I read this book just before it was released and honestly it was terrifying, and I am even more horrified by how much of our current world you can see on the pages of this book.

The original title of this post was “why Putin is (probably) losing,” but I decided not to tempt fate. Unfortunately, there are some possible signs that Russia is learning from its early mistakes and adjusting its tactics accordingly, with potentially devastating consequences for the people of Ukraine.

This war definitely hasn’t gone the way the Russians planned it, though. Kyiv was supposed to have fallen by now. And The Dictator’s Handbook, a thought-provoking book released eleven years before Putin decided to retake Ukraine for the motherland, predicted this might happen.

The Dictator's Handbook cover.png
Written by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook makes the provocative argument that dictators and democratically elected leaders are guided by the same principle:

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's canonical book on political science turned conventional wisdom on its head. They started from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don't care about the "national interest"-or even their subjects-unless they have to.

This clever and accessible book shows that democracy is essentially just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.

Democrats, of course, have to get elected and maintain support from a much larger coalition of people than do dictators. We talk about “one-man” rule in countries like North Korea - or, increasingly, Russia - but even the strictest tyrants have at least some people he must keep on side or risk dying by suicide.

Suicide by several shots to the back of the head, that is.

The USSR had Communist Party officials who lived high on the hog while ordinary people queued for hours to buy whatever was left in mostly empty shops, and as we saw in the country’s final year of existence, some resorted to extreme measures to stay on top.

That attempted coup failed, but many of these same Communists proved surprisingly adept at crony capitalism, and became ridiculously wealthy in the post-Soviet years. They may not have political power anymore, but being able to buy giant yachts, Premier League clubs and Formula One racing careers for your marginally talented sons makes up for a lot.

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Dmitri Alperovitch
@DAlperovitch
One way that the West could increase likelihood of this outcome is to enact sanctions on more members of the intelligence services and the military further down the chain, as well as their families. Eg. General officers and even colonels https://t.co/Bwb0JJAK2R
Dmitri Alperovitch @DAlperovitch

For the first time in 22 years, I am actually starting to believe that Putin’s hold on power may be on shaky ground. Not because of some Plpeople’s uprising—that’s a fanciful dream—but because there is now a small but non-zero chance of a palace coup 🧵
February 27th 2022

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When the dictator becomes more trouble than he’s worth for the small number of people keeping him in power, his time might be up. Russian oligarchs are now starting to feel some pain from devastating sanctions imposed on their country - some of them specifically targeted at them by name - and when you find your assets frozen and your favorite vacation spots cut off, you have to wonder if it’s all been worth it.

If I can't scuba, then what's this all been about? What have I been working toward?" : r/DunderMifflin
If I can’t visit my Italian villa next to George and Amal’s place, then what’s this been all about?
More importantly for this news cycle, The Dictator’s Handbook makes a strong argument that, for all their public shows of strength, authoritarian governments actually have a pretty lousy track record fighting wars:

Our view of politics instructs us to anticipate that leaders who depend on lots of essential backers only fight when they believe victory is nearly certain. Otherwise, they look for ways to resolve their international differences peacefully. Leaders who rely on only a few essential supporters, in contrast, are prepared to fight even when the odds of winning are not particularly good. Democratic leaders try hard to win if the going gets tough. Autocrats make a good initial effort, and if that proves wanting, they quit. These strategies are clearly in evidence when we consider the Six-Day War in 1967.

Egypt had a much larger military than Israel, but with its government in accountable to voters or kept in check by independent media, it cheapened out and treated Egyptian soldiers as disposable cannon fodder. Why spend money for better body armour when that will divert funds from the important Mercedes-Benz S-Class limo budget?

The Israeli military, like the militaries 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 putting fewer soldiers at risk. 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 Abdel 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 bereaved family members who scream about the avoidable deaths of their loved ones. Israeli prime ministers are elected by those family members, 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 is 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.

“History is full of democratic Davids beating autocratic Goliaths,” state the authors.

In an authoritarian state, the military is also tasked with putting down domestic dissent as well as protecting the country from foreign threats:

In a small-coalition regime, the military serves two crucial functions: it keeps the incumbent safe from domestic rivals, and it protects the incumbent’s government from foreign threats. In a large-coalition government, the military only has to worry about the latter function. Sure, it might be called on to put down some massive domestic unrest from time to time, but its job is to protect the system of government, 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.

[…]

Autocrats don’t squander precious resources on the battlefield. And elite, well-equipped units are more for crushing domestic opposition than for fighting a determined foreign foe.

We’ve seen no shortage of evidence that Russian military equipment might not work as well as advertised, and there are reports (admittedly unconfirmed) that their soldiers’ rations expired several years ago. Imagine sending an army to conquer the second-largest country in Europe on the contents of your office refrigerator.

And how many of his elite fighters will Putin send to Ukraine when he might very well need them in Moscow or St. Petersburg, or at his Black Sea palace?

