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Notes -
What is it about autocracies that’s supposed to be more adaptive?
The 20th century provided some staggering evidence that it’s not the potential for command economy. Nor were the totalitarians particularly resilient against internal struggle; perhaps China has surpassed that issue, if they can ride their demographic transition into continued success? I’m partial to the theory that democracy serves as a release valve for tensions which would otherwise boil into bloody insurrection.
I have to wonder if a similar narrative existed in 400 CE. “It was a precarious military situation that converted Constantine; without such chance, now that the Empire is beset, surely this Christianity will collapse. Real Roman traditions always dominated before, and they will again.”
Well it was a precarious military situation that put a spear through Julian's chest. Give Julian the Apostate 30 years and Constantine 2 and things might turn out differently.
Autocracies have more freedom to undertake long-term strategies. They can resist getting dragged into popular but unwise decisions in the long term. They have a free hand to wage aggressive wars of conquest and mobilize more from their population. They can create extremely powerful militaries. As above, when Napoleonic France, Imperial or Nazi Germany faced opponents of similar economic size, they crushed them.
But the incentive of popularity isn't the only reason leaders make shortsighted choices. You could just as easily argue that democracy hedges against autocrats doing short sighted things. A military dictator panders to his cadre even in peacetime; his powerful military is a political tool as much as a diplomatic one.
Who the hell told Hitler to go forward with Operation Barbarossa?
If we assume a Platonic philosopher-king, making only morally and strategically correct decisions, there's no need to tie him down with populism. I'm not convinced that such a king can be created by concentrating power in the hands of mere mortals.
Barbarossa made a tonne of sense. Why would the Germans rely forever on a bitter ideological enemy for their vital fuel supplies? This is a question the Germans should have pondered in recent years. Stalin was building up his army and airforce, industrializing rapidly. Why wait till they get stronger? They also wanted Soviet land, that was the whole point of the war.
German intelligence thought the Russian army was under half its actual size, so it would be easy to win. They had won the last war with a bigger version of Russia while they were still bogged down in France. There was no way they could've known that every Abwehr agent in Russia had been turned. Later on Hitler said that if he knew how many tanks the Soviets were producing, he wouldn't have invaded. Barbarossa was a rational decision predicated on faulty intelligence.
The real question we should be asking is how two global empires managed to lose so catastrophically to Nazi Germany when they started off in such a commanding position, while Germany had an army of 100,000 men. Letting Hitler build a powerful army, letting him have the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia - that is the real disaster that made everything else possible. It wasn't just a failure of intelligence, it was a total failure of comprehending the situation, a surrender to cowardice. The US making China an industrial superpower is a similar kind of completely stupid decision.
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