How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam

Gil Merom argues that modern democracies fail in insurgency wars because they are unable to find a winning balance between expedient and moral tolerance for the costs of war. Small wars are lost at home when a critical minority shifts the balancing element from the battlefield to the marketplace of ideas. This minority, representing the educated middle class, abhors the brutality involved in effective counterinsurgency, but also refuses to sustain the level of casualties resulting from fighting in other ways.

Merom is a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tel-Aviv University.