From Crisis to Foresight: for a Long-Term Foreign Policy

On November 27, 2024, the launch of an offensive by Syrian rebels in the north-west of the country brought back into the media spotlight the Syrian crisis and its humanitarian crisis, a new stage in the Middle East crisis. However, this is first and foremost a localized military offensive in a civil war that has been going on for 12 years, within a regional space shaken by a "crisis" whose origins are hard to pin down: was it the Arab Spring (2011)? The Israeli intervention in Lebanon (2006)? The war in Iraq (2003)? The Lebanese civil war (1975)? The creation of Israel (1948) or even the break-up of the Ottoman Empire (1920)? In this context, does the term "crisis " even make sense?

This article pleads for a rethinking of our analysis of geopolitics and current conflicts: we should take a step back and broaden our scope.The very regular beat of the media and political pulse of our information societies has progressively locked our reading grids in a framework of urgency and immediacy, blinding us to the medium- and long-term dynamics unfolding before us.

Leaving Behind the Semantics of Crisis

The term "crisis" has been overused in the 21st century, and should be dropped from our collective vocabulary. Every jolt of tension or violence in international relations has been seen as a crisis to be faced and managed, giving rise to a specific anxiety-inducing discourse designed to satisfy a media appetite for adrenalin. In 1976, historian Randolph Starn was already explaining this taste for crisis, tracing the word's origin back to Thucydides and its Greek etymology: krinein, meaning "to examine, to decide". He aimed at showing that the term referred as much to the key moments and turning points that implied a decision, as to the tragic dimension of that choice. The desire to intensify the situation evoked by the term crisis is not new. Linguist Bruno Courbon shows that the term was outdated by the mid-twentieth century, but was later reappropriated, particularly in political and media rhetoric. He clearly demonstrates the quantitative increase in the use of a term of medical origin, now used to judge both normal and crisis state of the social body: the word, from then on, gives shape to the problem and makes the news.

Yet the vast majority of events qualified as "crises" are not crises at all, but rather the milestones of medium and long-term dynamics. As Richard Sinding reminded us in 1981: "A reflection on the notion of crisis is a reflection on reflection, because before the crisis the evil is already there, but unthought of, denied. Before the crisis, there is always the crisis, but hidden. When the crisis begins, we start to think. What is revealed in the crisis is the fragility of what was thought to be solid, the mortality of what was thought to be eternal, the alteration of what was thought to be identical, and, to put it philosophically, the accidentality of what was thought to be substantial."

Thinking of the world in terms of crisis may be exciting, but it prevents us from seeing these dynamics and placing the event in the course of history. The current crisis in the Middle East has its roots at least as far back as the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Today's international jihadism has its organic roots in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, and its ideological roots in Egypt, Palestine and Jordan in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Sahel crisis is already 10 years old if we start with Serval, 25 years old if we start with the arrival of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC, forerunner of AQIM, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) in the area and 62 years old if we start with the first Tuareg rebellion in Mali. The crisis in Ukraine dates back to 2014 if we start with the seizure of Crimea, 2004 if we start with the Orange Revolution, 2000 if we start with Vladimir Putin's seizure of power and 1920 if we start with the colonization of Ukraine by the USSR. This analytical mechanism can be applied in the same way to all the "crisis" issues addressed by French and European authorities over the past two decades.

As mentioned in a previous article, but also in Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer's "Réveil stratégique: essai sur la guerre permanente", today's world is facing an unprecedented multiplication of "crises", and with limited or reduced resources, state analytical systems are completely clogged up.This tends to increase the proportion of short-term management at the cost of long-term analysis.

