Florence Gaub (NATO): If You Focus Too Much on the Present, You’ll Pay a Price in the Future

Florence Gaub heads the Research Division at the NATO Defense College, from where she contributes to the Alliance’s strategic thinking. Confronted with the conventional scenario of a Russian offensive against the Baltic states or Poland, she warns that an unwanted escalation in the Arctic, the Mediterranean, or the Black Sea could trigger a conflict: “For me, the conventional scenario is not the most likely”.

I had the chance to speak with her this week at the EuropeFuture Forum in Warsaw. Gaub analyzes how governments can think long-term, what role psychological biases play, and how to counter groupthink. From the Spanish perspective, she focuses on a Mediterranean marked by Russian presence and the vulnerability of critical infrastructure: “We need a strategic shift in how we perceive NATO’s southern flank”.

Let me ask you first about your current work at NATO. What do you actually do?

I head the Research Division of the NATO Defense College, which, in NATO’s institutional terms, is part of the military command structure. We report to the Military Committee, which is our top boss. The North Atlantic Council is the highest authority and, below it, there is the Military Committee, where the highest-ranking military officers from all member states sit. We report to them.

In practice, what the Research Division does is contribute to NATO’s strategic thinking. We work with the Office of the Secretary General, with the member states’ ministries, with the Allied Command Transformation, with SACEUR, etc. Our job is to contribute to the Alliance’s strategic thinking.

And do you have a team?

Yes. I have a team of ten people in total, including military and civilian staff, from what I believe seven different countries at the moment. And we are in the process of growing, as everything in NATO. I always say I have the best job in the Alliance.

Is it possible to work with long-term scenarios when politicians may have only a four-year term?

When you correlate political systems with a metric called intergenerational solidarity — which basically measures to what extent a government works with the future in mind — you see that democracies are perfectly capable of doing so, because they are generally invested in their citizens, and people care about the future. The leadership itself may not always be interested, but citizens tend to elect and support politicians who run for elections with an optimistic and positive vision of the future. Pedro Sánchez is clearly an example of that.

But, of course, there has been a tendency, especially in the last twenty years, toward less long-term thinking. There is a real dip around 2008. It may be related to the financial crisis; it may be related to the advent of smartphones. Suddenly, the present becomes much, much more important.

And I often hear: “Well, that happens because we have so many crises and first we must deal with the crisis”.

But I don’t think one has to choose between one thing and another. You have to be able to manage the crisis and, at the same time, keep the boat on the right course. It is true, however, that many bureaucracies have difficulties doing both.

“You have to be able to manage the crisis and, at the same time, keep the boat on the right course”

There is also a trick to this. The quickest way to lose a leader’s attention is to present them with fifteen scenarios and tell them: “All of this could happen.” Our work as futurists in service of public policy is to make their lives easier. It is not about explaining to them absolutely everything that could happen, because many more things could happen than will ultimately happen.

My general rule is that the higher the level of the decision-maker, the fewer scenarios they should see. For a prime minister you give two scenarios. You don’t give him fifteen. A minister might handle three, but little more.

And, more importantly, a scenario isn’t merely about explaining what could happen. You also have to tell decision-makers what they can do to avoid that scenario. In the end, what do politicians want? They want to act. They want to make decisions.

Therefore, you have to give them ideas about what they can do to alter the scenario. Many futures experts don’t want to do that. They say: “This is the future; now you deal with it.” But the whole purpose of thinking about the future is precisely to do something about it.

Politicians feel they have to react to everything. Is it still possible to think in terms of scenarios when you have to react every day to so many events — or what we think are events —?

You have to do it. You have no other option.

There is a term for this: future discounting. If you focus too much on the present, you will end up paying a price in the future. The analogy would be that if you go out partying too much today, you’ll pay the consequences tomorrow. If you focus excessively on everything happening in the present, there will eventually be a cost.

That said, I am not saying you have to think about the future every day. I always say that a government — depending on its remit — probably should do it once a year. Take, for example, the first week of January, usually a week without a major crisis. You gather your team and ask: What do we want to happen? What do we not want to happen? What precautions can we take? And then that thinking filters down through the system.

