Two thousand five hundred years ago, Sun Tzu literally wrote the book on how to wage war. Although his advice has been influential to leaders down through the centuries, leading American foreign policy advisers have contradicted his war-fighting doctrines.

Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, George W. Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell, and, with slight modifications, Bill Clinton’s second secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, all prescribe a doctrine of when and how the United States should fight. And it differs radically from the time-tested advice of Sun Tzu.

The reason Sun Tzu has served so many leaders so well over twenty-five centuries is that his is the right advice for kings, chieftains, and autocrats of every shape to follow. Until recently, and with very few exceptions, small-coalition systems have been the dominant form of government. But these are the wrong policies for a leader beholden to many. Democratic war fighting emphasizes public welfare, exactly as should be the case when advising a leader who relies on a large coalition. Sun Tzu’s advice is exactly right for a small-coalition leader. To see this, let’s have a look at the ideas expressed by Sun Tzu and Caspar Weinberger.

Sun Tzu contended to his king, Ho Lu of Wu, that:

The skillful general does not raise a second levy, neither are his supply wagons loaded more than twice. Once war is declared, he will not waste precious time in waiting for reinforcements, nor will he turn his army back for fresh supplies, but crosses the enemy’s frontier without delay. The value of time—that is, being a little ahead of your opponent—has counted for more than either numerical superiority or the nicest calculations with regard to commissariat.... Now, in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger. For them to perceive the advantage of defeating the enemy, they must also have their rewards. Thus, when you capture spoils from the enemy, they must be used as rewards, so that all your men may have a keen desire to fight, each on his own account.²

In contrast to Sun Tzu’s perspective, Caspar Weinberger maintained that:

First, the United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies....

Second, if we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning. If we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit them at all....

Third, if we do decide to commit forces to combat overseas, we should have clearly defined political and military objectives. And we should know precisely how our forces can accomplish those clearly defined objectives. And we should have and send the forces needed to do just that....

Fourth, the relationship between our objectives and the forces we have committed—their size, composition, and disposition—must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary. Conditions and objectives invariably change during the course of a conflict. When they do change, then so must our combat requirements....

Fifth, before the United States commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress....

Finally, the commitment of US forces to combat should be a last resort.³

Sun Tzu’s ideas can coarsely be summarized as follows: (1) an advantage in capabilities is not as important as quick action in war; (2) the resources mobilized to fight should be sufficient for a short campaign that does not require reinforcement or significant additional provisions from home; and (3) the provision of private goods is essential to motivate soldiers to fight. Sun Tzu says that if the army initially raised proves insufficient or if new supplies are required more than once, then the commanders lack sufficient skill to carry the day. In that case, he advises that it is best to give up the fight rather than risk exhausting the state’s treasure.

Weinberger’s doctrine does not emphasize swift victory, but rather a willingness to spend however much is needed to achieve victory, a point made even more emphatically in the Powell Doctrine. Weinberger and Powell argue that the United States should not get involved in any war in which it is not prepared to commit enough resources to win. They, and Madeleine Albright too, argue for being very cautious about risking war. Once a decision is made to take that risk, then, as Weinberger (and Powell) recognize, the United States must be prepared to raise a larger army and to spend more treasure if necessitated by developments on the ground. War should only be fought with confidence that victory will follow and that victory serves the interests of the American people.

Sun Tzu emphasizes the benefits of spoils to motivate combatants (“when you capture spoils from the enemy, they must be used as rewards, so that all your men may have a keen desire to fight, each on his own account”). Weinberger emphasizes the public good of protecting vital national interests. For Sun Tzu, the interest soldiers have in the political objectives behind a fight or their concern for the common good is of no consequence in determining their motivation to wage war. That is why he emphasizes that soldiers fight, “each on his own account.”

