Authoritarian governments love to fight wars. They’re very bad at winning them

Elyse Graham is a historian and professor at Stony Brook University, and the author of Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II.

Authoritarians love to project an image of military might. This is so well-known as to be almost cliché. In North Korea, Kim Jong-un holds military parades for seemingly every occasion. In Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, party leaders dressed party members in military-style uniforms and wore military tunics themselves on most public occasions. Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, walked around in such a clattering profusion of medals that he was rumoured to wear them even in the bathtub.

Nor is this true only for authoritarians who are actually in power. Today, social media has made more visible than ever the military infatuation of ordinary people who long for the violent suppression of their political enemies. The worship of military-grade guns in civilian hands; photos of people mounting black flags outside their houses, a symbol that means, in some circles, When the fighting starts, I will give no quarter; videos in which the speaker – often wearing wraparound sunglasses, always sitting in the driver’s seat of their car – describes how easily they’d dominate in a civil war against their neighbours or simply looks smug below a text overlay that says something like, “How I feel knowing that my side would 100 per cent win the Civil War.”

History shows, however, that the infatuation authoritarians have for military pomp doesn’t correspond with actual military prowess. On the contrary, authoritarianism is, itself, a crippling military weakness. The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, in a recent TikTok video, pointed this out so precisely that I’ve been thinking about it ever since: “Authoritarian states do not produce the kinds of temperaments and ways of thinking that lend themselves well to winning wars, even though authoritarian states love to fight wars.”

Over the course of writing a book about spies in the Second World War, I was struck by the incredible advantage, on levels ranging from intelligence to tactics to military strategy, that the Allies had over the Axis simply by virtue of not being authoritarians. Hitler, like every would-be strongman, thought strength is measured by the violence you deploy against out-groups. He thought the Allies were weak because Allied countries were filled with non-Aryans.

Hitler also hated professors, librarians and intellectuals. This, too, is a characteristic trait of regimes like his, a belief that educators and centres of learning should be squashed lest they threaten ideological conformity. In the words of Robert Hutchings, the former chair of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, authoritarian regimes are captive to “intellectual pathologies” that greatly restrict their range of thought: closed thinking, conformity, overconfidence in insiders, the dismissal of outsiders and the belief that the only people capable of good ideas are the ones who exactly resemble themselves. Once they’ve suppressed all dissent, all they hear are validations of their own views – praise for the great leader and his retinue, and scorn for anyone who might think differently.

But that very mindset was what made Hitler’s Reich so vulnerable against the Allied forces. It was what made the people he wanted to murder, exile, or push out of public life so distinctly well-suited to beat him.

Many of the refugees who escaped occupied Europe wound up joining the war on the side of the Allies. Some worked as military interpreters and interrogators, advancing through Europe on the front lines and gathering tactical intelligence. Some became soldiers outright. Some worked on weapons research at secret facilities such as Los Alamos. And some worked as intelligence agents for clandestine intelligence agencies in Britain and the United States.

The United States was late to the intelligence game. When the war broke out in Europe, it didn’t have a standing intelligence agency. In 1941, president Franklin Roosevelt assigned a Wall Street lawyer named William Donovan to build a new intelligence agency from scratch. Donovan’s great innovation was to recruit professors and librarians – America’s secret standing army of experts who were trained to dig relentlessly for hidden information. They had trained for espionage all their lives without knowing it, hunting in library stacks for forgotten histories and weaselling their way into closed archives and scouring old letters for gossip. (Donovan’s new agency, the Office of Strategic Services, was the predecessor to today’s CIA.)

These unlikely intelligence agents, members of a world that Hitler despised, proved to be so effective that they changed spycraft forever. They used phone books to plan the North Africa landings, railroad schedules to organize sabotage by the French Resistance, statistics to figure out where to put armour on bomber planes. They went undercover abroad, using their document-hunting skills to obtain highly prized documents. (Because the U.S. was so late to building spy schools, the earliest American spies trained in Canada’s Camp X.) Many of them were Jewish people, people of colour, women, queer people and others who had no place in the military and political machinery of the Reich.

And America’s military and intelligence services heeded their insights, even when those insights seemed at odds with conventional ways of doing warfare. Democracies enable flexible and agile military thinking because they value outside perspectives, open debate and independent judgment. Time and time again, Hitler and his cronies were outmanoeuvred by their innovations, hobbled by their own limited outlook, their inflexibility, their need to conform, their conviction that any competent opponent must share their exact way of thinking.

In our own time, both the Canadian military and the U.S. military have conducted many studies that show diversity of personnel to be a considerable military advantage. In 2021, General Michael X. Garrett of the U.S. Army Forces Command described the benefits of diversity to factors ranging from resilience to readiness to unit cohesion: “My experience as a soldier and commander tells me diversity is much more than a force multiplier; it is essential at every level of mission effectiveness.” In 2019, the University of Toronto Press published a book that reviewed decades of research on the benefits of diversity in the Canadian armed forces.

This runs counter, of course, to the claim one hears sometimes, always by people who define excellence as patterned exactly after themselves, that “wokeness,” by which they seems to just mean diversity, will make Western militaries the laughingstocks of Russia and China. (“A woke military is a weak military,” the Heritage Foundation, the conservative U.S. think tank that created Project 2025, has tweeted more than once.)

It’s great to take pride in military service. The lessons of modern military service align, in fact, with the values of modern democracies. Those who grandstand about the military’s well-being without listening to what the military says about its well-being don’t actually care about the military; they just like the uniform, and – because they think it will enhance their own authority – they want to associate that uniform solely with themselves.

We’re about to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory in the Second World War. It’s disheartening, given how much soldiers, spies and civilians sacrificed to win that war and what they knew to be at stake in fighting it, to see that authoritarianism has become fashionable today among sizable segments of former Allied countries. The irony is that their ideology is terrible even when it comes to their most cherished ideal, military prowess. The next time you see would-be brownshirts marching down the road with tiki torches, posturing at military discipline and giving Nazi salutes, remember that their real message is, “I like fighting wars, but to be honest, I don’t like winning them.”