I don’t think it’s that difficult. It isn’t as if it’s impossible to find half a day to bring your team together.

Let me give you another example. Jens Stoltenberg’s team, when he was secretary general, met once a month to review their assumptions about Russia. It was an hour in which they sat down and said: “To avoid being surprised, let’s review our assumptions”.

It’s a kind of intellectual hygiene that is actually quite easy to practice. When people say: “I don’t have time for this,” it’s a bit like saying: “I don’t have time to brush my teeth.” It’s not that you don’t have time; you don’t want to find it.

If Germany had seriously worked with scenarios many years ago, would it have decided not to become so dependent on Russian gas?

Here’s an interesting obstacle, and it’s not exclusive to Germany. You can have the best foresight in the world, but if there is psychological resistance to your conclusions, it’s useless.

In many cases you later discover that what happened wasn’t really a Black Swan. Think of the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, or 9/11. Almost always there was someone who had anticipated it.

“You can have the best foresight in the world, but if there is psychological resistance to your conclusions, it’s useless”

What I mean is something similar to 9/11 even appears in a Tom Clancy novel. It wasn’t as if there was a single guy, sitting alone in a cabin somewhere, who came up with that possibility. In most cases, someone knew it; someone had considered that possibility. But later, at the higher political level, there was resistance.

In the case of Germany — and I say this as German — the psychological attachment to a world in which we could be friends with Russia was extraordinarily strong, precisely because of the Cold War and Germany’s division.

When I grew up in Munich, we were always aware that if a war broke out between the Soviet Union and the United States, it would be there. You lived constantly under the shadow of war. And that ended in 1990.

So I think the psychological attachment to that sense of relief was simply too strong. There were people, including Americans, who said: “Don’t do this.” But the bias was too strong. I don’t think it could have been overcome simply through better foresight.

That is why we always say: examine your biases, examine your assumptions. And if you are deeply attached to a particular assumption, define in advance the circumstances under which you would be willing to change your mind. Many people do not.

In many cases, politicians want to surround themselves with people who do not criticize the leader. If you want to work seriously with scenarios, you have to combat groupthink. How is that done?

You have pinpointed exactly where the real problem lies. Very often, people think that, to improve our ability to think about the future, we simply need more money, more information, or more people. Nobody would say no to any of those things. But the real problem is psychological. It has to do with all the different biases we have, and groupthink is itself a form of bias.

“The real problem is psychological. It has to do with all the different biases we have, and groupthink is in itself a form of bias”

What works is to create an environment where dissenting voices are allowed. That is difficult, especially in highly hierarchical structures — for example, the military — but also in certain particularly hierarchical cultures. And it becomes even harder when there is a strong personal attachment to a particular outcome, as happened in Germany.

The best way to address this is to ensure you have a genuinely diverse group. And when I talk about diversity, I don’t necessarily mean sexual orientation or issues of that kind. It could mean age, political inclination, professional background. Economists view the world differently from political scientists. Personality also matters.

The more diverse your team is — and many people don’t think about diversity in those terms — the more likely its members will learn from one another and challenge each other.

But of course, all of this must happen in a spirit of equality. Groupthink appears when there is one very powerful person in the room and everyone else is reluctant to contradict them.

I always think of the Research Division as a good example because, in a sense, we are protected. We are a small and highly diverse team. Within the team we frequently disagree, but it is a safe space. People can disagree. It does not cause any problem. No one will be fired for expressing a different opinion.

So that would be my recommendation. And if you cannot create that environment within your immediate team, set up a small team like mine somewhere else in the organization: a protected team that has both the trust and the mandate to disagree.

Is the European Commission currently working with scenarios?

I suppose so. When I worked at the EU, I had a fairly consolidated foresight system — ESPAS and the Global Trends Report, for example. So I suppose yes, they are working with different scenarios.

But different institutions and bodies may have different scenarios, and that is perfectly normal. You don’t need to have a single scenario for everyone. So I imagine the EU is also developing its own scenario work.

If you were asked to lay out the scenarios related to Russia, what would they be?

I think there is a conventional scenario. The conventional or generally accepted scenario — in the sense of what everyone assumes would happen if it occurred — is that Russia would attack the Baltic states, Poland, or some place in that area. Classically, it resembles Ukraine a great deal: tanks crossing the border, drones, etc.

