There’s a rather more convincing explanation for this massive failure: It’s a failure of the ecosystem of May’s government, rather than the individuals involved. British government machinery tends to be more comfortable executing a task than questioning fundamental assumptions. [...]
This is not the first time that geopolitical disasters have resulted from an overly narrow approach. In the run-up to the Iraq war, British diplomats and spies were tasked with making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They set about delivering with determination and energy. So successful was this work that, in early 2002, then-CIA Director George Tenet complained to his own spies that “all the good reporting I get is from [MI6].”
Unfortunately, nobody thought to ask the prior question: “Have they actually got these weapons?” The results are now all too well-known: Iraq was invaded on the false premise of a threat from WMD. The country collapsed into anarchy which still plagues it and the wider region, leading directly to the rise of ISIS and a new wave of global terrorism. [...]
Inside this pressure cooker, particularly the extreme pressure that the Brexit process is generating, there is an understandable tendency to focus on the narrow task at hand. This leaves British officials feverishly developing a plan that respects May’s self-defeating red lines rather than the bigger task of finding a plan that can actually be accepted by Europe.
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