Machines and Juntas will thus not behave appreciably differently from democracies because their leaders cannot avoid being dislodged from power for their mistakes. This literature suggests that even in civilian-led authoritarian regimes, the military may still be an important audience that can influence the behavior of the state.

Although the latter seems plausible, the former is puzzling, and contradicts much work on civil-military relations that highlights the salience of leaders’ vulnerability to military coups. Otherwise, the fear of a military coup or insurrection would cause leaders of machines to act more like the leaders of military juntas, in which a leader faces a domestic audience composed primarily of military officers. It is now well established in the military effectiveness literature, for example, that regimes where the leadership fears a military coup take a number of steps—collectively referred to as ‘coup-proofing,’ and including such measures as purging competent military officers and replacing them with incompetent (but loyal) bunglers; creating multiple independent military and paramilitary forces; prohibiting communication between officers and adjacent units to inhibit anti-regime coordination; and allowing little if any realistic training—that decrease coup risk but vitiate the military’s combat effectiveness.For Weeks, the key factors that distinguish authoritarian regimes from each other are whether they face a domestic audience that can hold the leader accountable for his or her actions, and whether the audience and the leader are civilians or military officers. The Arab Spring has fallen short of its democratic aspirations, especially in countries like Libya, Bahrain, and Egypt, and perhaps even in apparent success stories like Tunisia. In the second, the hybrid type I have been describing, the military is outside civilian control and has the ability to remove the leader. In sum, Dictators at War and Peace is an excellent book, which makes a number of careful and interesting arguments about an important but understudied topic.

This book combines parsimonious yet powerful theorizing with rigorous and thoughtful multimethod analysis, to answer crucial policy questions about war and peace. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Since these factors come together coherently, Weeks can use them to rank regimes from least to most likely on each of the proposed dependent variables, with for example Strongmen having the highest, Bosses, the second highest, Juntas the second lowest and Machines the lowest probability of conflict initiation. If anything, Goemans’s focus on Admiral Anaya raises the question as to why he supported the war so fervently; Goemans takes this as exogenous, but in the book, I attribute much of Anaya’s fervor to his naval background and parochial interests. Weeks' theory helps explain not only conflict initiation but also war outcomes and the fates of wartime leaders.Moreover, retaking the islands posed a major military challenge, requiring the British to carry out amphibious landings thousands of miles from home with no local base from which to operate. 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. By contrast, there is no difference between the dispute initiation rates of democracies and Machines.

The significant caveat, of course, is that dictatorships such as North Korea that have no significant elite restrictions on their leaders remain dangerous. In fact, in my work with Alexandre Debs I have proposed such a theory, built on the cost of replacing different types of leaders. This finding is based on reasonable analysis, but different reasonable approaches would have produced quite different results.In other words, the argument that Machines are relatively unlikely to initiate forceful disputes or wars hinges on an unarticulated assumption that civilian control of the military is secure. 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.