The West struggles to evaluate threats. Here’s how it can get better.

In 1924, while imprisoned at Landsberg Prison following the failed Beer Hall Putsch, a 35-year-old political agitator named Adolf Hitler began writing his manifesto, Mein Kampf. In it, he called for the destruction of the Treaty of Versailles, the creation of a new German Reich through territorial expansion, and the removal of Jews from German life. 

Fourteen years later, on September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to cheering crowds after concluding a meeting with the same Hitler. Waving a signed piece of paper, he assured his audience that “peace for our time” had been secured. Chamberlain, an experienced diplomat, believed he had persuaded Hitler to abandon the very ambitions he had once gone to prison for attempting to achieve. 

In less than a year, Hitler shattered the agreement by invading Poland and launching World War II, putting into action the same agenda he had laid out 14 years earlier. 

This is far from the only example of the West struggling to evaluate threats accurately, with deadly consequences. But by looking at past mistakes — and successes — we can see ways to improve threat assessment in the future.

Pearl Harbor

Roughly two years after Chamberlain’s failed deal, the United States misjudged a threat of its own. 

Washington had intercepted Japanese communications and received warnings that an attack was possible. Most military leaders believed Japan would not dare strike directly at American territory, though. They were confident that the Asian nation would avoid a confrontation sure to bring about its destruction. Yet Japan’s actions told a different story. Its occupation of Indochina, naval buildup, and public rhetoric about a “New Order in East Asia” made clear it was preparing for a direct clash. On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans and crippling much of the Pacific Fleet. 

This prompted the U.S. to enter World War II and look inward to examine its own failures in the lead up to Pearl Harbor. According to the Roberts Commission of 1942, the key lesson was the need to treat enemy intentions and public warnings with far greater seriousness than before. The belief that Japan would not dare carry out its declared intentions left America unprepared. The fatal consequences of that assumption could not be ignored. The tragedy underscored a simple but costly truth: Dismissing explicit threats as bluffs does not make them less real. It only magnifies the price of being wrong.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

In 1962, the Soviet Union began the secret deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba under the cover of reassuring diplomacy. Soviet officials insisted that only defensive weapons were being delivered, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko personally assured U.S. President John F. Kennedy that Moscow had no intention of placing offensive missiles on the island. 

Yet the calmness of these denials aroused American suspicion. The sudden surge of Soviet freighters, troops, and equipment contrasted so sharply with the peaceful language of Soviet diplomats that Washington ordered intensified U-2 reconnaissance flights. On October 14, those flights revealed missile sites under construction, confirming that Soviet promises had been deliberate deception. Ironically, it was precisely because Moscow never publicly declared its intentions that Washington stayed more alert; unlike with Germany and Japan, the absence of open threats made American leaders scrutinize the gap between Soviet words and actions, allowing them to detect the danger before it was too late. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis suggests that leaders sometimes respond more effectively when adversaries stay quiet and that open declarations of intent, paradoxically, can make governments more likely to dismiss threats as posturing.

Operation Desert Shield

In the years between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of the Twin Towers, the U.S. confronted a series of crises abroad, from the wars in Korea and Vietnam to hostage takings in Tehran and the Persian Gulf War — all while attempting to uphold a principle of Pax Americana, a term used to describe the period of relative peace and stability in the Western world following the end of World War II, under the military and economic dominance of the U.S. 

In the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein massed Iraqi forces along the border with Kuwait, a hub of the global energy supply, while U.S. intelligence carefully tracked the buildup. Some regional experts, including Ambassador April Glaspie doubted that Saddam would risk a full-scale invasion. Glaspie later admitted that she and her colleagues “didn’t think he would go that far,” referring to occupying all of Kuwait. But Washington did not dismiss the threat as empty posturing. When Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait on August 2, the U.S. responded immediately, launching Operation Desert Shield, deploying forces to Saudi Arabia, and assembling a broad international coalition. 

Washington’s willingness to prepare for the worst made the difference. Unlike at Pearl Harbor, it treated a looming threat as credible even when some experts doubted it. The contrast with earlier failures suggests that success here stemmed from both the hard lessons of the past and the sheer visibility of Saddam’s buildup, which left little room for wishful thinking.

