There is a thread connecting the preparation for the Iraq war in 2002-2003 and the way the West has handled the Ukrainian conflict: the unhealthy relationship between intelligence and political decision-making. Back then, while the case for war against Saddam Hussein was being built, the CIA raised substantial doubts about the official line coming from Washington. Donald Rumsfeld responded by creating the Office of Strategic Planning, a parallel structure designed not to understand reality, but to produce the analysis needed to justify a war that had already been politically decided.
Today the situation is, in some ways, even worse. There has been no need to build a separate body, because the error has settled directly inside the core of Western strategic culture. The decisions taken by European and Atlantic governments reflect a deep inability to understand the nature of the conflict, its real parameters, the logic of the adversary and the depth of its motivations. This failure of understanding was not a technical detail. It became one of the causes of Ukraine’s ruin and helps explain the panic that seized the European leadership by the end of 2025.
The West approached the Ukrainian crisis with an ideological assumption: Russia’s reaction had to be presented as irrational, groundless and entirely unprovoked. To sustain that narrative, it was necessary to remove from view all the indicators that might have allowed a different reading of the crisis. The same warning signs that had already appeared in Georgia, showing how certain political and military pressures could trigger disruptive consequences, were ignored or minimized. Not because they were invisible, but because acknowledging them would have made it harder to justify mass sanctions, rearmament and the political mobilization against Moscow.
In that sense, Western blindness was not an accident. It was a choice. British services, and to some extent American and French ones, aligned themselves with the policy of their governments to the point of becoming de facto co-belligerents. That may explain their conduct politically, but it does not absolve anything once one enters the realm of violent covert action. Terrorism remains terrorism regardless of the flag under which it is carried out.
The problem is even more serious in countries not directly engaged on the battlefield and in strategic intelligence services whose mission is to provide governments with the information required for sound decisions. Here one sees a remarkable crisis of analysis. Western services are often highly effective at identifying individuals, networks, targets and movements. They can locate, trace and strike. But they are far less capable of understanding the overall meaning of events, the deeper dynamic of a conflict and the behavioral logic of the adversary.
This weakness had already appeared in the Middle East and North Africa. Western agencies are often excellent at recognizing faces, names and organizations, but fail when it comes to understanding how these actors move within wider political, cultural, military and social systems. They see the details but not the whole landscape. The same defect reappeared in Ukraine. An abundance of technical data did not translate into strategic understanding.
European political leaders were therefore guided by a convergence between state apparatuses and the media system. The media played a decisive role in shaping the climate that accompanied the outbreak of war and later in constructing a distorted reading of the balance of power. The constant underestimation of Russian military power, economic resilience, industrial capacity, logistical adaptability and strategic depth created a devastating illusion. In Ukraine and across Europe, many came to believe that Moscow was far weaker than it actually was.
That illusion generated an artificial confidence that pushed Kyiv and its supporters to believe victory was possible, not through a lucid assessment of the conflict, but through expectations fueled by propaganda, wishful thinking and media simplification. European intelligence, in turn, began to behave like the media, ceasing to act as a corrective to power and becoming instead an amplifier of political self-deception.
When, by the end of 2025, the reality of the battlefield could no longer be concealed, the European leadership entered a phase of real panic. The problem was not the absence of signals. The problem was that those signals had been ignored, distorted or sacrificed to political convenience. That is why there is now a growing temptation to compensate for analytical failure through covert action.
The decision by Chancellor Friedrich Merz in December 2025 to authorize Germany’s foreign intelligence service not only to conduct clandestine collection operations but also sabotage abroad against so-called Russian hybrid threats is the clearest sign of this drift. Until then, German external intelligence had been authorized to spy. That move opened the way to destructive action and marked a grave escalation in the very conception of what intelligence is supposed to do.
The same spirit can be seen in Britain, where Blaise Metreweli at the head of MI6 invoked the need to recover the service’s historical SOE instincts. The reference is not innocent. It signals a strategic culture that, no longer able to understand the conflict, dreams of replacing analysis with sabotage and the reading of reality with covert disruption.
That is the most dangerous point of all. As in the war on terror, there is a belief that clandestine action can compensate for analytical weakness. It cannot. Ukraine’s announced defeat is not the result of a lack of covert tools. It is the result of the West’s inability to understand the war it claimed to be managing. When a political system stops understanding its adversary, no covert operation can save it. On the contrary, such actions may only intensify escalation while leaving the original error untouched.
Meanwhile, intelligence services become more numerous, more technical, more fragmented and less coordinated. Specialists multiply, but genuine strategists become rare. Capabilities increase while vision declines. The apparatus then becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
In this contrast, the Russian decision-making process appears, at least in this domain, more disciplined and more coherent. Not because it is perfect, but because it better aligns political objectives, military instruments, industrial capacity and long-term timing. In Europe, by contrast, many key decisions seem to be made by badly informed amateurs, often dominated by media pressure, emotional urgency and analytical shallowness.
The result has been rushed, poorly thought-out and often self-defeating choices. And when those decisions turn against their authors, the response is not self-criticism but the search for scapegoats. Every failure is attributed to Russian agents, infiltration, manipulation and hybrid plots. At that point, invented threats begin to govern the very people who created them.
The Danish case on Greenland is especially revealing. In its 2025 outlook, Danish military intelligence identified a looming Chinese and Russian threat over Greenland. That was enough to hand the Trump administration a ready-made argument for seizing the territory before its rivals could act. The paradox is extraordinary. The Danish service had not anticipated that the more immediate danger to its own national interests could come from its American ally, despite Trump’s repeated declarations dating back to 2024.
That is what happens when analysis is bent to fit political fashion. An intelligence service that builds its scenarios around the dominant narrative ends up trapping its own government and country inside representations that produce real and often damaging consequences. In that sense, an ideologically distorted intelligence service can become more dangerous than the enemy it is supposed to observe.
The real Western defeat is therefore not only military or diplomatic. It is intellectual. Ukraine was drawn into a war that Europe and much of the West misunderstood from the outset. Propaganda was mistaken for analysis, simplification for knowledge and moral posture for strategy. It was assumed that sanctions, military aid and the demonization of the adversary would be enough to bend a power that had calculated time, costs, sacrifice and adaptation far more realistically.
Ukraine’s tragedy was to become the ground on which the West projected its own strategic illusions. Europe’s tragedy is to have discovered too late that war punishes those who give up trying to understand. Before weapons, before drones and before covert operations comes the ability to grasp the nature of the conflict. And on that terrain, today, Western leadership appears dangerously unarmed.
Western intelligence, Ukraine war, Russia, Europe, NATO, strategic failure, intelligence analysis, propaganda, media narrative, covert operations, sabotage, Friedrich Merz, BND, MI6, Blaise Metreweli, SOE, Donald Rumsfeld, CIA, Iraq war, political blindness, hybrid warfare, strategic culture, Russia West relations, sanctions, Georgia conflict, Greenland, Danish intelligence, Trump, European leadership, geopolitical analysis
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