The freedom to stop fighting is not distributed equally.
In August 2021, the United States withdrew from Afghanistan after twenty years of war. Domestic political exhaustion played a real part in that decision. So did a mission whose objectives had grown murkier with each passing year, a shift in Washington’s strategic attention toward China, and the collapse of the Afghan government itself. Six months later, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Kyiv faced no comparable menu of options. Negotiated settlement, territorial concession, and a frozen conflict were all discussed at various points. None was acceptable if Ukraine wanted to remain a sovereign, self-governing state. The gap between these two cases has little to do with who chose to fight. It has everything to do with what each side retained the freedom to do once the fighting started, particularly the freedom to stop.
That is a more precise version of a familiar but overstated claim: that materially dominant states treat war as a policy instrument while materially weak states experience it as a condition of survival. The claim is broadly right but needs two corrections before it can carry real analytical weight.
The first correction concerns entry. Weak states choose to start wars all the time. Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. Serbia entered its wars in the 1990s by choice. Great powers, meanwhile, sometimes have war forced on them, as the United States did after Pearl Harbor. What varies systematically with material power is not the decision to enter a war. It is the range of options a state retains once inside one, and above all its capacity to exit.
The second correction concerns what strategic freedom actually buys a strong state. It does not buy freedom for the duration of an engagement. The United States learned this in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. France learned it in Algeria. Britain learned it in Northern Ireland. Once a great power commits ground forces to a protracted conflict, occupation dynamics, alliance commitments, and the political cost of an admitted failure narrow its options considerably. Strong states retain more choices before committing to a war and more viable exits once inside one. They do not retain unlimited freedom throughout.
Correcting the claim does not erase the underlying asymmetry. It only locates it properly. James Fearon’s work on audience costs explains why democratic leaders in particular pay a domestic political price for public threats they fail to carry through, and that price compounds the longer a war continues without clear success. Elections approach. Media coverage shifts. Legislative coalitions thin. A war that remains militarily sustainable can still become politically unsustainable, and a government will often withdraw while it still holds the field rather than absorb the cost of continuing.
Weaker states facing existential threats behave differently, though domestic politics never disappears entirely for them either. Ivan Arreguín-Toft’s research on asymmetric conflict argues that when a state’s survival is genuinely on the line, its political tolerance for backing down drops sharply, since there is no safe version of losing. Iran’s conduct of its war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988 illustrates the pattern. Tehran absorbed losses that would have broken a Western democratic government’s political coalition within months. Yet the pattern has a limit. Iran itself eventually accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598, the framework that ended the war, after Ayatollah Khomeini described the decision as harder to swallow than poison. Existential stakes compress political disagreement inside a weak state. They do not eliminate it, and eventually even a state fighting for its life weighs cost against objective.
A related assumption, that democracies alone face domestic constraints on their war-making, is also only half right. Authoritarian leaders answer to elite coalitions, party institutions, security services, and patronage networks capable of removing them through means other than an election. Research by China specialist Sheena Greitens on domestic security spending, along with Jessica Weeks’s work on autocratic audience costs, shows that many nondemocratic leaders face genuine domestic accountability, simply not through a ballot box. Caitlin Talmadge’s comparative study of authoritarian militaries, built in part on the same Iran-Iraq case, traces how fear of a coup shapes officer promotion, training, and command structure in ways that can degrade battlefield performance even while protecting a regime internally. That constraint is real. It is simply invisible to an observer looking only for elections and headlines.
This is also why treating authoritarian regimes as interchangeable produces weak analysis. China’s approach to internal security in Xinjiang reflects a highly institutionalized decision-making process inside a party-state with substantial administrative capacity. Russia’s campaigns in Chechnya reflected a far more personalist style of decision-making, concentrated in fewer hands. Iran occupies a hybrid position, with elected bodies holding limited real power alongside unelected institutions, including the Revolutionary Guard and the Supreme Leader, that hold considerably more. Three authoritarian systems, three different structures of internal constraint.
One variable is still missing from this account, and it may be the most consequential of all: stakes. Capability, political will, and institutional constraint describe an actor. Stakes describe what is actually on the table, and they vary independently of regime type. The United States fighting a war of choice in Vietnam and the United States responding to Pearl Harbor were the same government operating under the same constitutional constraints, yet the two wars followed entirely different political logics, because the stakes were not the same. Israel’s war in 1973 was existential. Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen has been a matter of regional influence rather than survival. A complete model needs four variables, not three: capability, constraint, political will, and stakes.
Two further objections deserve a direct answer, because both are true and neither undermines the core argument. Democracies are not inherently restrained in how they fight. The firebombing of Tokyo, British counterinsurgency in Kenya, and French conduct in Algeria all came from democratic governments willing to inflict severe violence, and Jason Lyall’s research on counterinsurgency outcomes suggests this pattern is closer to the rule than the exception. Their restraint, where it exists, operates through procedure and time rather than through conscience. Elections and legislative oversight govern how long a democracy can sustain a war and what its public will tolerate along the way. They say little about whether the fighting itself stays humane.
Authoritarian regimes, for their part, still make catastrophic strategic errors. The Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Russia in Ukraine both stand as evidence. Their internal constraints are real all the same. What differs is alignment. A system lacking a free press, an organized opposition, or independent institutions capable of challenging a leader’s assumptions before troops cross a border produces its own distinct category of error, running alongside the errors democracies make rather than replacing them.
Put together, capability, constraint, political will, and stakes explain far more about how states fight, and how they eventually stop fighting, than regime type can explain on its own. Regime type conditions the form a state’s constraints take. It does not determine whether those constraints exist in the first place. The more useful question, asked before any question about power or capability, is whose survival is actually on the line when a war begins: the state’s, a leader’s, or a governing coalition’s answerable to no electorate at all. That question, more than any tally of tanks or treasuries, decides how a war is fought and when it ends.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Mohammad Zain is an International Relations student at NUML, Islamabad. With an associate degree in English Literature and Linguistics and a BS in International Relations, he brings a unique blend of analytical and literary skills to his writing.