The premium for action implied by crisis logic generates three negative externalities: the illusion of rapid success, the wear and tear on levers of action, and the difficulty of acting in real crisis situations. In an international context where States control few factors and the decisions of all players are difficult to anticipate, action remains a major tool to influence dynamics or obtain modest or substantial gains, but temporary. This is made possible by a number of levers, the most important of which is the political discourse. But permanent action, on all subjects and in all fields, is likely to wear down the credibility and effectiveness of the levers of action, as the gains are often non-existent or very limited and the other international players are constantly readjusting to each other's actions. This performative action often misses out on the illusion of a rapid resolution to the crisis: most of the time, the germs of a crisis are so complex that it is unthinkable to resolve the tension quickly and sustainably. Against this backdrop, it would seem wise to distinguish between dynamics over which France has a real or proven influence, for decisive and ongoing action, and dynamics over which France has yet to demonstrate its added value or influence. All the more so since, as action fails to produce results, credibility on the targeted issue diminishes.

What's more, action requires more dense, frequent and circulated information, generated by the logic of crisis, which implies a less-than-optimal consumption of resources (human, budgetary, process...). This leads to structural fatigue, but also to the adaptation of a planning system to a crisis management system that does not allow for strategic thinking. The underlying problem with such a system is its inability to see evolutions coming in the dynamics we are trying to influence, but also how they relate to each other.

The Difference Between Crisis Information and Strategic Analysis

To move beyond the crisis, we need to look at how information is processed for the benefit of the political authorities. The strength of France's foreign, defense and security policy departments lies in their ability to gather and synthesize information for the benefit of decision-makers, who are often very well informed, and in real time. The weakness, on the other hand, is the difficulty of going beyond this synthesis to produce a structuring analysis useful for designing a long-term foreign policy. Here lies difference between managing day-to-day, operational information and building strategic thinking. However, the right decisions are also made on the basis of the latter, in order to have a dynamic understanding of the international situation and its multiple factors of complexity.

In Anglo-Saxon systems, this question was already asked under the same terms in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was asked to the intelligence services, mobilized as much to know what a Soviet minister was planning for the next official meeting as to assess the USSR's nuclear capabilities. The range of needs for analysis was wide. Today, many additional objectives have been added to the missions of intelligence services: they are asked to identify and hinder a terrorist project, to fight in cyberspace or to anticipate the strategic intentions of multiple countries. In the case of the USA, the intelligence community has been tasked with providing all decision-makers with strategic analysis, in addition to simple intelligence gathering: the CIA was originally created in 1947 to perform this function. One of its founding executives, Sherman Kent, is considered to be the father of this methodological approach: how to answer the many analytical, assessment and scenario questions posed by decision-makers? For its part, and following the same logic, the State Department has set up a Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) tasked with providing diplomats with wide-ranging, long-term analysis.

For this reason, intelligence services can be divided into three functions: information synthesis, decision support and strategic analysis.

1. Information synthesis is the classic, systematic process of compiling and transmitting a corpus of open information and/or intelligence, likely to shed light on the understanding of a subject for analysts and writers, but also to report effectively to administrative or political authorities.
2. Decision support refers to the use that can be made of one or more pieces of open information and/or intelligence to inform a policy decision, or to support an operational decision. This process corresponds to the circuits implemented by all actors of the foreign policy ecosystem (diplomacy, armed forces, intelligence services, etc.) to fulfill their day-to-day operational or strategic missions.
3. Strategic analysis is a process that seeks to answer questions posed by administrative or political authorities, notably on the medium-term strategies and intentions of international players, on their capabilities, and on the political,economic, military and social dynamics underway in a given area. Questions that can be answered, first, by open information or precise intelligence and, second, by a logic of inference, suppositions and scenarios.

Strategic analysis is carried out using methods inspired by scientific research, while integrating the demands and constraints of the government. It involves drawing on scientific research, enriching it with open or secret information, and analyzing all of it with precise tools and methodologies to limit bias and reflect on useful recommendations. Thus, strategic thinking cannot do without academics and geographic and thematic experts, nor without a multi-dynamic analysis of short and long timeframes. Nor can it do without a logic of anticipation, capable of aiding political decision-making.

So, to get out of the day-to-day crisis, our political and administrative decision-makers could work to improve the State's strategic analysis capabilities, by working closely with university and private scientific research, which could help define longer-term policies on the various international issues at stake.

