Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics (American Interest Books)

If you want a good book on this subject, read one of Nassim Taleb's books.He covers much of the same material, and he writes better.---After reading this book, I am convinced that truly unexpected eventsare very rare: What is mostly going on is that decision makers ignoreobvious trends and fail to make contingency plans for low-probabilityevents. Then, they say stuff like:"No one could have foreseen the attacks of 9/11", or"It was not possible to anticipate the financial crisis".(Tom Clancy was writing books about 9/11-type events 20 yearsbefore it happened, and lots of people on Wall Street were talkingabout the financial crisis before the news media noticed.Meredith Whitney comes to mind.)I think that the real problem in creating policy with regardto low-probability events is that the public allows incompetentpeople to say "Golly Gosh, NOBODY could POSSIBLY have predictedthat" and get away with it.Anyway, I cannot recommend this book, on the grounds of poor writing style.

This compilation by Francis Fukuyama, is an excellent compilation of the work of several up and coming authors. They approach the subject of national security in a unique and thought provoking manner. While some positions are debatable, it nevertheless makes excellent reading and stimulation g mind gymnastics. Recommended

great book

"Prediction is very hard," Yogi Berra supposedly remarked, "especially about the future." It's hard to argue with that, but even skeptics must admit that such events as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the East Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s or the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 came as a shock even to most experts. Yet, for all its difficulty, forecasting matters. No one, whether in government or business, wants to be blindsided by oil shocks, declining stocks, environmental crises, global pandemics, natural disasters or any of the other nasty surprises that chance sometimes delivers. Can anything be done, or must humanity merely watch the wheel of fortune spin, hoping for the best? According to this modest book, something can be done. Even when specific predictions are hard, if not impossible, leaders can "plan for surprise" by developing scenarios, boning up on history, overcoming cognitive biases and learning to think about the types of significant disruptions that could arise. While this uneven collection of articles is understandably short on conclusions, getAbstract predicts it will help you think about the unthinkable.