Sun Tzu’s attentiveness to private rewards and Weinberger’s concentration on the public good of protecting the national interest (however that may be understood) represent the great divide between small-coalition and large-coalition regimes. Our view of politics instructs us to anticipate that leaders who depend on lots of essential backers only fight when they believe victory is nearly certain. Otherwise, they look for ways to resolve their international differences peacefully. Leaders who rely only on a few essential supporters, in contrast, are prepared to fight even when the odds of winning are not particularly good. Democratic leaders try hard to win if the going gets tough. Autocrats make a good initial effort and if that proves wanting they quit. These strategies are clearly in evidence if we consider the Six Day War in 1967.

To understand the war and how our way of thinking explains it, we must first comprehend some basic facts about the adversaries. The combined armed forces of the Arab combatants on the eve of war came to 360,000, compared to Israel’s 75,000; that is, the Israeli side represented only 17 percent of the available soldiers.⁴ The Arab combatants accounted for 61 percent of the national military expenditures of the two sides. For starters, comparing these two sets of values already tells us something very important that reflects a fundamental difference between large-coalition and small-coalition governments. Although the Arab side had 83 percent of the soldiers, they spent considerably less per soldier than did the Israelis.

Remember that large-coalition leaders must keep a broad swath of the people happy. In war that turns out to mean that democrats must care about the people and, of course, soldiers are people. Although conflict involves putting soldiers at risk, democrats do what they can to mitigate such risk. In autocracies, foot soldiers are not politically important. Autocrats do not waste resources protecting them.

The difference in expenditures per soldier is greater even than the numbers alone indicate. The Israeli military, like the military of democracies in general, spends a lot of its money on buying equipment that is heavily armored to protect soldiers. Better training and equipment enable democracies to leverage the impact of each soldier so they can achieve the same military output while at the same time putting few soldiers at risk.⁵ The Egyptian military’s tanks, troop transports, and other equipment were lightly and cheaply armored. They preferred to spend money on private rewards with which to ensure the loyalty of the generals and colonels.

Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt’s president at the time, was not elected by the people; he was sustained in office by a small coterie of generals whose own welfare depended on the survival of his regime. For that reason, he was not beholden to the wives and mothers who scream about the avoidable deaths of their loved ones. Israeli prime ministers are elected by those mothers and wives, and this is reflected in the superior equipment, armor, and training given to Israeli soldiers. Give our troops the best, is a democratic refrain. This was why there was such a stink about US soldiers having insufficient body armor in Iraq and Afghanistan, and why the United States rushed to fix this deficiency, even if in some cases the extra armor made some vehicles so heavy that they became close to inoperable.

A bit of close reasoning shows us that making an extra effort to win the war made tons of sense for the Israelis and no sense at all for their opponents. Let’s have a look at why it is that democrats, like Israel’s prime minister Levi Eshkol, try hard to win wars and autocrats, like Egypt’s Nasser, don’t. Indeed, we will see that for a small-coalition autocrat like Nasser it could even make more sense to lose the war but keep on paying off his cronies than to win the war if doing so came at the cost of asking the cronies to sacrifice their personal private rewards.

In a small-coalition regime, the military serves two crucial functions. It keeps the incumbent safe from domestic rivals and it tries to protect the incumbent’s government from foreign threats. In a large-coalition government, the military pretty much only has to worry about the latter function. Sure, it might be called upon to put down some massive domestic unrest from time to time, but its job is to protect the system of government and not the particular group running the government. Its job description does not include taking out legitimate domestic political rivals. Autocrats, of course, don’t recognize any rivals as legitimate. And to do their job in an autocracy, as Sun Tzu eloquently argued, the soldiers must have their rewards. If they don’t they might turn the guns on the leadership that employed them to keep rivals at bay. With that in mind we can begin to unravel the seeming surprise of a larger military, backed by a larger gross domestic product—$5.3 billion derived from 30 million people in 1967 Egypt, compared to $4 billion generated by only 2.6 million Israelis—losing to a puny state.

Imagine that the Israeli government spent as much as 10 percent of its revenue on private rewards, probably a high estimate. Imagine that the Egyptian government spent 30 percent of its revenue on private rewards; that is, more than the Israelis as befits the comparison of large- and small-coalition regimes that we have seen in the earlier chapters. Then how valuable did winning have to be for Israel’s coalition and for Egypt’s coalition to justify trying so hard that it meant spending extra money on the war effort?

