It's lack of wisdom and insight.
Every decision involves resources and entails some sort of action.
Very few wanted to think that the USSR would collapse; it had to be strong and last for a long time for various reasons. Conservatives wanted it to fail and had that collapse as a goal. Scholars needed to work with Soviet authorities for access to information and peers in the USSR. Dissidents said the USSR would collapse, and few wanted to side with dissidents--many were loony and if you sided with them you'd also have to say things like Estonia was occupied and it was an empire. And evil.
There were also the policy considerations: What would happen if the USSR collapsed. War? Disease? Would it peacefully disintegrate? If so, how fine-grained would the result be? Would there be immigration? And China's response would be what? What would happen to nuclear weapons, to treaties? Even discussing these things would be tantamount to dancing on Brezhnev's grave, and when Gorbachov came along everybody well-nigh celebrated. He'd keep the old beast going for another generation and not have us face such questions.
Even in academia where there would be far smaller repercussions to such talk, people saying that the USSR was on the ropes were ostracized. You didn't get a job with a new PhD and such heretical views. Andrei Amalrik was judged crazy with his "Will the USSR survive until 1984?", written in the late '60s or early '70s. (And after the USSR collapsed, the "unitary" reasons for the country's collapse were diverse and all self-serving. 100 scholars would have 100 narratives.)
Same with ISIL. Could it grow? Sure. But if it did, it was because the Assad policy was wrong-headed. Because the wise decision not to fund and arm moderate groups would be judged in a harsh light. It would mean that "our" allies were weak. It would mean that funding was plentiful from those that said they were our friends, the Sa'udis, the Qataris. It would mean that we did a bad thing by leaving Iraq. But the policy implications were horrible--it might mean siding with Assad, or sending additional help to Iraq for training or even sending troops and materiel to Iraq.
In both cases we had the facts. It was the interpretation that we didn't like, and that kept us from seeing probable outcomes. It set up our confirmation bias.
In the case of N. Korea, it's likely we really don't know. Both the USSR and ISIL are remarkably open societies compared to N. Korea. N Korea is ethnically and culturally homogenous, linguistically distinct, with fairly tightly controlled borders and social structures within those borders. The media are controlled and contact with foreigners is limited, with information about the upper reaches of N. Korean political strata being more tightly controlled than was the case even in Stalin's or Brezhnev's USSR (at which point Sovietologists were openly saying their job was equivalent to reading tea leaves--who stood where on May Day, who's photo was in a textbook or airbrushed out, who was mentioned in which speech...).
On edit: This kind of self-serving blindness is endemic in politics. Look at Eastern Ukraine. Everybody kept saying "X will work," when it was blatantly obvious from two previous examples that "X" would not work: strong talk, sanctions, talk of more sanctions, cajoling, etc. Everybody said that the most important thing was not to allow a frozen conflict, even as the people saying this were doing everything in their power to have Ukraine take steps that could only lead to a frozen conflict. Mostly because nobody wanted to accept the consequences for their ideology, their politics, their policies, their actions. I see no hypocrisy here, just stupidity: People really wanted to believe sanctions would work, they really didn't want to think Russia was providing scores of tanks and shelling Ukr forces from across the border, they didn't want to think that there were hundreds of Russian troops using Grads against Ukr forces. Because that would be an invasion, and that kind of invasion would require some action OR require admitting that we really don't give a damn about other peoples unless it's directly politically useful here. Even if that's where all the evidence points, even as (R) talk about spreading freedom and (D) talk about human rights and freedom.
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