Gelendzhik Palace in the Black Sea where Putin is said to live
Hopefully this will be an IKEA store before too long.
Lest you think The Dictator’s Handbook contains starry-eyed cheerleading for liberal democracy as practised in the West, it’s actually rather clear-eyed if not downright cynical about how things really work here. For example, the authors also make a very strong case that foreign aid does more harm than good for the recipient countries and is meant largely to prop up national industries and/or just make voters feel good about themselves.

And part of the reason democratic countries have a better track record in war, write de Mesquita and Smith, is because their wars of choice are usually against much smaller and weaker countries, which is why the United States went to war against Grenada (which they could easily win) and not the Soviet Union (which could literally result in the destruction of all human civilization, such as it was for much of the Cold War).

Even in Vietnam and Afghanistan, which ended disastrously for the United States, the Americans at least expended some real effort to declare victory and get out (a peace deals in Vietnam that collapsed after the Americans left, “troop surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of just cutting and running. De Mesquita and Smith argue that the Allies prevailed in the First World War because they were more willing and able than the autocratic Germans and Austro-Hungarians to throw the needed resources at it:

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 efforts much, and their expenditures plateaued as the war dragged on. German spending did increase again in 1917 as it became clear that defeat would mean the replacement of the German government. In contrast to the meager efforts by autocracies like Austria and Russia, the democracies continued to increase expenditures until victory was achieved.

Democratic governments often end wars of choice because the people demand it. When war is thrust upon them, they will do everything possible to win it. Ukrainians have proven that point in the past week.

And yet, I fear the book ends on too optimistic a note about the fate of democracy, at least in the United States:

When the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol is looked at with an understanding of Figure 10.2, it is easy to see why the insurrectionists failed. There was no way for them to succeed: there just were not enough people who could be made better off by supporting the effort to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election. Sure, those trying to stop the certification of Biden’s election were making an effort to get into or stay in the winning coalition, or at least the support coalition. Presumably, they perceived that they were being purged by those forming Biden’s coalition. Their problem was that there were enough defections away from Trump that Trump no longer commanded a winning coalition. Since the winning coalition was almost certainly on the right side of the gray line, those trying to save Trump were on a hopeless fool’s errand.

Knowing the risks and the costs of purges, large-coalition leaders or aspiring leaders in large-coalition settings almost never take actions that are likely to result in attempted coups d’état or revolutions. Being survival oriented, they have the foresight to avoid actions that will lead their coalition or the general citizenry to rise up against them.

The beer belly putsch might not have had any real chance at overthrowing the American government, but that hasn’t stopped Republican lawmakers from doing their best to change the rules. Political parties have always worked the refs, but in several states, GOP legislators are literally trying to install their own refs before the next election cycle.

The authors acknowledge this, and still think it’s unlikely to succeed because the people just won’t accept it:

Still, there is another mechanism that uncovers the potential fragility of the American democracy. How does any state government actually know who won the presidential election in their state? Each state has a procedure in place for certifying the outcome of the vote. At the end of the state voting process there is a person, usually the state’s secretary of state, whose job it is to officially declare the outcome of the election by following the conclusion of an election board. Donald Trump, remember, tried to persuade several such people to certify that he won their state’s election. Famously, he was recorded on the telephone with Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to reverse the electoral outcome. There are fifty such people, whether their title is secretary of state, lieutenant governor, or something else. What if enough secretaries of state chose to ignore the certification of the state’s bipartisan or nonpartisan board? Then, if enough secretaries of state agree on a candidate and agree to ignore what “we the people” said, that candidate would have a majority of electors and so would be elected to the presidency. That could be a winning coalition at or below the left vertical line in Figure 10.2, meaning that a tiny group of people—for instance, the secretaries of state making up the hypothetical new regime’s winning coalition—could be so well rewarded that if they could get away with it, they would convert a very-large-coalition, democratic political system into a very-tiny-coalition, rigged-election autocracy. Nothing beyond norms, ethics, and personal honor binds secretaries of state to certify the election outcome correctly.

[…]

More reassuringly, so many currently really-well-off citizens would realize that they were about to be thrust into misery that the few secretaries of state who might contemplate such a move would be deterred by the expectation of rebellion against them, a rebellion that they could not defeat.

The authors go so far as to say there has never been a “large coalition” government which became a “small coalition” regime outside of external conquest by a bellicose dictatorship like the Nazis. Maybe they’re right, but history is littered with examples of shakier or more less liberal democracies becoming authoritarian states. It happened with elected left-wing governments in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and the elected right-wing rulers of Hungary and Brazil are trying their damnedest to do it. And of course, the Nazis themselves came to power in what was until 1933 a fledgling, uneasy democracy.

Even if they’re correct about no stable, established democracy ever becoming a dictatorship, well, it wasn’t too long ago that two countries with McDonald’s restaurants had ever gone to war with each other, either.