Anticipating the high risk of war, the usually fractious Israelis formed a unity government in May 1967, reflecting the national commitment to win the coming war. We know the government allocated $381 million to the military in 1967. That means, given our assumptions, that $38 million of that pot of money might have been available for private rewards to the government’s winning coalition. Of course, even more would have been available across the whole economy (both in Egypt and in Israel) but we focus just on money committed to the military in 1967, thereby understating our case. Being a unity government it is likely that the Israeli winning coalition was very large, but we will err on the side of conservatism and assume that the government needed just 25 percent of the population to sustain it. That puts the winning coalition’s size at roughly 650,000 people. With these numbers in mind, we see that the potential value of private rewards taken from the military budget for government supporters in Israel would have been less than $60 a head ($381 million in military expenditures x 10 percent for private rewards/650,000 coalition members = $58.62 per coalition member).

Each member of Israel’s coalition could have had a choice: take the private reward or agree to put that money toward the war effort. Putting it toward the war effort would certainly have increased the odds of victory, an attractive public good to offset the small private gain that would be sacrificed by each individual in the coalition. Surely each of the relevant 650,000 Israelis would have put a greater value on military victory than a paltry $58.62!

Compare this calculation to that for Egyptians in Nasser’s winning coalition. We did a pilot study a few years ago in which we surveyed country experts about the size of several governments’ winning coalitions from 1955 to 2008. The experts we interviewed about Egypt placed its winning coalition as being as small as 8 members and as many as 65 in 1967. Wherever one comes down in that range it is obvious that the coalition was very small. We suspect the experts may have underestimated its size so we will err, again, on the side of conservatism and assume it was as many as 1,000 key military officers and essential senior civil servants. Even with our conservative estimate, each coalition member stood to get $150,000 in private rewards ($500 million in military expenditures x 30 percent for private rewards/ 1,000 coalition members = $150,000 per coalition member) if the funds out of the military budget that were available for that use were turned over to them instead of being applied to making a concerted increased effort to win the war. Whereas Israeli coalition members were only asked to sacrifice about $60 to help their country win the war, Egypt’s coalition members would have had to personally give up $150,000 in income to help their country win. It should be obvious that Nasser would likely have lost the loyal support of lots of his key backers if he took their $150,000 a head and spent it on the war instead of on them. He actually would have increased his chance of being overthrown in a military coup by making an all-out effort to win the war at the expense of his cronies. His backers would have had to place a value on winning the war that was worth their personally giving up $150,000. Victory is nice, but it probably isn’t that nice for many people. Levi Eshkol faced no such problem. His supporters were much more likely to place a value on victory that was greater than $58.62.

Of course, Israel did not just fight Egypt. It took on Syria and Jordan at the same time. Here again the logic for its victory is the same. As Ryszard Kapuscinski describes, Israel simply tried harder.

Why did the Arabs lose the 1967 war? A lot has been said on that subject. You could hear that Israel won because Jews are brave and Arabs are cowards. Jews are intelligent, and Arabs are primitive. The Jews have better weapons, and the Arabs worse. All of it untrue! The Arabs are also intelligent and brave and they have good weapons. The difference lay elsewhere—in the approach to war, in varying theories of war. In Israel, everybody takes part in war, but in the Arab countries—only the army. When war breaks out, everyone in Israel goes to the front and civilian life dies out. While in Syria, many people did not find out about the 1967 war until it was over. And yet Syria lost its most important strategic area, the Golan Heights, in that war. Syria was losing the Golan Heights and at the same time, that same day, that same hour, in Damascus—twenty kilometres from the Golan Heights—the cafes were full of people, and others were walking around, worrying about whether they would find a free table. Syria lost fewer than 100 soldiers in the 1967 war. A year earlier, 200 people had died in Damascus during a palace coup. Twice as many people die because of a political quarrel as because of a war in which the country loses its most important territory and the enemy approaches within shooting distance of the capital.⁶

Kapuscinki’s numbers are wrong, since about 2,500 Syrians were killed in the war, but his point is not. Autocrats don’t squander precious resources on the battlefield. And elite well-equipped units are more for crushing domestic opposition than they are fighting a determined foreign foe. Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, did just that. In February 1982, he deployed around 12,000 soldiers to besiege the city of Hama in response to an uprising of a conservative religious group, the Muslim Brotherhood. After three weeks of shelling, the city was destroyed and tens of thousands of civilians were massacred.

