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

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As anyone who has written a book knows, it is impossible to do without friends and family. I am indebted to Dara Cohen and Sarah Kreps for many years of friendship and both personal and professional guidance. I am also grateful to Ed Bruera for years of support and encouragement. My parents Steve and Ursula and sister Stephanie have also rooted me on at all stages; I am particularly grateful to them for knowing when not to ask how the book was going. Ienaga, Pacific War, 35. By tradition, and sometimes by law (1900-1913, and from 1936 to the end of the war), both ministers had to be serving officers. Hein E. Goemans, Kristian S. Gleditsch, and Giacomo Chiozza, “Introducing Archigos: A Dataset of Political Leaders,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 46, No. 2 (March 2009): 269-83. Of the 501 irregularly removed leaders for whom it is possible to code a specific manner of e Nonetheless, I agree that there is still much to be learned by linking monadic arguments about regime type to (dyadic) theories of strategic interaction. My aim was to characterize the domestic politics of making decisions about war in non-democracies and to develop some core hypotheses, none of which are inconsistent with the bargaining model. Of course, that still leaves many future steps. One is to understand how the politics of different kinds of authoritarian systems might compensate for a small bargaining range, or lead to war even when the bargaining range is large. Another is to investigate how different types of regimes interact. Another, as Goemans points out, is to integrate time-varying factors into the model, allowing for within-regime variation rather than the across-regime variation on which I focus. I hope my book will spur future scholarship to engage in those theoretical tasks, whether by building on my work or critiquing it. The three countries that provoked these conflicts had much in common. Each was ruled by a highly repressive dictatorship that denied its citizens civil and political rights and ruthlessly suppressed domestic opposition to the regime. Each placed control over decisions about war and peace in the hands of a small coterie of elites. And each instigated a costly war against a vastly more powerful democratic foe with the goal of enlarging its own territory.

Weeks’s argument also differs from a second model of civil-military relations developed in the military effectiveness literature. Risa Brooks’ theory of strategic assessment focuses on the balance of power between civilian leaders and military leaders (civilian dominance, military dominance, or shared power) and the extent of preference divergence between the two groups (high versus low). [7] When civilians are firmly in charge and civilian and military officials have congruent preferences, states will be able to assess their strategic environment accurately and are likely to have positive military outcomes. When civilians share power with the military—that is, when the military can threaten the tenure of the leader directly or indirectly (in Weeks’s terms, the military constitutes an audience)—and the two sides have strongly divergent preferences, then strategic assessment will be very bad. [8] Because they are competing for power, both civilian and military officials are reluctant to share information with each other, which in turn makes it difficult to coordinate strategic plans with political goals. Moreover, the military tends to focus on its internal rival, undermining its ability to assess its own (and its external adversary’s) strengths and weaknesses, and it is unclear who has the final say on military strategy. Such states are prone to major strategic mistakes. Dan Reiter is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He is the author of Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances, and World Wars (Cornell, 1996) and How Wars End (Princeton, 2009), as well as coauthor, with Allan C. Stam, of Democracies at War (Princeton, 2002). He has also authored or coauthored dozens of scholarly and popular publications on international relations and foreign policy. To develop the argument, I begin by laying out a simple framework that highlights the potential domestic costs and benefits of using—or not using—military force abroad. Although authoritarian leaders are not directly accountable to the public like democratically elected leaders, they nonetheless rely on the support of important domestic audiences. The intensity and source of this accountability vary across autocracies and affect leaders’ costs of using force. These insights lead me to distinguish regimes along two core dimensions: (1) whether the leader faces a powerful domestic audience, and (2) whether the leader or audience stems from the civilian or military ranks. These two dimensions produce four kinds of regimes: nonpersonalist machines, in which the leader faces a powerful domestic audience composed primarily of civilian regime insiders; nonpersonalist juntas, in which the leader faces a domestic audience composed primarily of military officers; and two kinds of personalist regimes without meaningful audiences—personalist regimes led by relatively unfettered civilian bosses and personalist regimes led by military strongmen. ⁸ The first is the idea that all authoritarian regimes are similar in that their leaders face few domestic constraints when making decisions about war and peace. This perspective, which typically concludes that democracies as a group are less warlike than dictatorships, dominates the existing international relations scholarship on regime type and foreign policy. The core of this view, introduced by Immanuel Kant, is that nondemocratic leaders are freer to choose war than leaders who must answer to the public. ² This assessment rests in part on the assumption that citizens find it difficult to punish dictators who subject them to the ravages of war.³ Dictators internalize fewer of the costs of war and are therefore more likely to use military force, whereas democratic leaders have incentives to choose less costly, and hence more peaceful, options.Finally, there is the difficulty of sorting out the independent effect of regime type given possible confounds. While definitively eliminating concerns about reverse causation is close to impossible, Weeks (33-34, 52) makes a reasonable theoretical and empirical case against endogeneity criticisms (for example, that Juntas are involved in more conflict because they come to power in more dangerous neighborhoods). A possibility that she examines less is that certain autocratic regimes may covary with other factors that influence foreign policy. For example, by a rough count, over 60% (387 of 627 country years) of Machines in the dataset were communist states, which might plausibly also have adopted a more cautious foreign policy. Specifically, if Marxist-Leninist ideology convinced communist leaders that the tide of history favored communism and that their opponents were ultimately doomed, then avoiding risky wars is a natural implication. A preliminary statistical analysis suggests, contrary to this counterargument, that the result is actually being driven primarily by the non-communist Machines (countries like Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party PRI, post-independence Kenya and Tanzania, and Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad), but disentangling this relationship is not straightforward given the broad overlap. Statement on language in description Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Comparing Weeks’s theory with two others developed in the literature on military effectiveness fruitfully highlights the missing role of civil-military relations in her argument. An important assumption of Weeks’s theory is that in constrained authoritarian regimes, civilian leaders are removed only by other civilian elites, whereas military leaders are removed only by the military. [5] Although the latter seems plausible, the former is puzzling, and contradicts much work on civil-military relations that highlights the salience of leaders’ vulnerability to military coups. It is now well established in the military effectiveness literature, for example, that regimes where the leadership fears a military coup take a number of steps—collectively referred to as ‘coup-proofing,’ and including such measures as purging competent military officers and replacing them with incompetent (but loyal) bunglers; creating multiple independent military and paramilitary forces; prohibiting communication between officers and adjacent units to inhibit anti-regime coordination; and allowing little if any realistic training—that decrease coup risk but vitiate the military’s combat effectiveness. [6] This literature suggests that even in civilian-led authoritarian regimes, the military may still be an important audience that can influence the behavior of the state. In other words, the argument that Machines are relatively unlikely to initiate forceful disputes or wars hinges on an unarticulated assumption that civilian control of the military is secure. If it is not, and thus the military constitutes a second audience in Machines, then these regimes may not face the simple incentive structure that Weeks lays out. 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. But these leaders may also face threats of removal from the military audience if they do not behave more aggressively.

How Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Transforms Public Support for War" (with Michael Tomz and Kirk Bansak) PNAS-Nexus 2023 Downes’s commentary focuses on the two kinds of nonpersonalist regimes: machines and juntas. Downes correctly points out that my argument assumes that machines feature strong civilian control of the military. Otherwise, the fear of a military coup or insurrection would cause leaders of machines to act more like the leaders of military juntas, in which a leader faces a domestic audience composed primarily of military officers. Leaders of juntas, I argue in the book, are more likely to use force because their audience can benefit from arms buildups and war, and because they tend to be more pessimistic about the efficacy of alternatives to war such as diplomacy. In short, I argue that there are two types of civilian-led authoritarian regimes with audiences that vary depending on whether civilians control the military. In the first, civilian control is firm enough that military actors play no role in decisions to remove the executive. These are the restrained Machines depicted by Weeks. In the second, the hybrid type I have been describing, the military is outside civilian control and has the ability to remove the leader. These regimes are likely to be more aggressive, since civilian leaders may be removed for opposing the use of force rather than for going to war unsuccessfully, and civilian elites cannot prevent the military from taking action. Although it is difficult to say for certain, two pieces of evidence suggest that these types of regimes are not uncommon in authoritarian states: (1) according to the Archigos dataset, of all leaders who were ousted by “irregular” (i.e., violent) means, slightly more than half were removed by military actors, [19] and (2) military Juntas are the least common type of regime in Weeks’s typology, [20] which implies that these coups are probably not limited to military-led regimes.In sum, Dictators at War and Peace is an excellent book, which makes a number of careful and interesting arguments about an important but understudied topic. Weeks makes the most convincing case yet that, like leaders of democracies, many autocratic leaders are accountable to domestic audiences who rein in riskier behavior and thus help prevent many of the worst foreign policy mistakes. The empirical analysis is admirably clear and consistently reasonable, even if the results are not always beyond dispute. Even where arguments are more open to question, whether in the analysis of Juntas or the existence of large numbers of autocracies that fall outside her empirical scope, Weeks’s work will provide a starting point for important future research. In short, this book is a major contribution that deserves to be read both widely and carefully. Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization, Winter 2008 (62.1) Public Opinion and Foreign Electoral Intervention” (with Michael Tomz) American Political Science Review 2020 Dictators at War and Peace pushes the domestic politics/international politics research agenda in a new direction. It asks whether different kinds of dictatorships conduct foreign policy differently. The book proposes that they do, and intriguingly finds that some kinds of dictatorships exhibit foreign policy behavior that converges with democratic foreign policy behavior.

