The brilliant and charming foreign-policy analyst Roberta Wohlstetter, who passed away in 2007 at age 94, knew how to coin a phrase. She also knew how to analyze a strategic surprise. Many years ago, Roberta, a friend and the author of a seminal book on the Japanese attack of Dec. 7, 1941, "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision" (1962), referred me to her follow-on essay, "Slow Pearl Harbours and the Pleasures of Deception" (1981).

"What has interested me from the beginning," she wrote in the essay,...