When they need to, democracies try hard. However, often they don’t need to. Indeed they are notorious for being bullies and picking on weaker states, and negotiating whenever they are confronted by a worthy adversary. Thus the United States readily fights small adversaries like Grenada, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, and many democracies expanded their influence in the world by colonizing the weak. But when it came to the Soviet Union, the United States and its democratic, NATO allies negotiated whether the dispute was over Cuba, issues in Europe, or elsewhere in the world. Indeed, the cold war stayed cold precisely because the United States, a large-coalition regime, even with enormous effort, could not be confident of victory. When extra effort does make victory likely, as in the Iraqi surge, democrats try hard.

Unfortunately, sometimes negotiations fail, as was the case when Britain and France sought to appease Adolf Hitler before World War II. They agreed to Germany occupying Austria and the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. Even when he invaded Poland, some in Britain hesitated to declare war. No concession, however, was sufficient to satisfy Hitler’s appetite for Lebensraum. This left Britain and France with a very serious fight on their hands, and one in which Britain tried enormously hard. In contrast, Germany did not switch its economy onto a full war footing until the later stages of the war when it was clear to Hitler and his cronies that their government’s survival—and their personal survival—was at risk.

In other cases the fight turns out to be significantly more difficult than initially thought. US involvement in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan would be just such cases. When confronted by these difficult fights democracies increase their effort. In Vietnam, the United States continually reassessed the resources needed to win before negotiating a settlement with North Vietnam, only to see that agreement collapse a year after American withdrawal. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has needed troop surges to advance its objectives. That is, the United States follows Weinberger’s counsel and not Sun Tzu’s time-tested advice. Autocratic leaders are wary of expending resources on the war effort, even if victory demands it. They know their fate depends more upon the loyalty of their coalition than success on the battlefield. They don’t generally make that extra effort.

World War I provides a great case study in these principles. Its origins are complex and contentious, so we limit ourselves to describing the chain of events. The war started as a dispute between Austria and Serbia after Serbian nationalists murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in June 1914. When Austria threatened war, Serbia’s ally, Russia, became involved. This activated Germany’s alliance with Austria. Given that war with Russia also meant war with her ally, France, the Germans launched a rapid invasion of France in the hope of quickly defeating it, as they had in 1871. The German invasion of France went through Belgium, and, since the British had pledged to protect Belgium’s neutrality, this brought Britain in on the side of the allies.

A tangled web! Although many nations were involved, the war was basically a struggle between the central powers of Austria and Germany and the allied powers of France, Russia, and Britain. After a dynamic beginning—the war was famously supposed to be over by Christmas—the conflict stagnated and devolved into trench warfare, particularly on the Western Front. Russia dropped out of the war in late 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution. Doing so cost it enormous amounts of its Western territory, but the political genius of Lenin knew it was better to preserve resources to pay supporters than it was to carry on fighting. In late 1917, the United States entered the war on the allied side.⁷ Allied victory was sealed with an armistice signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

Figure 9.1 plots the military expenditures of the primary combatants. ⁸ On a per capita basis, Russia spent less than the others. It was both massive and poor. Of these nations only Britain and France were democratic. After the war started in 1914, all combatants ramped up their military spending. However, after 1915, the autocratic nations didn’t increase their effort much and their expenditures plateaued as the war dragged on. German spending does increase again in 1917 as it becomes clear that defeat will mean the replacement of the German government. In contrast to the meager efforts by autocracies like Austria and Russia, the democracies continue to increase expenditure until victory was achieved.

