The Art of War: Proxy Warfare Through the Ages

To many of the most powerful nations throughout history, the idea of war has appeared unpalatable, uncivilized, or simply just inconvenient. Major nations, big global players, have disagreements all the time — over trade or borders or ideology — some of which are too important or too irreconcilable to fix over the negotiating table. But if every failed negotiation led to the world’s best fighting forces taking up arms, the world order would never know peace.

There is, however, a hell of a lot of grey space between polite conversation and all-out war, and operating in that grey space often means having friends who can go to war on your behalf. From brief skirmishes between virtually unknown tribes to decades-long wars that claimed the lives of millions, countless conflicts across history have attempted to squash the beef between major powers while ensuring that those major powers weren’t the ones getting their hands dirty.

The Method: How Proxy Wars Work

At its most basic level, a proxy war is a contrast to a traditional war — a war in which Nation A and Nation B are mad at each other, so Nations A and B gather up their respective militaries and go fight it out. A proxy war, then, is a war in which Nations A and B don’t go head-to-head, but instead lean on a third party to do the fighting for them. Those third parties could be allied nations, formal or informal protectorates, non-state groups, insurgencies, or even civilian protestors.

In general, a proxy conflict will take one of three basic forms. If Nation A’s smaller, subsidiary ally is Nation A-1, and Nation B’s ally is Nation B-1, then the conflict might see Nation A fighting Nation B-1, Nation A-1 fighting Nation B, or Nation A-1 fighting Nation B-1. The whole point is that Nation A and Nation B never meet directly in open conflict.

That is not to say that either Nation A or Nation B would ignore a proxy conflict; far from it. Instead, these major powers partner together with the minor powers. The minor power is the one sending troops into the battle, but the major power could be providing anything from financial support, to weapons, to training, to safe haven — or, in some cases, taking away their own troops’ uniforms and sending them into battle to help out.

This way, the major powers involved in a proxy conflict do end up spending their resources on a war, and both sides will typically give their all to attain victory, but neither of the major powers should ever be able to hold each other directly responsible for the damage that the war brings. It’s not a secret that both major powers are involved, at least not usually, but that isn’t the point. The point is that neither of the major powers want to bear the costs of going to war with each other, but both sides are able to stomach the significant, but lesser damage of a side conflict.

Why Major Powers Choose Proxy Conflict

There are a few key reasons why major powers would generally elect to pursue a proxy war. Perhaps the most obvious is that a nation would rather not send its own citizens off to die if it doesn’t have to. At other times, it’s a matter of cost, where waging a major war would be prohibitively expensive — especially for countries that can’t foot the bill of moving troops between regions or even continents at scale.

Or, in the case of the largest proxy conflict in history, the Cold War, the two major powers involved could do some truly unacceptable levels of damage to each other if they ever met in direct conflict. Just about any cost is worth avoiding a full-on, world-ending nuclear exchange, a consensus that the US and the Soviet Union thankfully agreed upon. Proxy warfare gives each side just enough plausible deniability that such a potentially devastating outcome can be avoided.

Proxy warfare also offers real advantages that major powers often can’t get on their own. If the goal is to bring down some third-world dictator in a remote, difficult area to navigate, it’s far more likely that a knowledgeable local insurgency can have success than a group of foreign Special Operations forces with an outdated map and a compass. And finally, there’s the matter of solidarity.

Be it a question of politics, religion, shared ethnicity, or anything else, a major power can advance its own goals or ideologies by helping its smaller foreign partners advance themselves. The other side of that coin, though, is that if that major power has an equally powerful enemy, then that enemy is going to want to make sure they don’t get their way. History has seen long-term proxy wars play out to pit communism against capitalism, Shi’a versus Sunni Islam, Catholicism against Protestantism, and quite a bit more.

Unlike an alliance between two nations who simply want to fight a war alongside each other, proxy wars are strictly hierarchical — the minor powers involved probably wouldn’t be fighting at all, or might not even stand a chance, except that they are acting on the will of a larger ally. Depending on which party you ask, this relationship might be described as benevolent, or transactional, or exploitative. But typically, it’s a short-term and highly conditional partnership.