The Art of Foresight: a Useful Oracle

The full analytical continuum of decision support involves working on the short term (crisis), the medium-long term (dynamics) and the future, the latter of which can be approached through foresight. A current buzzword in European administrative systems, it is often misunderstood by those who benefit from it. More often than not, foresight fails to convince because it is misunderstood as a method of anticipating the future. However, if it is understood in this way, either it is wrong and loses credibility, or it is not wrong, but projects itself into the long term, which the "crisis" manager cannot grasp. The "I told you so" attitude has no raison d'être in the decision-making arena, if it hasn't convinced the decision-maker to act.

It also makes it possible to prepare for it, by anticipating the decisions to be taken in all relevant fields. It's not a question of being right, or of reading the tea leaves, but of providing the political, administrative or operational officer with a map of the different paths a dynamic may take, the means of identifying their materialization, and a list of decisions to be taken accordingly.

Furthermore, it's important to understand that all researchers and experts in a given field can carry out foresight work, as it is above all a precise method of analysis:
-Identify as many players and factors as possible acting on the observed phenomenon;
-Study their short, medium and long-term evolution;
-Specify the relationships between these factors and their reciprocal dynamics;
-Analyze the balance of power between players and their own strategies;
-Characterize possible breakthroughs and their chances of occurring.

The aim is not to create complex statistical models, but to project and cross-reference multiple dynamics in order to anticipate their evolution. This enables us to identify a number of realistic and possible scenarios. The stages in these scenarios need to be clearly highlighted, along with the triggering factors, to offer ways of anticipating their occurrence. On this basis, a corpus of recommended actions can be proposed in anticipation of, or in response to, a given scenario, which unfolds progressively over time. It's a question of building reading grids for the future.

We have carried out a number of foresight studies to illustrate the value of this type of thinking, and the need to integrate this analytical method into the strategic analysis of the State. Here are a few useful examples that demonstrate the relevance of this approach:

• On January 11, 2023, we outlined the future evolution of the security situation in Mali and Burkina Faso. The approach was forward-looking, from the point of view of the jihadist actors, to highlight the dynamics to be expected, given that factors on the ground would not change. 5 of the 6 forecasts have taken place or are still ongoing. The 6th, of longer duration, may still occur in the future;
• In February 2023, we reported on TV5 Monde that the new ruling military junta's request for the French military to leave Burkina Faso heralded the imminent arrival of Russian troops in the country. This position was widely criticized on social networks, and questioned until the arrival of those concerned. This prediction might not have materialized, but the scenario presented offered the possibility of preparing for it;
• For the new year 2024, we published an X/Twitter thread containing 12 proposals for anticipating international dynamics. Most of them came true, because they were broad enough to constitute long-term dynamics, but also precise enough to have direct and important implications for foreign policy. They were not proposed by rule of thumb, and those that turned out to be inaccurate concerned subjects not within our current expertise, which confirms the importance of ongoing, long-term expertise in the field of prospective and strategic analysis. Lack of method and experience on a subject is a guarantee of being wrong about the future, which is often the hallmark of poor decision-makers and advisors;
• Following on from these proposals, we explained that Chad would gradually exit the French orbit, in a tweet dated January 28, 2024, and in multiple other interviews, public and private, over the following months, as well as in an article dated July 15, 2024. This analysis was based neither on intelligence nor on a crystal ball, but on an analytical argument of several important dynamics underway both in N'djamena, in its regional space and on the globe as a whole, likely to provide keys to anticipate this. It was entirely possible to contest this analysis, and it was entirely possible for it to prove wrong, but it could serve as the basis for a scenario to prepare for and not be taken unawares by recent Chadian declarations.

This effort can help to reintegrate French action and influence into the ongoing stream of international dynamics.

Copyright image : Bashar TALEB / AFP
An Israeli missile explodes in Khan Younès, November 13, 2024.