FIGURE 9.1 Military Expenditures in World War I

Sun Tzu’s advice to his king predicts the behavior of autocrats in World War I: they didn’t make an extraordinary effort to win. The effort by the democratic powers in that same war equally foreshadowed what Caspar Weinberger and so many other American advisers have said to their president: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

When it comes to fighting wars, institutions matter at least as much as the balance of power. The willingness of democracies to try harder goes a long way to explaining why seemingly weaker democracies often overcome seemingly stronger autocracies. The United States was once a weak nation. And yet, in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) it defeated the much larger, better-trained, and highly favored Mexican army. The miniscule Republic of Venice survived for over a thousand years until it was finally defeated by Napoleon in 1797. Despite its small size and limited resources it fought above its weight class throughout the Middle Ages. It played a crucial role in the Fourth Crusade that led to the sacking of Constantinople, in which Venice captured the lion’s share of the Byzantine Empire’s wealth. The smaller, but more democratic government of Bismarck’s Prussia defeated the larger—widely favored—Austrian monarchy in the Seven Weeks War in 1866. Prussia then went on to defeat Louis Napoleon’s monarchical France in the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War. And as we have seen, tiny Israel has repeatedly beaten its larger neighbors. History is full of democratic Davids beating autocratic Goliaths.

Fighting for Survival

Autocrats and democrats, at one level, fight over the exact same thing: staying in power. At another level, they are motivated to fight over different things. Democrats more often than autocrats fight when all other means of gaining policy concessions from foreign foes fail. In contrast, autocrats are more likely to fight casually, in the pursuit of land, slaves, and treasure.

This has important implications. As Sun Tzu suggested, autocrats are likely to grab what they can and return home. On the other hand, democrats fight where they have policy concerns, be these close to home, or, as can be the case, in far-flung lands. Further, once they have won, democrats are likely to hang around to enforce the policy settlement. Frequently this can mean deposing vanquished rivals and imposing puppet regimes that will do their policy bidding.⁹

Thinking back to our discussion of foreign aid, we can see that war for democrats is just another way of achieving the goals for which foreign aid would otherwise be used. Foreign aid buys policy concessions; war imposes them. Either way, this also means that democrats, eager as they are to deliver desired policies to the folks back home, would much prefer to impose a compliant dictator (surely with some bogus trappings of democracy like elections that ensure the outcome desired by the democrat) than take their chances on the policies adopted by a democrat who must answer to her own domestic constituents.

The idea that democrats and autocrats fight for their own political survival may seem awfully cynical at best and downright offensive at worst. Nevertheless we believe the evidence also shows this is the way the world of politics, large and small, actually works. A look at the First Gulf War will validate all of our suspicions.

Before 1990, relations between Iraq and Kuwait had long been fractious. Iraq claimed that Kuwait, with its efficient modern oil export industry, had been pumping oil from under Iraq’s territory. On numerous occasions it had demanded compensation and threatened to invade. After misreading confused signals from US president George H. W. Bush (on previous occasions the United States had deployed a naval fleet to the region in response to Iraqi threats but had also told Iraq’s government that what it did in Kuwait was of no concern to the United States), Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded and occupied Kuwait in August 1990. His goal was to exploit its oil wealth for the benefit of himself and his cronies—fairly typical for an autocrat at war. However, despite initially confused signals, the United States did not look the other way: President Bush organized an international coalition, and in January 1991 launched Operation Desert Storm to displace Iraqi forces.

The goals and conduct of each side in the First Gulf War differed greatly. In contrast to Hussein’s motives, President Bush did not attempt to grab oil wealth to enrich cronies. Rather, the goal was to promote stability in the Middle East and restore the reliable, undisrupted flow of oil. Protestors against the war would chant “no blood for oil.” It would be naïve to argue that energy policy was not a major, if not the major, determinant of US policy in the Middle East, but it was not an exchange of soldiers’ lives for oil wealth. The objective was to protect the flow of oil, which is the energy running the machines of the world’s economy. Economic stability, not private gain, was the goal of the coalition. To be sure, soldiers from the United States and other coalition members died, although in very small numbers. Of the 956,600 coalition troops in Iraq, the total number of casualties was 358, of which nearly half were killed in noncombat accidents. In contrast, Iraq experienced tens of thousands of casualties. These coalition deaths brought concessions from Saddam Hussein, not booty.