However, when you put all these elements together, you realize that essentially we are recycling past war scenarios. Ukraine is obviously very recent and, therefore, extremely present in our minds, but it also resembles the old Cold War scenario. During the Cold War, the scenario was essentially the same, only the front line was a bit farther west.

That is, basically, what NATO is currently preparing for. But I think there is a problem in our way of thinking. NATO war scenarios tend to begin when the first shot is fired. But wars begin before the first shot.

“NATO war scenarios tend to begin when the first shot is fired. But wars begin before the first shot”

She has mentioned escalation. I do not think we think sufficiently about escalation from the perspective of asking: when do you really realize that it is happening? What steps occur beforehand?

What worries me at the moment is that we are not thinking enough about those stages and that, therefore, we could end up accidentally entering a war.

For me, the conventional scenario is not the most likely. I think the most probable scenario could arise, for example, in the Arctic, or perhaps even in the Mediterranean or the Black Sea. But let us focus on the Arctic: imagine you have a British ship. A satellite fails. The vessel enters Russian territorial waters, something happens, and shots are fired.

The North Atlantic Treaty also applies to ships north of the Tropic of Cancer, so suddenly you have potentially an Article 5 situation that neither the United Kingdom nor Russia really wanted.

This possibility of accidentally entering a war worries me far more. The situation is now so tense that something could go wrong. Think of the dynamics that led to World War I.

And suddenly you have a huge problem on your hands. It could have started in the Arctic and then perhaps develop in the Arctic as well as in space due to satellite involvement. It may not resemble at all the war we have prepared for. For me, that is the most likely scenario.

It has far less to do with Russian tanks crossing the Polish border than with how both sides observe each other. Both sides increasingly expect the other to do something.

And what happens when both sides are waiting for something to happen? When an incident occurs, it is much more likely that you assume it was intentional.

“This possibility of accidentally entering a war worries me far more. The situation is now so tense that something could go wrong”

All that you have said about already being at war with Russia does not necessarily help, because it also contributes to that tension, the assumption that anything Russia does is likely malicious or intentional. I am not saying whether that assumption is right or wrong. I am saying that we are increasingly inclined to perceive things that way.

Russia, as strange as it may seem, believes that creating a war atmosphere can help avoid war. We do not think so. Essentially, you have two different strategic languages speaking without understanding each other.

From Spain, the Russian threat may be perceived as distant, while Ceuta, Melilla and North Africa present more immediate vulnerabilities. Do you think Europe and NATO are paying enough attention to the Mediterranean as a strategic theatre?

Let me tell you an interesting story. When the Cold War ended, JFC Naples [the United Forces Command of Naples] conducted an assessment of what would have happened if the Soviet Union had attacked from the south.

They concluded that the odds of winning the war would actually have been much higher for the Soviets in the south than in the east because, much like what happens today, NATO was already looking east and not south.

There are various reasons why NATO suffers from this “southern blindness.” But it is not justified. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now.

“There are various reasons why NATO suffers from this ‘southern blindness’. But it is not justified. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now”

It is extremely important that NATO as a whole — and Europe as a whole — understand that the Mediterranean is not simply a friendly lake that connects us to our neighbours in the Middle East and North Africa. It is not only about the Mediterranean Dialogue, state-building, and capacity development. All of that is valuable, of course, but there is another strategic reality.

Russia has a port in Syria. Russia maintains fairly good relations with Egypt. It is probably present in Libya and, certainly, in other parts of Africa. It has just bought a shipyard in Morocco. No one really knows what they will do with it, but I would certainly raise a question mark. There is also a slowly growing presence of Russian ships in the Mediterranean, including aggressive tracking — following ships of NATO countries, for example.

So it is high time we understand that the Mediterranean is not merely a friendly lake between Europe and North Africa. It is an area that hosts critical infrastructure, including submarine cables, which will also be affected by climate change, submarine activity, storms and other factors.

Even if we only look at the naval, military, and maritime dimensions, many things are happening. It is really important that people understand this. We need a strategic shift in how we perceive NATO’s southern flank.

Thank you very much.