A Strategy for Success: How the Weak Defeat the Strong

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How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict. By Ivan Arreguin-Toft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 274 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-83976-9), $29.99 (ISBN: 0-521-54869-1). How do the weak prevail in conflicts with significantly stronger opponents? This is the central question in Ivan Arreguin-Toft's How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict . According to Arreguin-Toft, the basic presumption that power trumps all other factors in determining who is victorious in battle is historically untenable. With increasing frequency, the weak have been defeating the strong. As Arreguin-Toft notes (pp. 5–6, 20), the field of international relations has failed to produce any systematic explanation for this empirical puzzle. How the Weak Win Wars is an attempt to fill this lacuna in the security studies literature, while providing policymakers and political analysts some insights into the conditions that make asymmetric conflicts tremendously costly in terms of political legitimacy and human life. Arreguin-Toft begins by building upon Andrew J. R. Mack's (1975) seminal discussion of small wars, in which Mack argued that relative interest is the deciding factor in wars between the strong and weak. Because weak actors are fighting for survival, they are systematically more motivated to absorb the costs of long wars than their stronger adversaries. In turn, the combination of low interests and high costs puts a strong actor's ruling elite in a position of political vulnerability, and eventually they succumb to domestic pressures to end the war short of victory. Although Arreguin-Toft agrees that the proximate cause of strong actor defeat is political vulnerability, he cites (pp. 14–15) three critical shortcomings in Mack's interest-asymmetry argument. First, power is a poor predictor of resolve. Because of alliance commitments or the prevalence of domino rationales, a strong actor may view a materially insignificant conflict as a matter of life and death and, thus, will be highly motivated to win. Second, to operationalize political vulnerability, Mack assumes that wars between the strong and weak are …