The conduct of the First Gulf War also fits the patterns predicted by a political survival outlook. The United States first tried negotiations to get Iraqi forces to leave. When these failed, the United States assembled an overwhelmingly powerful coalition of highly trained and superbly equipped troops. Saddam Hussein had elite troops, such as the Republican Guard, that perhaps came close to matching the training and capability of coalition forces. But his elite Republican Guard did not confront the coalition forces; Saddam had them pulled back to safety so they could protect him rather than protect Iraq. Instead the brunt of the coalition attack was borne by raw recruits and poorly equipped units. As the casualty figures show, many of these units suffered horribly.

Facing the possibility that coalition forces would invade Baghdad to depose him, on February 28 Saddam Hussein agreed to terms of surrender. The United States retained forces in the Gulf to ensure Saddam complied with the terms to which he had agreed. Yet no-fly exclusion zones, diplomatic isolation, and economic sanctions did not stop Saddam from repeatedly reneging on the agreement he accepted. He also survived domestically. After his military defeat, several groups, including Shiites in the South and Kurds in the North, rebelled. Unfortunately for them, Saddam had preserved his best troops and retained enough resources to buy their continued loyalty. The suppression of these uprisings killed tens of thousands and led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of others. Saddam would subsequently remain in power until the United States deposed him in the Second Gulf War in 2003.

Saddam was not alone in placing survival and enrichment over fighting well. Dictators would like to win wars if they can secure control over extra riches that way, but keeping their job takes priority over pursuing those riches. Mengistu Haile Mariam, who came to power in 1974 when he overthrew Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, embraced communism and was handsomely rewarded by the Soviet Union. Over a fourteen-year period the USSR gave his regime about $9 billion, much of it as military aid with which to fight Eritrean rebel forces seeking independence. Despite all this money, his war against the Eritreans did not go well. It seems Mengistu was more interested in the Soviet money as a means to enrich himself and ensure his political survival than in the successful conduct of the war. He certainly had little concern for his soldiers’ welfare, as we shall see later. Michela Wrong, for instance, reports that the Soviets eventually worked out that Mengistu’s devotion to the fight was not all it was cracked up to be: “‘He kept telling us that if we helped him he could achieve this military victory,’ remembers Adamishin, with bitterness. ‘I remember how he told me with tears in his eyes: “We may have to sell our last shirt, but we will pay you back. We Ethiopians are a proud people, we settle our debts.” Looking back, I almost feel I hate him. Because I believed that what mattered to him was what was best for the country. While really all that mattered to him was his own survival.’”¹⁰

Unfortunately for Mengistu Haile Miriam, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of his gravy train. In 1989 the Soviets departed. Mengistu needed a new source of money. In an effort to salvage his situation, he decided to try to get blood money from the United States and Israel by offering to trade Ethiopian Jews (Falashas) for money and military aid. The Falashas dated back in North Africa for thousands of years and are counted among those who fled from the Babylonian captivity in 586 BCE. To resettle these people, the United States allegedly paid $20 million and Israel agreed to pay $58 million (but eventually only paid $35 million). With the money transferred, the rescued Falashas were then settled in Israel.¹¹ This blood money was not enough to buy the loyalty of his supporters. It was a far cry from the annual amounts doled out by the Soviets. As his military collapsed to the much weaker Eritrean forces, Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, where he lives in luxury with around fifty former colleagues and family members.

Who Survives War

Democrats are much more sensitive to war outcomes than autocrats.¹² Indeed, even victory in war does not guarantee a democrat’s political survival. For instance, within eighteen months of defeating Saddam Hussein, and the over 80 percent approval ratings that went with it, President George Herbert Walker Bush was defeated at the polls by Bill Clinton in 1992. Similarly, British voters threw Winston Churchill out of office despite his inspired leadership during World War II. Still, while it is no guarantee of political survival, military victory clearly helps. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher turned her career around with the defeat of Argentina in the Falklands war in 1982. Her economic reforms and confrontations with trade unions had led to recession and high unemployment. Prior to the war she was deeply unpopular. At the end of 1981 her approval rating stood at 25 percent. After the war this jumped to over 50 percent, and a year later she won a decisive electoral victory that would have looked virtually impossible eighteen months earlier.

