As the philosopher Yogi Berra once noted “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Over the last year, the Middle East has frequently proven Berra correct as confident predictions have frequently been far from accurate whether it be the stunning collapse of the Assad regime to the apocalyptic warnings that an attack on the Iranian nuclear program would lead to WWIII.

While it is unlikely that those who got the predictions particularly wrong will feel particularly abashed, there is a larger lesson that is less about pointing to those who were wrong and more about recognizing the limits of our ability to know what is going to happen particularly in relation to authoritarian regimes.