The Dictator's Handbook

by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

  To Try Hard or Not

  As its name tells us, the Six Day War was a short fight, begun on June 5, 1967, and ending on June 10. On one side were Syria, Egypt (then the United Arab Republic), and Jordan; on the other was Israel. By the end of the war, Israel had captured the Sinai from Egypt; Jerusalem, Hebron, and the West Bank from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria. The air forces of the Arab combatants were devastated and Egypt accepted an unconditional cease-fire. The Israelis had easily defeated their opponents. From a conventional balance-of-power perspective the outcome must be seen as extraordinarily surprising. From the political-survival point of view, as we shall see, it should have been perfectly predictable.

  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.