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

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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 A second problem with using selectorate theory to explain differences among authoritarian regimes is its assumption that, conditional on coalition size, all actors perceive the world in the same way. ¹⁴ This assumption overlooks the great uncertainty that exists in decisions about international relations. If different types of regimes systematically empower actors with different perceptions of the costs and benefits of war, this could affect international bargaining in ways not explained by selectorate theory. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-04-17 16:00:32 Boxid IA40089823 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

One issue that these three essays skirt, and which I wish to touch on here, concerns the policy ramifications of Weeks’s argument. Especially since the end of Cold War, American foreign policy has stressed the importance of converting dictatorships into democracies, in part because, as Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush reiterated, democracies do not fight each other, and dictatorships are belligerent. Weeks’s book challenges this assumption, noting that some types of dictatorships, especially ‘Machine’ regimes led by civilian dictators who have to answer to elites, can be as peaceful as democracies. The book has a number of strengths. The clearly articulated theoretical argument makes a compelling case for focusing on the two central variables – domestic audiences and civilian vs. military outlooks – as particularly salient determinants of autocrats’ foreign policies. The integration of institutional and dispositional variables is a nice contribution that helps to advance the now well-established literature on the independent effect of leaders on foreign policy. The statistical analysis is thorough and sophisticated, yet simultaneously presented in a way that ensures that the reader can clearly assess the implications of important decisions about variable coding and statistical specification. The case studies complement this analysis nicely; for example, the carefully detailed review of the extensive consultation that North Vietnamese leaders undertook during the Vietnam War makes for a compelling case that responsibility to a broader audience was largely responsible for the effective North Vietnamese military strategy. In short, the book will be a standard for people interested in the foreign policy of non-democracies.Military Alliances and Public Support for War” (with Michael Tomz) International Studies Quarterly 2021 I will begin by responding to comments about the theory. Alexander Downes focuses much of his discussion on the book’s typology of authoritarian regimes. As he notes, I differentiate regimes around two dimensions: first, whether or not the leader faces a powerful domestic audience, and second, whether the key decisionmakers in the regime are civilians or military officers. Leaders of personalist boss and strongman regimes do not face powerful domestic audiences and therefore face relatively few domestic constraints in their foreign policy decisions, while leaders of nonpersonalist civilian machines and military juntas are accountable to politically important domestic groups that shape their decisions about war and peace. 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. Weeks argues that we can best understand the foreign policies of these regimes by considering the implications of two central axes along which they vary: whether the leader is accountable to a domestic audience with the capacity to punish him, and whether the key policymakers are civilians or members of the military. At one extreme, Machines like contemporary China, in which leaders are accountable to a civilian audience, are effectively indistinguishable from democracies, if anything more cautious about the use of force and more likely to win the wars that they fight. Because leaders of juntas also must worry about punishment in the event of foreign policy failure, they too are relatively cautious about the use of force, though their military outlook leaves them more likely to see resort to violence as appropriate. By contrast, personalist leaders, both civilian Bosses and military Strongmen, face little prospect of punishment for foreign policy failure, and thus can afford to engage in speculative gambles.

How Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Transforms Public Support for War" (with Michael Tomz and Kirk Bansak) PNAS-Nexus 2023 Public Opinion and Decisions about Military Force in Democracies” (with Michael Tomz and Keren Yarhi-Milo), International Organization 2020 (74:1)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] Answering these questions is important for those tasked with understanding the behavior of authoritarian regimes. Yet current scholarship provides few systematic answers. As a result, scholars and policymakers have several competing but incorrect views of how domestic politics affect the foreign policy behavior of dictatorships. Weeks, for example, characterizes “nonpersonalist civilian machines” as being governed by “civilian leaders and elites.” (19). Although I was unable to find an explicit statement that the leaders of Juntas must be military officers, Weeks strongly implies this when she writes, “the core domestic audience in Juntas is composed of other military officers” (6). (emphasis added). One could argue that the leader of a junta must, by definition, be a military officer. 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. Finally, Goemans raises the question of whether the research design I chose for Chapter 2, which focuses on directed-dyad-years as the unit of analysis, is appropriate for assessing my theory, which is monadic. It is true that my theory focuses on how domestic politics in one country affect its conflict behavior overall, rather than delving into how different authoritarian regime types interact with each other. It is also true that the unit of analysis in Chapter 2 is the directed dyad-year rather than the country-year. However, the dependent variable is conflict initiation by Side A of the dyad, and the explanatory variables measure regime type for Side A. Thus, the tests are about the monadic effect of regime type, regardless of the target’s regime type. Why then, one could ask, not use a smaller, simpler dataset? The reason is that an enormous literature suggests that the strongest predictors of international conflict are dyadic in nature. [49] For example, geographic proximity, shared interests, and trade levels have all been argued to affect interstate relations. To try to boil these down to the monadic level would leave the analysis open to critiques of omitted variable bias, which is why I opted for the dyadic approach that is the most common for analyzing the onset of military disputes (I also included fixed effects in the analyses). Nonetheless, I hope that future research will evaluate whether and how the conclusions change given different ways of approaching the empirical analysis.

Alex Weisiger is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His published research examines war termination, explanations for particularly destructive interstate wars, the democratic peace, and reputation. His book, Logics of War: Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Conflicts, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013. Review by Alexander B. Downes, The George Washington University Goemans raises different questions about the conclusions I draw from the Argentine case. He argues that I do not engage enough with an alternative diversionary explanation for the war, namely that that General Galtieri had reason to fear severe punishment (such as death, imprisonment, or exile) if he lost office, which he expected would come at the hands of naval minister Jorge Anaya if he did not make progress on the Falklands. [44] This, he points out, is different from the more common diversionary interpretation, in which the junta went to war because it feared a domestic revolt. 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.

In her excellent book, Jessica Weeks advances a clear and generally compelling argument about how important variations among autocracies affect decisions about the use of force. International relations scholars have long been interested in the implications of democracy for foreign policy, whether in classical realist arguments that democracies are ill-suited to the effective conduct of power politics or in more recent arguments that democracies are both good at managing their relations with one another and particularly effective at war. [36] In this discussion, non-democracies have constituted a residual category, collecting together countries as varied as Tsarist Russia, communist China, and contemporary Somalia. It is only recently, however, that systematic analyses of variation among autocracies have emerged. The Generalizability of IR Experiments Beyond the U.S." (with Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Chagai Weiss, and Jonathan Renshon) As with any collection of case studies, one can always ask 'but what about...?' I personally understand what it is like to write about IR and history and know that there is no way in hell you can cover every base-nor should you. Despite this though, I would have loved to have seen the quite placid personalist boss rule regimes of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan included, even if only to dismiss them as being too under Russia's wing to have much autonomy. But it seems entirely plausible to propose that leaders value the same good differentially because it brings them different private benefits [27] of war, thereby eliminating the bargaining range. Alternatively, variation in regime type could be linked to variation in private information, incentives to misrepresent, or commitment problems. It could be argued that personalist regimes, in particular Bosses like Saddam Hussein or Stalin, make decisions in such isolation that information about their preferences and calculations is limited to a very few individuals, leaving the dictator with more private information than other authoritarian leaders. In turn, the international opponent of such a leader might also have `more’ private information about his capabilities and resolve. Any information that contradicts the leader’s beliefs about the international opponent may never reach a personalist leader who is surrounded by sycophants. Thus, even when dealing with a complicated four-way regime typology it seems by no means necessary to bypass the bargaining model of war. 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. Weeks writes that while “autocratic audiences may approve of the use of force if the benefits outweigh the costs, they are no less wary of the possibility of defeat than they democratic counterparts and do not see systematically greater gains from fighting” (22). In her view, such audiences by and large restrain leaders from going to war or initiating a dispute (22-23). 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. As Giacomo Chiozza and I argue, it is the time-varying (an issue to which I return below) threat of domestic punishment that can make war a rational gamble for resurrection. [28] If the peacetime threat of domestic punishment is high, the use of force with the potential for political domestic rewards in the case of victory can be a rational gamble, even if defeat carries a high concomitant likelihood of punishment. The truncation of punishment is key. 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.