Military success helps democrats retain power while defeat makes removal a near certainty for democrats. A failure to achieve victory in Vietnam ended US president Johnson’s career. French premier Joseph Laniel suffered a similar fate. His government collapsed following the French defeat by Vietnamese forces in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. British prime minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign after his disastrous invasion of Egypt’s Suez Canal Zone in 1956.

Autocrats are much less sensitive to defeat. Despite defeat in the First Gulf War and a costly and inconclusive result in the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), Saddam Hussein outlasted four US presidents (Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton). Only defeat in the Second Gulf War cost him his job, and that war was fought primarily to remove him. Unless they are defeated by a democracy seeking policy concessions, autocrats can generally survive military defeat provided that they preserve their resources. Autocrats even survive if their loss involves huge causalities. In contrast, even in victory democrats are liable to be deposed if they get lots of soldiers killed in the process. That presumably is why democrats do much more to protect soldiers than autocrats do.

Hermann Goring, Hitler’s number two in the Nazi German regime, knew that, while it is the people who do the fighting, it is leaders who start wars.

Naturally the common people don’t want war. . . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.¹³

Goring is right. Leaders of every flavor can deploy troops and the people in democracies are liable to rally around the flag. But democrats don’t recklessly put soldiers in harm’s way. And when they do, they do much more to protect them. The value of a soldier’s life differs drastically between small- and large-coalition systems. To illustrate this sad truth we compare two conflicts fought a few years apart in the Horn of Africa.

The US military operates on the principle of no soldier left behind. For an accurate and gory drama of this principle, we recommend Ridley Scott’s 2001 film, Black Hawk Down, which portrays an account of the battle of Mogadishu, October 3–4, 1993. US troops entered Somalia as part of a United Nations–sponsored humanitarian mission. In 1993 Somalia was a collapsed state. Between 1969 and 1991 it had been ruled by Siad Barre, someone who understood that policy should always be subordinate to survival. As the real-life Barre bluntly stated, “I believe neither in Islam, nor socialism nor tribalism, nor Somali nationalism, nor pan-Africanism. The ideology to which I am committed is the ideology of political survival.”¹⁴ And this focus allowed him to successfully survive in office for twenty-two years before being caught up and deposed in the myriad of civil wars that plague the Horn of Africa. Following his deposition, the Somali state collapsed, with control divided between tribal warlords whose militia terrorized the people. Mohamed Farrah Aideed, who led the Habar Gidir clan, controlled one of the strongest factions. Aideed was strongly opposed to the United States’s presence in Somalia because he believed the United States was backing his adversaries. After several failed attempts to capture or kill Aideed, the United States received intelligence that several of his senior colleagues were meeting at a house. The US plan was to helicopter elite troops into the building, capture the senior Habar Gidir members, and get out via a military convoy.

Unfortunately the mission went sour. Two Black Hawk helicopters went down and two others were damaged. Thousands of Somalis took to the streets and erected barricades so that the convoy became trapped. Both the helicopter crews and many in the convoy became trapped overnight and subject to small-arms fire, and it was not until the next day that they could be rescued. Although the operation was a debacle, the US commitment to its soldiers was unwavering. As is to be expected when soldiers’ lives are highly valued, the United States sent forces in to retrieve the downed helicopter crews. We might take this for granted but it is not the behavior of autocrats—the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict in the Horn of Africa provides a case in point.

The Battle of Afabet (March 17–20, 1988) was an important turning point in the decades-long battle for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia. As we have seen, Ethiopia had an enormous military of about 500,000 men that was lavishly equipped by Soviet military aid. In contrast, virtually all the Eritrean’s equipment had been captured from the Ethiopians.

