If this year taught me anything, it’s that big unexpected events are the real deciders of international affairs. We spend a lot of time analyzing, forecasting, and planning—and we must. But sudden curveballs wreck those plans, forcing us to hedge against chaos in advance.
Three interconnected examples from 2024 illustrate the point: Israel’s dramatic rollback of Iran and its proxies, the sudden collapse of the Assad regime, and the resurgence of Turkey and its Islamist allies across the Near East. None of these events were anticipated by successive US administrations convinced of Iran’s invincibility, by Arab states resigned to Assad’s staying power, or by DC experts who preached the centrality (and reliability) of Turkey in US grand strategy.
At the end of 2024, the experts look like fools. The Near East morphed in ways no one expected. Moving into the new year, I’m less interested in any one event than how to guard against such surprises in the future.
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No one explained the problem better than Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the eccentric Lebanese-American trader-turned-essayist, whose book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) built a new theory around “Black Swan” events. Taleb defined Black Swans as outlier events that exert extreme impact on the world yet get explained away retroactively by humans trying to rationalize it all. Man’s limited knowledge, combined with his (paradoxical) “epistemic arrogance,” blinds him to the “rare but consequential shocks and jumps” that really define history.
“A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world,” Taleb pointed out, “from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.” Yet policymakers press on with their calculations, convinced of their ability to predict the next disaster, oblivious to the fact that “our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable.”
Taleb gave the example of a turkey that’s fed every day by friendly humans, growing more confident with each feeding that such is the permanent state of things—that is, until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when something unexpected happens and incurs a revision of belief. Ultimately the Black Swan problem is a sucker’s problem, and the point of Taleb’s work is to help humans avoid being the turkey.
When it comes to US foreign policy, this doesn’t mean we should spend time trying to forecast the next Black Swan. After all, the essence of these events is their unpredictability. What it does mean is that we should anticipate Black Swans generally by investing in things that are “antifragile”—that is, things that gain from chaos and disorder (think of muscles that grow in response to stress, or immune systems that get stronger as a result of infection)—which, in the global context, means policies that don’t just withstand Black Swans but benefit from them.
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One of the more obvious lessons from the past year is that policymakers should pay more attention to the Near East, not less. “The Levant has been something of a mass producer of consequential events nobody saw coming,” Taleb noted, citing the invention of the alphabet, the rise of Christianity, the spread of Islam, the shattering of his prosperous Lebanon by civil war, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Since so many Black Swans have originated in such a small corner of the world, we should prioritize that corner in our policymaking. The Near East isn’t done surprising us.
But the bigger lesson is that, while the US should expand extra-civilizational partnerships like those embodied in the Abraham Accords, it should prioritize intra-civilizational, values-based alliances that withstand and benefit from global turbulence. Unfortunately, most Americans reflexively embrace the neo-realist worldview which sees states as culturally fungible and ranks alliances according to perceived material advantages under current conditions. Blind to the Black Swan, they tend to neglect kin-country relationships in favor of “strategic” alliances (often bought with US dollars or weapons) that collapse with the first stiff wind.
Religion, culture, and identity—those intangible forces that govern the rise and fall of civilizations yet rarely factor into policy analysis—are, on average, highly antifragile. When chaos strikes, groups fall back on the ideas and beliefs that define them. In the context of the Near East, this means our relationships with countries like Israel, Greece, and Armenia will be more durable than those with countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The latter can be critical partners, but they won’t stick by us in a storm. The disparities in how we think about faith, society, and politics are too great.
“History and societies do not crawl,” Taleb wrote. “They make jumps.” Sadly, we cannot foresee these jumps—but we can prepare for them. The best way is to double-down on values-based alliances that will grow stronger, not weaker, in the face of global conflict.
