One year ago, I woke up to multiple text messages telling me there was an attack in Israel. I checked the news and like most people could not believe what I was seeing, texting a friend saying, “They even overran an army base.” Little did I know this was just scratching the surface of the devastation, murder, and evil unleashed that day.
Although it shocked me and the rest of the world, it really shouldn’t have. The population of Gaza is raised from childhood to hate Israel, and all Hamas had to do was amass an irregular militia made up of fewer than 1% of Gaza’s military aged males to launch its attack. Despite having no chance to defeat Israel as a whole, they could cut through fences, overwhelm a quiet weekend security force, and lead acts of mass murder and terror against defenseless people in an attempt to win a psychological victory and tilt the broader region into war.
Americans were similarly shocked after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but they should not have been: Even though Japan had no chance of conquering the United States, it dispatched an armada across the Pacific to wreak havoc and destruction on what should have been a quiet Hawaii Sunday morning. The Dec. 7, 1941, attach was, as Franklin Roosevelt, said, “dastardly,” but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Japan had already proven itself a brutal and belligerent regime and had the right incentives to seek a psychological victory in its attack against the relatively lightly defended U.S. fleet.
Likewise, it should not have been surprising that a terror group committed to demoralizing and paralyzing the United States, and who previously tried to topple the World Trade Center in a 1993 bombing, would just a few years later hijack civilian planes and fly them into the same twin towers. Under fear of this exact scenario, Israel shot down a non-responsive Libyan civilian airliner entering its airspace over 50 years ago.
People talk about so called black-swan events, unforeseen and unpredictable, but all those attacks could be foreseen – if one just looked at capabilities, incentives, and historical patterns of behavior. Sometimes the only surprising question is why they didn’t happen sooner.
Some 70,000 tourists visit Washington D.C. each day. Would it be a complete surprise if a hostile force made up of only 1% of those “visitors” turned out to be foreign infiltrators who converged on the White House with AK-47s or rocket launchers, and rammed a truck through its gates to take over the Oval Office – something a force of 700 fanatical fighters could likely accomplish? This relatively small force would represent a tiny fraction of the million illegal immigrants who cross our border each year. It should surprise no one, but it would shock nearly everyone.
Our major cities’ water systems are vulnerable to mass poisoning. A handful of foreign terrorist cells that attacked enough U.S. schools, shopping malls, and transit centers could likely shut down our entire economy in a matter of days. An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack could destroy our unprotected grid infrastructure and cripple the United States. A 2008 U.S. congressional study estimated that such an attack, if successful, could lead to the death of 90% of the U.S. population due to the long-term breakdown in rule of law and disruption of food supplies.
The same reasoning can be extended to economic meltdowns, which in recent history include the dot-com bubble and the 2008 Great Recession. There was nothing about those events that could not have been foreseen. Today we face comparable if not worse economic and monetary calamities which can be easily envisioned but most of us live as though they will never happen.
Lastly, we should not be surprised when attacks on the Jewish people rapidly escalate. Chants of “Death to Jews” in the streets of major Western capitals and demographic shifts in the West show the writing on the wall. Yet, people keep acting shocked and surprised when even one synagogue is attacked.
I do not know if any of these or similar events will happen in our lifetime. If they were easy to predict, they would be easy to prevent. To be clear, these are not “black-swan” events – which are improbable and unforeseen – the events I’m describing are improbable but foreseeable. While they are long-tail risks, the aggregate of the long-tail risk is large and historically repeats itself more often than we expect.
The Holocaust was so shocking and surprising that people could not believe it was real. But given what was known at the time of Nazi ideology and Hitler’s own writing and speeches, as evil as they were, should it have been surprising?
When countries like Iran vow the complete destruction of Israel, how many of us will still claim to be surprised when they actually act on their genocidal promises?
History shows that events that shock and surprise tend to follow not-so-subtle precursors foreshadowing them. It’s only a question of whether we’re willing to listen.
