Tunisia: Predictably Disastrous Handling by Brussels

Sally McNamara / February 15, 2011

Harvard University’s Niall Ferguson recently criticized the Obama Administration for lacking foresight and planning over the events in Egypt. The point of his criticisms of the Administration—and, by extension, the European Union—was illustrated over a year ago in a Heritage Foundation “war game.”

In late 2009, Heritage invited security experts and Washington-based policymakers to “game” a fictional scenario of its own whereby Tunisia was hit with a major earthquake. Significant political and civil unrest followed, accompanied by large numbers of refugees flowing from Tunisia to Italy and Malta.

The exercise was intended to test how well NATO and the EU would respond to such crises, and it proved eerily predictive of current events in North Africa. In Heritage’s simulation, when Tunisia was hit by the fictional earthquake, the EU foreign minister made a number of statements proclaiming leadership of the crisis. The player simulating the role of the U.K. stated that this mission was an opportunity for the EU to demonstrate its much-vaunted ability to project soft power, and the U.S. was happy to see Europeans taking the lead for the crisis. (more…)