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

Product Information

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. 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. The Constitution exempted the military from parliamentary control; the armed services answered only to the emperor, and “[n]o civilian control was ever allowed.

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. 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.

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). E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, N.

Weeks’s argument also differs from a second model of civil-military relations developed in the military effectiveness literature. Thus, I agree with Weisiger that one can rationalize the junta’s decision, but do not think that this undermines my conclusion that war was more likely because the decisionmakers stemmed from the military. In previous secret diplomacy, the British government had made clear that it was willing to cede the islands if the inhabitants agreed, and moreover expressed frustration at the islanders’ reluctance to go along. To assess the explanatory power of the time-invariant regime-type specific factors requires an evaluation of the counterfactual behavior of the other potential regime types.Downes’s commentary raises an important question about the theory, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify how I conceptualized and coded regime type. 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.

Weeks] makes readers insightfully aware of the key differences among 'dictatorships' that may account for alternative foreign policies. After conducting empirical tests, weeks runs through a number of case studies to show the mechanisms she outlines with the theory. Reading the book, it struck me that she seemed to suggest that different leaders may value the same good differently.

Wilhelmine Germany thus appears to be another example of a civilian-led regime that shared power with and—in important ways—could not control its military, which led to the adoption of a military strategy poorly suited to the country’s political needs, with ultimately devastating consequences in the First World War. Downes notes that I do not explicitly say that the leaders of juntas must be military officers themselves, though he points out that in one place in the text I imply this to be the case. Weeks assumes that civilians exert strong control over the military in Machines, but the quality of civil-military relations is a variable, not a constant. Future work might seek to integrate civil-military relations to provide additional nuance to Weeks’s typology.

The essays also provided very useful comments on the quantitative analyses of conflict initiation and conflict outcomes. D., University of Chicago, 2004) is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University.The intellectual depth of the reviewers’ discussions speaks to the magnitude of the contribution of Dictators at War and Peace. More importantly, the argument that the invasion was clearly going to be a diplomatic disaster but that the Junta’s predisposition toward military solutions led it to miss this obvious fact (114-115) neglects what were in fact quite rational bases for the Junta to have been both pessimistic about the utility of diplomacy and optimistic about the use of force. Any information that contradicts the leader’s beliefs about the international opponent may never reach a personalist leader who is surrounded by sycophants.