Proxy Warfare

Andrew Mumford

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745670928
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Paz y desarrollo global

Proxy wars represent a perennial strand in the history of conflict. The appeal of 'warfare on the cheap' has proved an irresistible strategic allure for nations through the centuries. However, proxy wars remain a missing link in contemporary war and security studies. In this timely book Andrew Mumford sheds new light on the dynamics and lineage of proxy warfare from the Cold War to the War on Terror, whilst developing a cogent conceptual framework to explain their appeal. Tracing the political and strategic development of proxy wars throughout the last century, they emerge as a dominant characteristic of contemporary conflict. The book ably shows how proxy interventions often prolong existing conflicts given the perpetuity of arms, money and sometimes proxy fighters sponsored by third party donors. Furthermore, it emphasizes why, given the direction of the War on Terror, the rise of China as a global power, and the prominence now achieved by non-state actors in the 'Arab Spring', the phenomenon of proxy warfare is increasingly relevant to understandings of contemporary security. Proxy Warfare is an indispensable guide for students and scholars interested in the evolution and potential future direction of war and conflict in the modern world.

CHAPTER ONE

What is Proxy War?

Proxy wars are the indirect engagement in a conflict by third parties wishing to influence its strategic outcome. They are constitutive of a relationship between a benefactor, who is a state or non-state actor external to the dynamic of an existing conflict, and their chosen proxies who are the conduit for weapons, training and funding from the benefactor. Such arm’s-length interventions are undertaken ostensibly for reasons of maximizing interest, while at the same time minimizing risk. In short, proxy wars are the logical replacement for states seeking to further their own strategic goals yet at the same time avoid engaging in direct, costly and bloody warfare.¹

Before we go any further, it is important to place proxy wars in both their international and local context. Often, the two contexts work in partnership to shape the dynamic of the conflict. Historically, states have exploited specific localized events (such as a civil war) to engender a shift in the wider geopolitical environment (such as the stifling of a rival ideology in the broader region). Take, for example, the Thirty Years War (1618–48), where Protestant France and Catholic Spain covertly involved themselves on the sides of their co-religionists within the Holy Roman Empire. Two centuries later, the American Civil War can be seen through the prism of proxy warfare, whereby British weapons sales to the Confederacy was widely interpreted as London attempting to lever long-term political and economic gain from the victory of the secessionist Southern states.² Likewise, during the Franco– Prussian War of 1870–71, Britain again vicariously influenced events by arming the French military to undermine their common Prussian enemy. Even before the nineteenth century had ended, the Industrial Revolution’s impact upon the weapons of war had increased the scope for Western nations in particular to stake claims in foreign conflicts. The production of more deadly and efficient weapons became bargaining tools for strategic influence over the outcomes of wars.³

Although proxies have been utilized throughout history as means of fulfilling the objectives of third parties, it was only in the twentieth century that war by proxy was transformed into a prolific form of conflict. Despite an official position of neutrality, the United States, through massive arms supplies, used the Triple Entente as a proxy to shape events in Europe from a distance during the opening three years of the First World War. President Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted a similar stance of proxy engagement during the Second World War up to 1941.

Indeed, the adoption of proxy war strategies became so ingrained into the politics of the mid-twentieth century that direct superpower intervention (such as the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan) arguably became the exception rather than the rule of conflict during the Cold War period. Proxy interference from a distance had established itself as the norm. Assertions, such as that from Harold Tillema, that in the late Cold War era ‘foreign overt military intervention directs modern international armed conflict’,⁴ are blind to the prevalence of foreign covert and indirect military intervention and the ubiquity of proxy wars throughout that century.

Defining the Parameters of Proxy Wars

Although efforts have been made in the past to explain what proxy wars entail, certain areas of definitional contention still remain. In 1964, Karl Deutsch termed proxy wars ‘an international conflict between two foreign powers, fought out on the soil of a third country; disguised as a conflict over an internal issue of that country; and using some of that country’s manpower, resources and territory as a means for achieving preponderantly foreign goals and foreign strategies’.⁵ Arguably, though, Deutsch’s definition is too state-centric, as it ignores the role non-state actors can play in proxy wars (as discussed here in chapter 3), and it unnecessarily internationalizes proxy wars (an inevitability, perhaps, of the Cold War context in which this definition was coined) by overlooking the often regional power struggles that they represent.