Do what the big boss says, and you’ll be rewarded; go off-script or fail to keep up, and the big boss will find someone else worth their time.

Tools of Sponsorship and the Risks of Proxy Warfare

The major power’s support can manifest in a number of different ways. In some cases, they’ll train a smaller nation or an insurgency’s troops, or physically provide heavy-duty weapons and equipment that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. At other times, they might supply crucial intelligence, or tactical support in planning and carrying out attacks.

They might provide large sums of money and let their smaller partner figure out the rest themselves, or they might hand-pick some of their own elite soldiers and tell those soldiers to go help out the smaller nation as “mercenaries.” It’s not uncommon to see a major power offer logistical support, create propaganda, or organize recruitment drives where fighters from around the world are convinced to travel on their own and start to help out. As for how success is defined, there are a range of options: the proxy war can be won outright, or the smaller nation might grow powerful enough to carry on the fight without help, or the situation can settle into a stalemate or balance that everyone involved can learn to live with.

But the risks are substantial. Although entire global conflicts have been decided by proxy battle in the past, those same attempts at proxy warfare have just as often deteriorated into direct, major-power confrontation, or otherwise gone way off-course. Leaning on a smaller power or a non-state actor requires that actor to be trustworthy — and often, those allies aren’t quite as trustworthy as a major power might think.

The Afghan mujahideen used US-supplied armaments to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, but turned them back against the Americans just a few years later. At other times, proxy forces might not show up to the battle in nearly the numbers that their sponsor had hoped, or they might become overly reckless, willing to take risks or make tactical errors because they know that their sponsors can get them out of a bad situation. And proxy conflict has a nasty tendency to create situations where the end justifies the means — a major power that trusts a regional leader to shut down dissent or political opposition but chooses to ignore that this leader is torturing and disappearing their population in order to keep them in line.

Proxy conflict is chosen, almost invariably, because it is the lesser of two evils — but being the lesser of two evils absolutely does not make something good.

Ancient and Pre-Cold War Proxy Conflicts

The Byzantine Empire were masters of proxy warfare — which, ironically enough, have been referred to as “Byzantine politics” in the past. Rather than attack any of their rivals themselves, the Byzantines had a nasty habit of stoking animosity between multiple rivals at once, and then sitting back when those rivals went to war with each other. Much like modern powers, the Byzantines would then toss a bit of money one way or the other, or enter as peacemakers once the conflict had gone on long enough.

Across the continent in Western Europe, the French would use similar strategies to inflame the Wars of the Roses, fought between the warring English houses of York and Lancaster. French King Louis XI backed York, while his main rival, the Duke of Burgundy, threw his lot in with Lancaster. Although the wars would throw England into chaos, it was largely on the back of foreign aid provided by France and the Low Countries, who were the ultimate beneficiaries of a weakened English crown.

The 19th century provided significant examples of proxy warfare as an integral part of the broader wheeling and dealing between European powers. In the Egyptian-Ottoman War, Egypt fought with the support of France and Spain, while the Ottoman Empire solicited aid from the British, the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Tsarist Russians, in a war that eventually saw Muhammad Ali recognized as the ruler of Egypt. In Uruguay, Samoa, and Sudan, similar battles played out, although the events of the 1910s — namely, a global and very non-proxy World War — saw these sorts of conflicts placed on hold for a time.

World War I also brought about the fall of the Tsars in Russia, thus kicking off the first in a long series of proxy conflicts in which Soviet Russia supported communist movements around the world. That first conflict was the Finnish Civil War, in which the Finnish White Guard, backed by Germany, fought to preserve the nation’s democratic practice against the Red Guards, a communist paramilitary faction that garnered strong support from the Soviets. After a hard-fought war that saw some forty thousand odd casualties in total, the Finnish White Army was able to overcome the Red Guards, even despite their backer, Germany, being defeated in World War I shortly after the conflict ended.

The Spanish Civil War and the Road to World War II

The Spanish Civil War provided an exceptionally relevant proxy war, with the fascist regimes of Italy, Germany, and Portugal throwing their support behind the Spanish Nationalists, a rebel faction led by future fascist dictator Francisco Franco. On the other side, the Soviets attempted to support the Second Spanish Republic, with France briefly getting in on the action as well. The conflict was a valuable opportunity for each of those foreign powers to send soldiers to support on the ground, where they picked up experience that would inform their approach to World War II — especially in the case of Germany’s Luftwaffe pilots.

