Shaun Walker’s outstanding piece of work on the run-up to the Russian invasion in 2022 (A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them, 21 February) is by no means the only example of defence and intelligence analysts foreseeing catastrophic acts of war. Ironically, one of the classic examples, exhaustively analysed, is the US failure to anticipate the deadly Japanese attack on Hawaii, with all its monstrous consequences, despite a myriad of clear signals.
David Kahn, the US historian and author, attributes this fatal myopia to “mirroring”, which made analysts incapable of imagining Japanese tactics. Couple this with Simon Tisdall’s typically forensic article on the diplomatic failure since 2022 (Ukraine is the biggest and most consequential of all the American betrayals, 21 February) to demonstrate how out of touch the Nato top brass and their acolytes were recently in frantically calling for massive rearmament.
