Caetano was the nominal head of a collegial dictatorship, as were Videla and Galtieri in Argentina. Collegiality doesn’t make a dictatorship less dictatorial if you’re a tortured imprisoned dissident. A single Fuhrer isn’t required to oppress a population that can’t fire its leadership.

In 1982 Argentina seized and occupied islands where the population was not Argentine. Both were colonizers, in sequence, though the Falklands were uninhabited when Britain claimed them, which makes the British in the Falklands an empire with penguins as subjects. A pity Anatole France didn’t include this as a chapter in Penguin Island.

Italy lost Libya to the British in 1942. Sicily was invaded on July 10, 1943. The Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini on July 25, 1943. Italy’s failed war against Greece starting October 1940 brought Germany into the Balkans. They all looked like failed wars of colonial conquest to me.

Other regime-killing colonial wars: Germany’s Lebensraum invasion of the USSR, Japan’s invasion of China and SE Asia, Russia’s war of imperial rivalry against Japan in 1904–05, Spain in Cuba in the 1890s and the Rif, Morocco, 1909–21, the USSR in Afghanistan, 1979–89, France in Algeria, 1954–62, LBJ’s presidency died in Vietnam. Autocracies that fail in war fall harder than elected governments.