Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

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

Defending the Peace and Nation Building

In his 1994 State of the Union address, US president Bill Clinton declared “democracies don’t attack each other,” and therefore “the best strategy to insure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere.” This is a common theme for US presidents. Unfortunately, actions have not matched the rhetoric. More unfortunately still, the problem lies not in a failure on the presidential level, but with “we, the people.”

In democracies, leaders who fail to deliver the policies their constituents want get deposed. Democrats might say they care about the rights of people overseas to determine their own future, and they might actually care too, but if they want to keep their jobs they will deliver the policies that their people want. Earlier we examined how democrats use foreign aid to buy policy. If that fails, or gets too expensive, then force is always an option. Military victory allows the victors to impose policy.

We should dismiss any pretense that such policies are paternal and imposed with the foreigners’ long-term best interests in mind. They are not. They are done for the benefit of the democrat’s supporters and sometimes these policies can be very unpleasant. For instance, the opium wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) got their name because the British wanted to finance their purchases of Chinese exports by selling the Chinese opium grown in India. China was reluctant to become a nation of addicts. The British used force to open up China to the drugs market. Hong Kong started out as a base from which the British could enforce this trade openness. It is telling that, while the settlements that ended the wars are officially known as the Treaties of Nanking and Tianjin, the Chinese often refer to them as the Unequal Treaties.