But far more importantly, Europe’s unified fascist powers were able to put Franco in power, and though Franco ultimately declined to join Hitler and Mussolini in World War II, he also took Spain off the board as far as the Allied Powers were concerned, making a Nazi victory in continental Europe far more achievable. Proxy wars took a backseat during World War II, but it didn’t take long for them to begin again, even before the world war had finished up completely. In the Chinese Civil War, the US and the Soviet Union got their first chance to sit on opposite sides of the fence, as Soviet aid helped propel Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party to victory over Chiang Kai-Shek’s US-backed Chinese Nationalist Party.

At the same time, the two sides would battle in the shadows over control of Iran, Paraguay, and British Malaya, while the US also had to deal with the combined influence of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania in their attempt to help a communist faction take over Greece. In these early years, the Americans and the Soviets would each take wins and losses, in a series of conflicts that essentially set the table for what was to come.

The Cold War: The Defining Era of Proxy Warfare

The Cold War was a decades-long struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union in which both sides agreed that it was absolutely imperative that they didn’t go directly to war with each other. After all, that would almost definitely precipitate the launch of a truly insane number of nuclear weapons, and both America and the Soviets had slightly more chill than that. Instead, the Soviets and the Americans ended up on opposite sides of the Korean War, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the Vietnam War, the Congo Crisis, the Ethiopian Civil War, the Afghan Civil War, and a very long list of civil wars and uprisings in Latin America.

That is not necessarily to say that the US and the Soviets were always on opposing sides; they both supported Egypt in the Suez Crisis, against the will of France, Israel, and the UK, and they worked together to support the 1959 Tibetan Uprising against communist China, although China eventually gained victory there. But by and large, the Cold War was made up almost exclusively of proxy conflicts between these two global superpowers. In some cases — Vietnam and Korea, for example — American troops ended up fighting on the battlefield directly, opposed not by the Soviets, but by Soviet-backed opposition movements.

The same thing happened in reverse in Afghanistan; the Soviets weren’t getting shot at by Americans, but they were getting shot at by American weapons, in the hands of Afghan militants. But in most of the era’s conflicts, both the US and the Soviet Union would throw their support behind opposing sides in a civil war, or a border dispute, or a recently inflamed but very old cultural or tribal disagreement. Those sorts of engagements were far lower-impact, generally involving the loss of far fewer lives, but they were far greater in number than the instances where either American or Soviet troops were drawn into battle directly.

Just as important were American and Soviet efforts to prop up various dictatorships and regional allies to ensure that certain parts of the world remained under their control. The United States spent the 1970s and 1980s orchestrating Operation CONDOR, a coordinated intelligence-sharing effort that allowed authoritarian regimes across Latin America to hunt down dissidents on each other’s soil. Likewise, the Soviet secret police spent decades hard at work trying to root out any American attempts to subvert their authority on Soviet soil.

The conflict between the Americans and the Soviets was largely decided by the results of their proxy wars, with the United States proving able to weather a war of economic attrition, while the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed under its own weight.

Post-Cold War Proxy Conflicts and the Rise of New Coalitions

Proxy warfare didn’t end when the Cold War did. Instead, the sovereign state of Russia largely pivoted into the major-power vacancies that the Soviet Union had left behind. In the 1990s, NATO and Russia ended up on opposite sides of the Georgian Civil War, and each side did quite a bit of puppetry behind the scenes to figure out where, exactly, each newly post-Soviet state would align itself.

During these years, Russia, Ukraine, and Greece also entered into a proxy war with Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, who had chosen to put aside their differences and fight toward the breakup of Yugoslavia. Pakistan and Iran also ended up facing off against Russia during a civil war in Tajikistan, while the US and France ended up being major players in conflicts in the Congo, Nepal, and on the Ivory Coast. The First Libyan Civil War in 2011 was practically the proxy war to end all proxy wars, as a massive, US-led global coalition sought to support the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, and a smaller, more ragtag coalition of mostly leftist states worked unsuccessfully to keep the dictator in power.

