Small wars kept recurring in world history because powerful states were often tempted to exploit their military superiority in order to subjugate and oppress others. Conquerors and oppressors were usually well equipped to win such wars. Given overwhelming military superiority, one needed little more than mediocre military talent in order to crush insurgent populations. The cohesion of insurgent communities and the acumen of their military leaders made counterinsurgency campaigns more costly and slower, but rarely did either change the end results of the confrontation.

Still, it would be misleading to argue that power asymmetry was alone responsible for the victory of the strong party in small wars. Underlying successful counterinsurgency campaigns was also a cultural capacity to exploit the military advantage to its limits and pay the necessary price – that is, the readiness to resort to extremes of personal brutality, and occasionally tolerate significant losses. As I noted in Chapter 3, social and political developments in Western states in the nineteenth century eroded this cultural capacity. Thus, while technological and organizational innovations increased the relative military power of democratizing states, social developments reduced their oppression potential. To put things in a broad theoretical perspective, the (realist) iron rule of power has eventually broken down in the context of democratic small wars. After 1945, democracies discovered that military superiority and battlefield advantage have become fruitless, if not counterproductive, in protracted counterinsurgency campaigns.