Governments are not "caught off guard" in the sense that they know variants are expected. All major countries perform routine sequencing for exactly that reason

Governments are not "caught off guard" in the sense that they know variants are expected. All major countries perform routine sequencing for exactly that reason, some more than others, but they all do. They also have plans for apocalypse-class variants that we will hopefully never see. Where you can say they are caught off guard is that they obviously can't plan in advance what the next mutation will be in the wild. The virus doesn't send advance notices. Even knowing how bad a variant is can take weeks because we don't know what makes it spread. Is it vaccine resistance, pre-infection resistance, high infectivity, does it evade testing, does it target a different population. And how deadly is it? Does it have different symptoms? All these questions call for different answers. It is even harder for policymakers who have to care about more than just health. They can't just say "hey, new variant, let's lock down everything", it will tank the economy and make people unhappy, maybe for no reason. But if you don't do anything, you may end up with overwhelmed hospitals and lots of people dying. So what are you going to push? Vaccination (including making vaccination mandatory)? Contact tracing (including surveillance)? Mass testing and quarantines? Masks? Event closure? Movement restriction? You can't be consistent because the virus is not. And of course there are long term solutions being studied too. New vaccines and drugs are being researched. Increasing hospital capacity is also on the menu, but that takes time. We already made a lot of progress, and I think the much lower mortality of the delta variant despite the virus itself being more deadly other things being equal (no vaccines, ...), is proof of that.