In the modern era, no proxy war has played out quite so visibly as the Syrian Civil War, a multi-dimensional and quickly evolving conflict. From the start of the conflict, many countries around the world had at least some skin in the game. The regime of Bashar al-Assad was seen as a stabilizing influence in the region, as well as an economic partner and geopolitical ally, for countries like Russia, Iran, and China, while Western powers like the US, the UK, and the European Union had hoped that Syria would become yet another victory for the Arab Spring movement.

But the innumerable Syrian factions on the ground and the military contributions of foreign nations turned the Syrian Civil War into a conflict that, at times, seemed to only nominally be about deciding the fate of Syria. Instead, it became a forum for US-backed militias to clash with Russian-backed ones, for Israel and Iran to do much of the same, for Turkey to force the world to take sides in its long-running conflict with the Middle East’s Kurdish population, and for disputes between secularist and Islamist governing principles to be settled in blood.

Syria, Libya, Yemen, and the Saudi-Iranian Cold War

The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria muddied the waters further, as the many proxy wars going on in Syria had to also take place against the backdrop of a very real, direct war against the Islamic State. Overall, the civil war appeared to resolve mostly in Russia’s favor, with the Assad regime seeming to be on the precipice of victory. But this came at the cost of millions of dollars per day for Russia, and on the occasions where Russian forces clashed directly with the Syrian militias that opposed them, those battles resulted in thousands of dead Syrian civilians, including, by some estimates, nearly two thousand children who were directly killed by Russian forces.

Many of the Russian troops who gained experience in Syria now fight in Ukraine, either for the Russian military itself or for the paramilitary Wagner Group. The Second Libyan Civil War, despite being the quieter of the two conflicts as it raged alongside the Syrian Civil War, has been even more of a geopolitical mess than Syria ever was. Libya’s precious oil reserves have prompted most of the world’s major military nations to pick a side.

The conflict has seen Iran working for the same goals as the Americans and the British. It has seen France split with the rest of the European Union and join Russia on the opposite side of the conflict, and it has seen Israel and Saudi Arabia work together for common goals, even as Libya itself has splintered into a patchwork of militia-controlled territories. Much like Syria and Libya, Yemen’s ongoing civil war has turned into a proxy conflict, with a Saudi Arabia-led coalition — including support from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, America, the UK, and Germany — battling against an Islamist movement known as the Houthis.

The Houthis, for the most part, fight their own battles on the ground, much like the North Vietnamese of the Vietnam War. However, they solicit ongoing support from an opposing coalition spearheaded by Iran and backed up by Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Russia. The Yemeni Civil War is just one in a long series of proxy conflicts between Saudi Arabia and Iran, who have fought a cold war of their own for some forty-five years.

They’ve shown up on opposite sides of conflicts from Lebanon to Iraq to the Caucasus and the Balkans.

Ukraine, the Future of Proxy War, and the Coming Arms Race

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a conflict where the question of whether or not it truly qualifies as a proxy war has been a subject of heated debate. It does bear pointing out that the prior stage of the conflict, a low-grade war that was waged for years in Ukraine’s Donbas region, was very much a proxy conflict. In those years, Russian-backed but Ukrainian-led separatist movements were responsible for fighting the Ukrainian state, not Russia directly.

Since Russia invaded, the conflict has been very clearly fought between Russia and Ukraine, and although Russia has claimed that large numbers of NATO troops are fighting in Ukraine, those claims are — to put it kindly — complete and utter nonsense. The more relevant question is whether NATO’s support for Ukraine, and on the other side, China’s evidently growing support for Russia, is enough to consider the war a true proxy conflict. There are legitimate arguments on either side.

Western financial and military support for Ukraine has absolutely bolstered the Ukrainian defense, so much so that it’s an open question what the situation would look like today if that support had never come. But the war is very much a war of Ukrainian independence versus Russian annexation — and the two principal actors in that question, the two countries with the biggest stake in the answer, are battling it out directly. Thus, even if both sides of the war receive backing from international partners, neither side would qualify as a proxy force acting out the will of a sponsor nation or coalition.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly invoked the idea of the Ukrainian invasion as a proxy war with the West — even a so-called “defensive” one — but this defense does little to excuse Russia’s decision to invade a sovereign neighbor. As major and regional powers continue to grow more and more militarily fearsome, the question of proxy warfare has become increasingly pragmatic in recent years. Although it’s still regarded as a low, or even shameful form of warfare in some circles, other experts have advocated for a more focused development of proxy-warfare doctrine from Western nations.