The war on terror

In July 1990, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (“the Blind Sheikh”) arrived in New York having traveled through Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Sudan, and quickly became involved in managing al-Qaeda’s financial and organizational network in the U.S. In April 1991, he obtained a green card from an immigration office in Newark, New Jersey. 

Despite earlier U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen, Abdel Rahman openly denounced the U.S. and issued religious rulings permitting the robbing of banks and the killing of Americans. In one sermon in New York City, he described Americans as “descendants of apes and pigs, feeding off the tables of the Zionists, communists, and colonialists.” Two months later, on February 26, 1993, al-Qaeda detonated a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. 

Five years later, in February 1998, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a fatwa under the banner of the “World Islamic Front,” declaring the duty to kill Americans “in any country, civilian or military.” On August 7 of that year, al-Qaeda carried out near-simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. During interviews in 1998 and 1999, bin Laden promised that U.S. military forces in the Middle East would be attacked, and in October 2000, al-Qaeda operatives rammed a small boat packed with explosives into the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors. 

Later, in the spring and summer of 2001, U.S. intelligence received repeated warnings that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the U.S., culminating in the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” Only weeks later, on September 11, al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four passenger planes and carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in modern history, killing nearly 3,000 people. 

This failure was not due to a lack of warnings, but to a deeper human tendency to discount the unthinkable. Leaders and intelligence agencies assumed that al-Qaeda’s threats were posturing, that no group would dare launch such a catastrophic strike against the U.S. The tragedy of 9/11 thus demonstrates more than institutional failure. It reveals how the West has repeatedly had difficulty taking explicit threats at face value, especially when those threats violate its expectations of rational self-preservation.

Modern conflicts

This unwillingness to take threats at face value has led to some of history’s greatest tragedies — at Pearl Harbor and on 9/11, the U.S. had clear indicators of enemy intent and capability, yet the blame afterward focused mainly on failures of coordination.

A similar dynamic has unfolded in recent years with America’s response to Russian aggression. At NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit, Vladimir Putin bluntly declared that Ukraine was not a legitimate state. In 2014, he seized Crimea, explicitly tying the annexation to his ambition of restoring Russian control of the region. In 2021, he followed up with a book and speeches outlining his belief that Ukraine should be brought back under Moscow’s authority — by force. 

Western leaders largely dismissed these overt signals, assuming Putin would not be reckless enough to risk crippling sanctions, economic isolation, and a costly war. Even as Russia massed an invasion force of 150,000 troops positioned in Russia, Belarus, and Crimea in early 2022, many European leaders refused to believe an invasion was imminent. As the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell later admitted, “We were quite reluctant to believe it,” despite stern warnings from the U.S. government. 

The same blindness appeared yet again on October 7, 2023, when Israel, one of the world’s most advanced intelligence powers, ignored evidence of Hamas’s preparations for a deadly attack. In the months before the attack, Hamas openly trained, broadcast videos, and even had its complete battle plans exposed, yet Israeli intelligence dismissed the possibility of an attack, convinced that Hamas would not be reckless enough to launch a war it was certain to lose and that its exposed preparations were too overt to be taken seriously.

Believing the unthinkable

The surest way to deceive a modern democracy is to show it exactly what you intend to do. Too often, these nations assume such threats are bluffs or exaggerations because their own logic struggles to grasp that someone would be so blatant. In doing so, they add layers of nuance that do not exist and blind themselves to dangers declared from the start, convinced that no one would be so reckless, or so suicidal, as to start a battle both parties know the aggressor cannot win. 

This happened when Chamberlain tried to persuade Hitler, and it happened again when the U.S. dismissed the warnings of a man shouting from a cave in Afghanistan. The West ignores those who spend years openly declaring their intentions, while comforting itself by insisting they do not mean their words. 

Not every threat is imminent. Some potential aggressors, like North Korea, will hint at violence but stop short of openly declaring an intent to strike. Rhetoric becomes dangerous when it is reinforced by consistent ideology, direct public declarations over time, and obvious preparations for action. From manifestos written in prison to the visible movement of troops and weapons toward the battlefield, democracies must be able to identify the signs that mean they need to shift from explanation to preparation: hardening defenses, rallying partners, and above all, being willing to strike first if waiting appears costlier than acting.