The question of asymmetric conflicts or, more precisely, wars between two states of unequal power capabilities is an important one, but it has received scant scholarly focus, especially in the international relations field. More importantly, the subject of weaker actors winning wars against stronger adversaries has received limited attention. This is especially puzzling since during the Cold War, both superpowers experienced defeat or stalemate at the hands of weaker powers. In the case of the Soviet Union, an ill-fated asymmetric war in Afghanistan contributed to its demise as a state. America's failure in Vietnam had a major impact on U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy behavior for years to come. It affected American strategy regarding war in the developing world, encouraging the development of and reliance on new precision-guided weapons systems and strategies that would preclude ground combat. The failure of France in Indochina and Algeria also point to the significance of the phenomenon of asymmetric war. The Israeli and American withdrawals from Lebanon in 1982 and 1983 and India's pulling out from Sri Lanka in 1990 are other instances of stronger powers failing to make gains against their weaker adversaries. In the post-9/11 world, asymmetric conflicts have increasingly received the attention of military strategists as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they have not received commensurate attention from IR scholars.

The reason for this apparent lacuna is that most of the dominant IR paradigms rely on power capabilities that determine conflict outcomes. For realism, the powerful get their way most often, and the international system is largely defined in terms of great power politics and great power wars. Traditional balance-of-power theory argues that the weak will not challenge the strong if the relative capability balance is against it; for it is the strong that start wars when they expect victory on the battlefield. The logic of deterrence is also based on the idea that a challenger can be deterred if the costs of attack are high and the cost is largely, although not exclusively, a function of the military capabilities each side possesses, in addition to the credibility of the retaliatory threat.

A small group of scholars has written on the subject of asymmetric wars in general. In Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (1994), I developed an argument about why weaker powers start wars based on strategy, alliance support, offensive capabilities, and domestic politics, and I explored six cases of relatively weaker actors initiating wars against their stronger opponents. These factors compensated for overall material weakness in the calculations of the weaker initiator. The strategic variable emerged as the dominant factor that cut across all six cases. In his classic article “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars” (World Politics 27 [1975]: 175–200), Andrew Mack more specifically examined how the strong often lose, using two cases, the United States in Vietnam and France in Algeria. Some scholars who have studied Vietnam (e.g., Betts, Mueller, and Rosen) also tried to explain the U.S. loss without generalizing their theories to other cases. Today there is a plethora of work on terrorism, a form of asymmetric war, especially involving state and nonstate actors, although very few talk about how and why a weaker actor, be it a state or a nonstate actor, can win.

The work under review is one of the most sophisticated book-length treatments to date of the subject on the weak winning against the strong. While Mack's account of the phenomenon is based on the balance of interests, Ivan Arreguin-Toft's explanation is based on the strategic approach. His central thesis is that the interaction of particular strategies employed by the strong and the weak determines the outcome in asymmetric wars. Using historical and statistical analysis of cases spanning two centuries, he argues that similar strategic approaches (direct-direct or indirect-indirect) favor the strong while dissimilar ones (direct-indirect or indirect-direct) favor the weak. While in the nineteenth century strong actors won disproportionately (over 80% of the time), in the second half of the twentieth century, the weaker actors have won over 51% of conflicts. The author discusses competing explanations based on the nature of the actor, increasing dissemination of arms to weaker powers, asymmetry in the interests of the parties, and squeamishness of democracies to fight, but he finds his strategic interaction model superior. To substantiate his thesis, he analyzes five case studies drawn from different historical periods: the Russia-Murid conflict (1830–59), the British-Boer War (1899–1902), the Italy-Ethiopia war (1935–40), the U.S.-Vietnam War (1965–73), and the Soviet-Afghan war (1979–89). The concluding chapter offers theoretical and policy implications and findings on why the strong sometimes lose wars and why they lose the peace even after winning an asymmetric conflict.

How the Weak Win Wars is a nicely written, well-argued, and sophisticated treatment of a long-neglected subject with enormous policy implications. The book has much to offer to U.S. policymakers in particular on the need to develop creative strategies for war avoidance and peace preservation and on the dangers of relying on brute force for achieving foreign policy goals. One wishes that the book had been read by Bush Administration officials before they launched an ill-conceived war in Iraq in 2003. The trouble that the United States faces in Iraq shows that the strategic logic presented here is fairly accurate. The Iraqi insurgents are fighting a war based on urban hit-and-run guerilla strategy, while the United States is pursing a counterinsurgency strategy, relying on superior firepower. However, the chances of the United States succeeding are limited given the contradictory strategies of the parties. It is difficult to offer the precise strategy that the United States should employ to win such a war. This is an area where the author's analysis needs more finessing. The war in Afghanistan also demonstrates some of these difficulties. The initial U.S. victory is explainable using the model developed here. But it is puzzling why this victory could not be sustained.

There is much fruitful discussion in this book, and it ought to be read by IR theorists and policymakers alike. As conflict patterns in the world become more complex with the advent of transnational terrorism, the existing tools for understanding such conflicts remain inadequate. In the semi-unipolar world, there are bound to be more asymmetric conflicts occurring in the future. Here lies the importance of this work.