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

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One issue that these three essays skirt, and which I wish to touch on here, concerns the policy ramifications of Weeks’s argument. In her analysis of conflict initiation, Weeks finds that Machines are comparable to democracies, that Juntas are comparatively more likely to use force, but that personalists (especially Strongmen) are particularly likely to do so.

The new Prime Minister in 1937, Fumimaro Konoe, was not a military officer, there was no coup or seizure of power by the military, and the structure of the regime remained unchanged.There were elections and universal manhood suffrage, but the Chancellor served at the pleasure of the Kaiser and did not require the support of a majority of the Reichstag. 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. 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 significant caveat, of course, is that dictatorships such as North Korea that have no significant elite restrictions on their leaders remain dangerous. For example, Weeks reports that Juntas lost three out of eight wars in which they were involved, a rate that is lower than that for personalist regimes but higher than that for democracies and Machines. 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.While the focus of my theory is not on how regime type affects private information, commitment problems, or indivisible issues, my argument dovetails well with the bargaining model in its attention to the size of the bargaining range between two countries. 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. 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.

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. One significant result of the military’s autonomy in the German system was the mismatch between German political goals—such as keeping Britain on the sidelines of a European war—and its military strategy (the Schlieffen Plan)—which was predicated on violating Belgian neutrality, making it highly likely that Britain would enter any such war.

Jessica Weeks is Associate Professor and Trice Faculty Scholar in the department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.