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

Product Information

third, in addition to generic views about force, audiences and leaders have perceptions of the costs of defeat in a military challenge.

It is particularly important for policy makers understand how and why certain dictatorships are more prone to war and less competent at it than their democratic counterparts. First, in the theory, all the variation that potentially drives variation in the use of force is between regime types; there are no time-varying factors or variables.Weeks differentiates authoritarian regimes that do not have an audience that can potentially punish the leader (personalist dictatorships) from authoritarian regimes that do have such audiences, but ignores the strategic interactions between domestic actors. 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.

While Japan provides a clear example of an aggressive military, its status as a Junta is more open to question given the importance of the civilian emperor and of civilian politicians.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. I am grateful that four extraordinary scholars—Daniel Reiter, Alexander Downes, Hein Goemans, and Alexander Weisiger took the time to provide such detailed and thought-provoking comments. On the more general side, Hein Goemans argues that all regimes vary along two dimensions—the risk versus the cost of removal from office a leader faces for foreign policy failure—and that different combinations of these two variables determine leaders’ decisions to initiate war as well as their wartime behavior. Machines and Juntas will thus not behave appreciably differently from democracies because their leaders cannot avoid being dislodged from power for their mistakes.

The argument in the book is that all else being equal, civilian decisionmakers faced with the same situation would not have been as likely to use military force. 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. Regimes in which leaders are vulnerable to removal fall into two types depending on whether both actors are civilians ( machines) or military officers ( juntas). According to my argument, Anaya was an important member of that audience, and I discuss his strong support for the operation explicitly through the case study.

In Alex Weisiger’s judgment, the results about juntas are less persuasive than those about the distinction between personalist and nonpersonalist regimes. The section on machine/party apparatus governments-particularly Vietnam-was the strongest part of the book. Of those, 60% lost office in a regular manner, and only about 10% of those suffered punishment in the form of exile. As a result, as Weeks notes, Japan’s civilian prime ministers were unable to prevent the military from starting or escalating wars, making Japan’s hybrid government much more warlike than Machines with civilian control of the military.

Regimes in which leaders are immune from removal differ only in whether the leader has a civilian ( boss) or military ( strongman) background. Case studies are a useful tool in tracing causal mechanisms, and in her book Weeks innovates relative to her earlier published work not just through an analysis of the factors that influence war outcome and post-conflict punishment in Chapter Three but also through presenting new qualitative evidence.As Weeks remarks about the latter episode, “the clash at Nomonhan was the product of poor civilian control over a Kwantung Army that represented the extremes of ‘militaristic’ thinking” (126). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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.