Together, these existing approaches have resulted in misconceptions about how and why dictatorships make decisions about war and peace. This book, instead, exposes predictable patterns across different types of regimes, with important payoffs. Patterns of foreign policy decision-making are different in different kinds of autocracies, and the strategies policymakers use when confronting different types of leaders must therefore be tailored appropriately. The Vietnamese case differs from both of the above templates. Unlike the leaders of Iraq or Argentina, Vietnamese leaders Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan made decisions cautiously and shrewdly, using force only after lengthy internal debate. Their approach paid off: the United States withdrew in 1973, and Vietnam was reunified in 1975. It was a stunning defeat for the democratic side, and Le Duan’s reward for the victory was a long career as ruler of a united Vietnam. As an example, let me discuss the details of one case about which Weeks and I disagree. In Chapter 5, Weeks dismisses diversionary explanations for Argentine behavior leading up to the 1982 Falklands War. 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. Thus, Weeks dismisses fears of punishment as a motivator in Argentinean Junta leader General Galtieri’s decision making, pointing out that few of his direct predecessors in Argentina and his contemporary colleagues from Latin America suffered from punishment after they lost office. I would point out that Galtieri was indeed imprisoned. Relying on Archigos 2.9 [32], we also see that between 1945 and 1982, 121 South American leaders lost office. Of those, 60% lost office in a regular manner, and only about 10% of those suffered punishment in the form of exile. Roughly 38%, however, lost office in an irregular manner [33], and 76% of those faced severe punishment in the form of exile (52%), imprisonment (15%) and/or death (2%). Two lost office as a result of suicide. With such numbers in recent history, it seems eminently plausible that Galtieri feared an irregular removal from office and subsequent severe punishment. As Levy and Vakili and Chiozza and I have argued, Galtieri’s diversionary motives stemmed largely from a fear of an overthrow by Junta members, specifically Naval Minister Jorge L. Anaya. [34] This is a different line of argument to link the Falklands War to the survival of Galtieri, in office and beyond, than the standard fear of a popular revolt. It is not discussed in the book. [35] Overall, there is too little detail in the empirical chapters on both the novel mechanisms and on the mechanisms of the competing explanations to draw strong conclusions about the superiority of Weeks’s approach. The goal, as stated in Table 1.3, is nothing less than to explain the initiation of conflict, the probability of defeat, the probability of (post-conflict) punishment of the leader and/or regime members after a defeat, and the decision-making process in different authoritarian regimes (35). Building on Dan Slater’s conceptualization of regime types – e.g., distinguishing Bosses, Strongmen, Machines, and Juntas – Weeks argues that leaders of these different regimes systematically come to different conclusions about the combination of four central factors in decisions about war. [21] “First, actors form views about the benefits of winning compared to continuing on a nonmilitary pathway. … second, actors form perceptions of the costs of fighting, regardless of the outcome of the conflict. …. third, in addition to generic views about force, audiences and leaders have perceptions of the costs of defeat in a military challenge. …. finally, actors form estimates of the likelihood of winning a military contest” (15—16). Since these factors come together coherently, Weeks can use them to rank regimes from least to most likely on each of the proposed dependent variables, with for example Strongmen having the highest, Bosses, the second highest, Juntas the second lowest and Machines the lowest probability of conflict initiation. [22]The evidence in these chapters is ambiguous regarding Juntas, the second type of constrained autocracy. For example, Weeks finds that Juntas are significantly more likely than Machines and democracies to initiate MIDs, but not significantly more likely to win or lose wars. Leaders of Juntas also lose office at roughly the same rate as these other two regimes after losing a war. Juntas thus seem more constrained when it comes to war outcomes and the consequences of defeat, and less constrained in initiating military conflicts. See 44, 69, and 73. Lccn 2014021002 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9796 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000274 Openlibrary_edition Hein Goemans also comments in detail on the theory, though from a different angle. Goemans advocates building an argument more closely around the bargaining theory of war, which focuses on the puzzle of why states choose war rather than reaching a more efficient peaceful bargain. He writes that it is not necessary to “side-step the inefficiency puzzle of war to make predictions about the war-proneness of different authoritarian regime types,” and points to some of his own excellent work that builds on the bargaining model to explain variation across dictatorships. [43]

Reacting to the Olive Branch: Hawks, Doves, and Public Support for Cooperation” (with Michaela Mattes) International Organization 2022​ Strategic assessment will also be poor when political and military leaders share power but have largely convergent preferences. Strategic assessment will be fair when political leaders dominate and preference divergence is low, or when the military is dominant (preference divergence is less important when civilians have no say in strategic assessment). Brooks, Shaping Strategy, 7 and 42-53. Saburō Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 35-36; and Ronald H. Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 33.Authoritarian regimes and the domestic politics of war and peace -- Audiences, preferences, and decisions about war -- Hypotheses, implications, and cases -- Initiating international conflict -- Measuring authoritarian regime type -- Modeling the initiation of international conflict -- Results -- Winners, losers, and survival -- Selecting wars -- War outcomes in the past century -- Outcomes of militarized interstate disputes, 1946-2000 -- The consequences of defeat -- Personalist dictators: shooting from the hip -- Saddam Hussein and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait -- Josef Stalin: a powerful but loose cannon -- Juntas: using the only language they understand -- Argentina and the Falklands/Malvinas war -- Japan's road to World War II -- Machines: looking before they leap -- The North Vietnamese wars against the US, South Vietnam, and Cambodia -- The Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era -- Conclusion: dictatorship, war, and peace