In a switch from its usual guerrilla tactics, the Eritrean rebel force (the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, or EPLF) decided to challenge the Ethiopian army in a head-on battle. The Ethiopians resisted solidly for sixteen hours. On multiple occasions the EPLF commander, Mesfin, was told to withdraw but he carried on pressing his attack. The Ethiopian commanders decided to withdraw to the garrison town of Afabet and assembled a convoy of seventy vehicles. Unfortunately for them, the withdrawal went through the Ad Shirum Pass that forms a natural bottleneck. When an advancing EPLF tank hit a truck in the front of the column, the Ethiopian forces were stuck.

The Ethiopian command was concerned that their heavy weapons not fall into enemy hands. Fortunately for them they had a sizable air force. Yet, rather than attempt to relieve their trapped countrymen and fellow soldiers, they embarked on a two-hour aerial bombardment that destroyed everything. The Ethiopian motto was: Leave no working tank behind. As an Ethiopian general put it, “when you lose an area you better destroy your equipment—it’s a principle of war. If you cannot separate your men from their equipment then you bomb them both together.”¹⁵

It’s likely that few readers have ever heard of this battle, in which Ethiopian causalities were perhaps as high as 18,000 men. In contrast, many Americans are familiar with the disastrous policy failure in which, for the loss of thirteen lives, the US army killed possibly as many as 1,000 Somali militants.

The Peace Between Democracies

Democracies hardly ever (some might even say never) fight wars with each other. This is not to say they are peace loving. They are not shy about fighting other states. But the reasoning behind the tacit peace between democracies provides some clues to how the world could become more peaceful and why achieving that end is so difficult.

Democratic leaders need to deliver policy success or they will be turned out of office. For this reason they only fight wars when they expect to win. Of course they may turn out to be wrong, in which case, as we have argued, they then double down to turn the fight in their direction. That is just what happened in Vietnam, where the United States committed massive numbers of troops and huge amounts of money to no avail. Only after many long, costly years of trying did the United States settle for a negotiated peace that ultimately turned all of Vietnam over to the North Vietnamese regime.

If we are correct, we should hardly ever witness two large-coalition regimes fighting against each other. According to our reasoning, democrats will only fight when they believe they are almost certain that they will win. But how can two adversaries each sustain such certainty? Autocrats, as we saw, don’t need to think they have a great chance of winning. They are prepared to take bigger risks because they have good reason to think that the personal consequences of defeat are not as bad for them as the personal consequences of not paying off their few essential supporters. Now, following the logic of political survival closely, we must recognize that just because two democrats are not likely to fight with each other, we cannot say that one will not use force against another. Large-coalition systems certainly may be prepared to engage in disputes with each other and one might even use force against the other. How does this work?

As long as a large coalition leader believes that his dispute is unlikely to escalate to war, he can move partially up the escalation ladder, pressing his foe into backing down or else backing down himself, and negotiating if he concludes that the other side is prepared to fight and that his own prospects of victory are too small to justify fighting. Now imagine the two disputants are both democracies dependent on a large coalition. The logic of large-coalition politics tells us that a large-coalition state will attack another large-coalition state only if the target is sufficiently weak that the target is expected to prefer to negotiate rather than fight back. Since the democratic target will also try hard if it chooses to fight back, the initiating democracy must either have or be capable of having a great military advantage or it must be confident that its rival’s resources are insufficient for the target to believe it can be nearly certain of victory. Thus, the attacking democracy must be sure that its target democracy is unsure of victory; this is of paramount importance in a head-to-head military dispute between two democracies.¹⁶ Here we have an explanation for the history of US attacks against very weak democratic rivals such as Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 attack and overthrow of Juan Bosch’s democratically elected regime in the Dominican Republic, France’s invasion of Weimar Germany in 1923, and the list goes on.

Democracies don’t fight with each other, true. Rather, big democracies pick on little opponents whether they are democratic or not, with the expectation that they won’t fight back or won’t put up much of a fight. Indeed, that could very well be viewed as a straightforward explanation of the history of democracies engaged in imperial and colonial expansion against weak adversaries with little hope of defending themselves.

This democratic propensity to pick on weak foes is nothing new. Looking at all wars for nearly the past two centuries, we know that about 93 percent of wars started by democratic states are won by them. In contrast, only about 60 percent of wars started by nondemocracies are won by them.¹⁷