So perhaps in order to garner a greater understanding of what proxy wars are, it would be useful to first dwell upon what they are not. Proxy wars are not merely regional wars that seemingly mirror broader ideological struggles perpetrated by superpowers. Neither are they exercises in direct military intervention by third parties or necessarily a form of ‘covert action’, as shall be discussed more fully later in this chapter. Proxy wars need not be solely categorized as occurring when, for example, medium regional powers clashed during the Cold War, as such an assumption ignores other forms of conflict in which proxy interventions occur, namely, civil wars.

A further effort at clarification is needed because in this book the terms ‘proxy war’ and ‘proxy intervention’ will be used interchangeably. This is based on an understanding that states primarily intervene indirectly in the wars of others, using proxies who are already engaged in the war. The conditions of war already exist and are often exacerbated by the intervention. Furthermore, these indirect interventions are used to enhance inherently war-like strategies of interest or ideology maximization, albeit ones that minimize the risks associated with outright war or direct intervention. As such, this book will refer to proxy wars and proxy interventions to explain the same phenomenon of indirect interference in an existing conflict by a third-party state.

Richard Ned Lebow, in his book Why Nations Fight, characterized Cold War confrontations between the two main superpowers and the allies of their opponents (understood in this book as a proxy war if the ally receives indirect forms of aid from the other superpower) as an ‘in-between state’, neither war nor peace, and therefore not included in his large dataset analysis of the causality of wars over the last three centuries.⁶ This is symptomatic of how an understanding of the dynamics and importance of proxy wars has fallen through the cracks of security studies and contributed to incomplete scholarship of the full spectrum of war typologies in the modern world. This is a significant omission, especially when considering K. J. Holsti’s calculation that 30 per cent of all wars between 1945 and 1995 witnessed some form of external intervention⁷ – although we can assume that this figure is actually much higher given that Holsti did not include in his dataset the wars of decolonization that occurred across the Third World in the mid--twentieth century, many of which contained demonstrable proxy interference from superpower benefactors. Indeed, it was the patterns of proxy intervention in such anti-colonial wars that denoted an increased prevalence of proxy war, as superpowers sought ways to shift regional politics in their ideological favour. As Hedley Bull noted in the early 1980s: ‘In recent decades … modes of intervention have changed … [F]orcible intervention has tended to give place to non-forcible, direct to indirect, and open to clandestine.’⁸

Until now, one of the most substantial efforts to recognize proxy war as a strand of conflict worth studying in its own right lay in an article written in the mid-1980s by Israeli scholar Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov.⁹ In this article, he poses nine key questions in order to characterize ‘war by proxy as a separate and unique category of war’.¹⁰ It is worth addressing each of these questions in turn and offering some answers, so as to flesh out our understanding of what proxy war constitutes:

• Can one classify as a proxy war one in which an external power intervenes directly?
No. Indirect intervention is the fundamental element of proxy war (see the later section for a full discussion of this issue).

• Is it essential that both small states in a local war serve as a proxy for an external power?
No. The premise that proxy wars build upon inter-state conflicts is misleading; however, it is not indicative of such wars to be symmetrical in their provision of proxies. Furthermore, such wars are not confined to ‘small states’ acting as the proxy (as the final question addresses), as this assumes that proxy wars only grow out of pre-existing inter-state wars between such states. They can feed off other forms of war too, and involve large states or non-state actors.

• Can we regard a war by proxy for one side and not the other?
Yes. Take, for example, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. For the Soviets, this war constituted a direct intervention involving the overt deployment of large numbers of their own troops in order to prop up an allied regime. For the Americans, however, it presented itself as an opportunity to engage in a proxy war by funding and arming the mujahedeen fighters who wished to repel the Soviets. The same war therefore represented two distinct forms of intervention, one direct and one by proxy, for the two main superpowers (see the next section on the dynamics of proxy wars for a further discussion of this issue).

• Does the consideration of the war by one external party as a war by proxy make it possible to define a war as such, or do we need more external parties to define it as a war by proxy?
No. The categorization of a conflict as a proxy war is not necessarily for states themselves to certify. Indeed, external parties are more likely to refer to it as ‘foreign internal assistance’, ‘long-range projection capabilities’, or some other such semantic device.

