective deterrents but these must be accompanied by an understanding of the factors and motivations that lie behind belligerence and the support given to belligerent leaders: Too many people live in conditions that offer them no hope of a better future; there are structural failures within the global collective security system; the global economic system encourages aggressive competition instead of cooperation and collaboration. Meanwhile, extreme nationalism is on the rise again as a tool for unscrupulous politicians to claw their way to power.
If intelligence communities are to best serve their governments and advance the cause of peace, these are the most important issues they must address. Otherwise they will forever be forced to deal with the inevitable fallout from their failures to confront them.
• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House.
X: @YMekelberg