The thinking goes that as the world’s advanced militaries become more and more capable of doing massive damage to each other, proxy conflicts get more and more attractive as a less devastating alternative. There is also potential for this to develop into yet another arms race, as China and the West both pivot toward proxy conflict in advance of a new Cold War that many experts believe has already begun. China has remained conspicuously absent from many of the proxy wars of the last half-century, and has often chosen to play the role of a peacemaker rather than a belligerent or a sponsor, but this may well change as China continues its evolution into a more Cold War-esque hegemonic power.

Whether or not China becomes the next major player in the proxy wars of the world, it seems entirely likely that the rest of the world’s larger powers will continue to be drawn toward proxy warfare to suit their own goals. No matter which way you slice it, proxy war has been an integral part of both the Cold War world order and the post-Soviet state of affairs. Who exactly the belligerents and sponsors of future proxy wars will be remains to be seen, but if one thing is certain, it is that proxy warfare itself will remain central in the years and the decades to come.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three basic forms a proxy conflict takes?

A proxy war involves Nations A and B disagreeing but avoiding direct confrontation by leaning on allied third parties. The conflict can take one of three forms: Nation A fights Nation B’s smaller ally; Nation A’s smaller ally fights Nation B directly; or the two minor allies fight each other on behalf of their sponsoring major powers. In every case, the major powers never meet each other in open conflict, though both typically provide financial support, weapons, training, intelligence, or covert troops to their proxies.

What are the main reasons major powers choose proxy war over direct conflict?

Major powers elect proxy warfare for several reasons. Most importantly, they would rather not send their own citizens to die if they do not have to. Cost is also a factor, since major wars are prohibitively expensive.

In the Cold War’s case, direct conflict between the US and Soviet Union risked a world-ending nuclear exchange that both sides were determined to avoid. Proxy warfare also offers tactical advantages—local insurgencies often navigate difficult terrain and conditions more effectively than foreign special forces—and allows major powers to advance ideologies and support aligned partners without bearing the full cost of war.

What was the Afghan mujahideen episode, and what does it illustrate about proxy warfare’s risks?

The Afghan mujahideen used US-supplied armaments to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, then turned those same weapons against the Americans just a few years later. This episode illustrates one of proxy warfare’s central risks: the minor power or non-state actor a major sponsor relies on may not remain trustworthy, may act recklessly knowing their sponsor will bail them out, or may eventually use the capability provided against the sponsor itself. Proxy conflict also tends to create situations where the ends justify the means, allowing a major power to ignore atrocities committed by a regional partner as long as that partner serves the sponsor’s goals.

How did the Spanish Civil War function as a proxy conflict that shaped World War II?

The Spanish Civil War saw fascist Italy, Germany, and Portugal back Spanish Nationalist rebels led by Francisco Franco, while the Soviets and briefly France supported the Second Spanish Republic. Germany’s Luftwaffe pilots gained combat experience there that directly informed their approach to World War II. More consequentially, the unified fascist powers succeeded in installing Franco, and though he ultimately declined to join Hitler and Mussolini in the war, he removed Spain from the Allied cause entirely—making a Nazi victory in continental Europe far more achievable than it otherwise would have been.

Why is the Russian invasion of Ukraine a contested example of proxy warfare?

The earlier, low-grade conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region from 2014 onward was clearly a proxy war: Russian-backed but Ukrainian-led separatist movements did the fighting, not Russia directly. Since Russia’s full invasion, though, both sides fight openly, making it harder to classify. Western financial and military support has bolstered Ukraine’s defense, and China has provided growing support to Russia, but neither Ukraine nor Russia qualifies as a proxy force acting out a sponsor’s will—they are the principal actors with the greatest stake in the outcome. Russian President Vladimir Putin has invoked the idea of a proxy war with the West, but this framing does little to excuse Russia’s decision to invade a sovereign neighbor.

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