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. Reading the book, it struck me that she seemed to suggest that different leaders may value the same good differently. Their essays raise helpful questions about my book, and suggest many productive avenues for future scholarship about dictatorships and foreign policy. Even more valuable is her finding that certain types of dictatorships are as pacific and as competent at war as democracies. The key fact that makes Imperial Japan from 1889 to 1941 a hybrid regime with civilian leaders and a military audience, and which Weeks mentions only in passing, is that under the Meiji Constitution of 1889, the military had the power to bring down any civilian government by withdrawing—or refusing to name—the Army or Navy Minister.

This book combines parsimonious yet powerful theorizing with rigorous and thoughtful multimethod analysis, to answer crucial policy questions about war and peace.Future work might seek to integrate civil-military relations to provide additional nuance to Weeks’s typology. Of those, 60% lost office in a regular manner, and only about 10% of those suffered punishment in the form of exile. Instead of strategy being crafted to achieve political objectives, civilian policymakers had to mold their objectives to military strategy. 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.

In Dictators at War and Peace, Weeks categorizes authoritarian regimes based on whether leaders face domestic audiences that can hold them accountable for foreign policy failures—as in democracies—and whether leaders and audiences consist of civilian elites or military officers. In the first, civilian control is firm enough that military actors play no role in decisions to remove the executive. Risa Brooks’ theory of strategic assessment focuses on the balance of power between civilian leaders and military leaders (civilian dominance, military dominance, or shared power) and the extent of preference divergence between the two groups (high versus low). The idea that these kinds of governments are slightly less likely than democracies to launch overt conventional aggressive war and also significantly more likely to win their wars than other types of authoritarian governments is an argument which should be looked at more by policy makers. 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.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.

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. These regimes are likely to be more aggressive, since civilian leaders may be removed for opposing the use of force rather than for going to war unsuccessfully, and civilian elites cannot prevent the military from taking action. I think, however, that to characterize my argument as side-stepping the bargaining model of war is not accurate. The book also argues that civilians would have been more likely to stay put in the South Georgia islands, inviting the UK to look like the aggressor. Leaving such theoretical issues aside, Weeks’s framework also raises some issues for the empirical sections of her book, especially the case studies which are a significant addition to her previous published work.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). Downes proposes that Weeks’s description of dictatorial regimes pays insufficient attention to variance in civil-military relations, demonstrating his critique through descriptions of Imperial Japan, Wilhelmine Germany, and Egypt under Nasser. Egypt failed miserably in the ensuing war, and Nasser managed to survive defeat—both of which are consistent with Weeks’s theory—but the mechanism that explains these outcomes is quite different across the two arguments. 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. Comparing Weeks’s theory with two others developed in the literature on military effectiveness fruitfully highlights the missing role of civil-military relations in her argument.