Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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This suggests that the presence of an audience might prod leaders into wars they would not have selected if they had not had such an audience.

It is a bit puzzling, thus, to see the directed-dyad-year as the unit of analysis in Chapter 2, the quantitative chapter. Why do regimes sometimes stay at peace, but at other times go to war or in other ways choose to use force?Weisiger also suggests that the explanation for the Argentine invasion of the Falklands is not persuasive because it was “rational” for the junta to have been pessimistic about diplomacy and optimistic about the likely success of a military operation.

Thus, I believe that Downes and I agree that the military can exert influence even when the leader is a civilian. My argument suggests that the bargaining range is smaller when one leader is relatively immune to the costs of fighting or losing wars, gains private benefits from war, or has inaccurate assessments of the likelihood of winning, each of which is influenced by domestic regime type. On the one hand, the potential for removal at the hands of civilian elites for failed foreign adventures induces caution in the leaders of Machines. Moreover, I did not find evidence that Galtieri gambled on an invasion of the Falklands despite believing to be hopeless endeavor – in fact, in his review, Alex Weisiger argues that the junta had reason to expect exactly the opposite.Indeed, it seems to me that Weeks’s theoretical arguments could, in principle, be linked to war through simple extensions of the logic of the bargaining model of war. It clearly cannot be the regime-type factors in isolation which lead to war; after all, these are constant. The narrative is not fully convincing, however, since it does not drill all the way down into the mechanisms and evidence on the central points of contention of those who have argued that this was indeed an instance of diversionary conflict. For example, concluding that contemporary China is a Machine regime (Weeks generally classifies China after 1976 as being a Machine) would suggest that China is generally unlikely to initiate dangerous militarized disputes over issues such as the South China Sea and the political status of Taiwan. Explicitly building on the bargaining model of war and taking account of strategic interaction at both the domestic and international level, I would argue, might also lead to some countervailing hypotheses.