proxy-war
A conflict in which two or more major powers support opposing sides, using local actors to fight on their behalf without direct military confrontation between the sponsors. The Cold War produced a global system of proxy conflicts from Korea to Angola to Afghanistan.
Proxy warfare became the primary form of superpower competition during the Cold War precisely because direct conflict was unthinkable — both superpowers possessed nuclear weapons, and a war between them risked mutual destruction. Instead, the United States and Soviet Union supported opposing sides in conflicts across the developing world: North Korea against South Korea, North Vietnam against South Vietnam, UNITA against the MPLA in Angola, the Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Each side provided arms, training, financing, intelligence, and in some cases personnel to the local actors whose victory they desired. The proxy relationship was never symmetrical with the relationship between local actors and their sponsors: the local actors had genuine political goals of their own, which sometimes aligned with their sponsors’ interests and sometimes did not. The United States backed Saddam Hussein as a proxy against Iran and later fought him; the Soviet Union backed the PLO whose politics it could not control; the United States armed the Afghan Mujahideen who produced Al-Qaeda. The instrumentalisation of local conflicts for superpower competition regularly produced outcomes that the sponsors neither intended nor could control.
Proxy warfare’s most important characteristic is its asymmetry of cost: the major powers that supply the weapons bear a fraction of the cost borne by the populations in whose countries the fighting occurs. The United States lost 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam; Vietnam lost two million civilians and approximately one million military personnel on all sides. The Soviet Union lost 15,000 soldiers in Afghanistan; the Afghan population lost between one and two million people. This asymmetry creates a moral hazard: the willingness to supply proxy conflicts is inversely related to the cost of the conflict to the supplier. The post-Cold War continuation of proxy warfare — Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen, regional powers in Syria, foreign states in Libya — demonstrates that the practice is not a Cold War anomaly but a structural feature of competitive international politics wherever direct confrontation between major players is costly relative to supporting local actors.
Leave a Reply