• Does the consideration of the war by the external parties as a war by proxy make it possible to define a war as such, or do we need it to be considered as a proxy war by one or both of the small states?
No. Again, it is less the involved parties who are likely to classify themselves as being engaged in a proxy war, but more likely the wider, non-involved, international community. But the more important point remains not who asked whom to intervene (for example, a client-state request or a benefactor-state offer), but how the very presence of externally provided arms or money is affecting the dynamic of that war.

• How does one distinguish between proxy relationships and alliance relationships?
On occasion, with difficulty. It is often pre-existing alliances between states that lead to the request for, or offer of, proxy intervention. However, it remains important for us to distinguish between the meaning of an ally as a treaty-bound friend willing to share in the blood cost of a war to achieve a shared strategic vision, and a benefactor state utilizing a proxy war strategy exactly because they are not willing to share that burden. A proxy relationship is therefore far more impermanent, temperamental and opportunistic than alliance relationships, which are often built on more common foundations of shared identity or threat perceptions.

• When is a big state helping a small state and when is it using the latter?
This comes down to a subjective interpretation of the motive behind the intervention (see chapter 2 for a thorough discussion of these motives). We always need to bear in mind what Bertil Dunér has labelled the ‘compatibility of interests’ during such interventions.¹¹ This is the foundation of the benefactor–proxy relationship, as it reveals the perceived mutual benefit that the intervention reaps if the strategic goal motivating the proxy war is achieved. This, however, must be couched in terms of the asymmetry between the actors, traditionally (but not exclusively) encompassing a more powerful resource-rich state and a less influential state or non-state proxy.

• Does a big state act as a proxy for a small state?
On occasion, yes. This answer in large part is predicated upon an understanding that big states can unwittingly fight a proxy war on a smaller state’s behalf. The American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, for example, fulfilled a long-term Iranian ambition by cementing Tehran as a pre-eminent regional power despite the American’s lack of desire for this outcome. The fulfilment of a strategic goal by proxy does not necessarily have to be a conscious or deliberate act.

• Is the definition of the term ‘war by proxy’ limited only to big power–small state relationships?
No. Proxy wars are not fought exclusively by or for states. Particularly in the post-Cold War period, non-state actors have been harnessed as proxies (such as the utilization of Hamas by Syria to attack Israel). Chapter 3 engages in detail with exactly who fights proxy wars, and explores the dynamic between states and non-state actors.

The Dynamics of Proxy Wars

The relationship between benefactors and their proxies are context specific and are mired in a host of queries relating to consent, levels of engagement, and the perception of eventual gain.¹² If we take the use of proxy wars by the Soviet Union during the 1970s as an example, we can see, as Bruce Porter has pointed out, that in the vast majority of cases ‘the initial impetus for Soviet military assistance … was a specific request from the Third World client, rather than an offer from Moscow’.¹³ This has implications for our understanding of the phenomenon of proxy wars, as it indicates that they are not inherently the product of overbearing interference from larger external powers, but often invited opportunities to achieve a mutual strategic goal. The outcomes, regardless of the initial cause or motive, are, however, still invariably the same: the ratcheting up of regional tensions and the flooding of the country with arms, money or foreign ‘advisers’.

The issue of pre-existing alliances between eventual benefactors and clients, of course, can play a large role in the explanation of a proxy wars occurrence. If alliance reliability affects whether nations decide to go to war in a conventional inter-state conflict (such as the treaty entanglements that spiralled into the First World War), then there is no reason to assume that the level of support from allies has to first be restricted to war in an inter-state sense, second be direct, and third be overt. Complex conflict dynamics, or the desire to avoid sparking international opprobrium, may provoke certain alliances to manifest their solidarity in a proxy manner. If, as Alastair Smith has argued, a nation is more likely to retaliate if provoked when it expects the support of its allies,¹⁴ then we must consider that the fulfilment of collective security pacts and alliance treaties can be achieved both through direct third-party intervention and by indirect proxy involvement.

Yet one of the most concerning dynamics of proxy wars remains the way in which they possess the capacity to potentially escalate localized conflict into larger wars. The issue of escalation has to be disaggregated between the potential for indirect proxy assistance to cause more deaths within a civil war, for example, because of the proliferation of weapons, even though the initial conflict remains contained within its original borders; and its potential to escalate a conflict beyond its original borders by triggering collective security pacts amongst neighbouring states or drawing in another major power. The historical record of proxy wars has shown a detrimental proclivity towards the first type of escalation, yet a relative absence of the second. Morton Halperin argued in 1963 ...