Moreover, the military tends to focus on its internal rival, undermining its ability to assess its own (and its external adversary’s) strengths and weaknesses, and it is unclear who has the final say on military strategy. Weeks also performs illuminating case studies of two Bosses—Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin—two Juntas—Argentina in the early 1980s and interwar Japan—and two Machines—North Vietnam and the Soviet Union under Khrushchev. Moreover, civilians were outnumbered by military officers in important ministries, and were increasingly excluded from important political and military decisions.

While I did not single out Anaya as uniquely threatening to Galtieri, my argument is that part of what drove Galtieri to war were his concerns about the preferences of his audience, including Anaya.

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. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. Unconstrained leaders, however, are far more likely than constrained leaders to survive defeats, further signaling their immunity from punishment by a domestic audience. The picture sketched by Brooks could not be more different: out-of-control military officials essentially committed the state to war without the knowledge or consent of the Egyptian Strongman, whom they had deceived about the preparedness of the Egyptian army. Similarly, I agree with Weisiger’s comment that future scholarship should analyze whether the results are robust to controlling for possible confounding variables beyond those I studied.

An important assumption of Weeks’s theory is that in constrained authoritarian regimes, civilian leaders are removed only by other civilian elites, whereas military leaders are removed only by the military. I argue that these alternative, civil-military based arguments, provide superior explanations for a number of important cases—some of which Weeks covers in depth, and some of which she does not. However, Downes raises an important issue that I do not address in the book: whether “civilian-led-juntas” like Japan are different from “pure” juntas like Argentina in the 1970s. As he points out, juntas are rare, so the findings about juntas’ war outcomes in Chapter 3 rest on a small number of cases; had some cases been recoded, the success rate of juntas would have looked more like that of personalists.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. Regarding the problem of Russian aggression under President Vladimir Putin, Russian aggression could be substantially constrained if the Russian elite found a means of putting constraints on the power of the Russian president, even if such constraints fall short of effecting a full democratic transition. 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. First, actors form views about the benefits of winning compared to continuing on a nonmilitary pathway. My argument suggests that the bargaining range is smaller when one leader is relatively immune to the costs of fighting or losing wars, gains private benefits from war, or has inaccurate assessments of the likelihood of winning, each of which is influenced by domestic regime type.