The Dark Truth Behind Modern Proxy Wars

– The nature of war is changing, and I wanna show you how. (bright classical music) – [Reporter] Syria over the last decade. – Countries are
increasingly using a new way to fight one another, and it’s remaking the
entire globe in the process. There’s a really important chart that shows this that I want to show you. (bright classical music continues) This chart shows all of the
interstate conflicts over time, at least since World War II. Interstate just means wars
fought between two countries. You’ll notice that it’s
a pretty flat line. Some years, there’s just
one or two conflicts, and some years, there’s
no conflicts at all between countries. But if you pay attention to the world, that doesn’t seem right. (bomb explodes) (bright classical music continues) It certainly doesn’t feel like
the world is mostly at peace. And that’s because this
graph doesn’t represent all the types of war that exist. For that, you have to stack on a different kind of war. Like this. This is civil
wars or intrastate wars. You can see that there’s
a lot more of those, but not as many as in the ’90s. But now, I wanna show you
what this graph looks like if we put on a different kind of war, the kind of war that
we’re talking about today. It looks like this. (suspenseful piano music) What we’re looking at
here is intrastate wars. So civil wars, wars within a country, but that are internationalized, meaning they have external backing. The more common name
for this is proxy wars. (suspenseful piano music continues) They used to be fairly rare, but look what’s happened
starting 15 years ago. (suspenseful piano music continues) There were over 25 proxy wars
happening at one time in 2020. Now, these usually get
talked about as civil wars, the Rwandan Civil War,
the Syrian Civil War, the Civil War in Sudan. But these are not just civil wars, and that’s what you can’t really see by just looking at a graph. You have to go deeper which
is what I wanna do today. I wanna show you how these things work and why they’re so dangerous. Because this is the new way that the most powerful countries in the world fight each
other, not fighting directly, but by using other conflicts
as their battlefield. Proxy wars are deadlier,
more resistant to peace, and they’re a driving force
changing geopolitics today. (suspenseful piano music continues) So I want to explain to
you what proxy wars are, how they work, why they’re so deadly, and why they’re on the rise. – [Jeremy] Hey, how are you? – Doing well, how are you doing? Thanks for taking the moment to chat. – [John] I’ve been
talking to Jeremy Shapiro about proxy wars. He’s got a lot of perspective on this. – Worked in the US government on that, and so, there’s some things
that I can maybe allude to, and I can’t really talk
about how I know them, so don’t ask for sources on
that one, (laughs) I guess. – Yeah, yeah. Okay, so before we get into
proxy wars in our world today, I want to go into an imaginary world, a fake map that we’ve made up. (bright music) How would you concisely
define what a proxy war is? – I think it is when a
war is instrumentalized by outside parties to use it as a proxy for their external or larger dispute. – In this made up world,
there are two dominant powers. Let’s call them Johnny Land, and over here, you’ve got is Izistan. Yes, I’m doing this. Let’s
just go with it, please. In the old days, if Johnnyland
and Izistan went to war, it would look like this. They would send their armies
smashing into one another. It was really violent. – It looked very much like
World War I and World War II. They ended up in massive
wars with each other that were quite destructive,
often to their own countries, particularly if they lost. But frankly, even if they didn’t lose. – Well, and let’s remember
why big powers go to war. And they do this to assert
dominance over their region. Maybe they’re after the same resources. Maybe they fear each other as rivals, and they see an opportunity
to weaken the other. Or maybe, Johnnyland
forgot to sign the kids up for little league and Izistan is angry. And they’re fighting directly. This is how war has worked
for thousands of years. That is until the
greatest war of them all. (suspenseful piano music) (bomb exploding)
(machine gun rattling) World War II was a war
that showed the world that we had become too
dangerous, too advanced, too destructive, especially
with the invention of atomic weapons. (nuclear bomb exploding) – Nuclear weapons really focus the mind. They are so destructive and so easy to deploy once
you have them that the idea that you could ever defend
yourself against that is not one that really any country
has ever entertained. In a nuclear age, it
would be insanity for them to fight each other directly. – So direct war between these two great
powers became unthinkable and thus, it basically stopped. This is a crazy thing,
like sometimes we forget that like we live in a world where great powers don’t
fight each other directly, something that they’ve always done, but that doesn’t mean they
don’t fight each other. – In the nature of countries, they’re still extremely competitive and still looking for
ways to harm each other, to get leverage on each other, to sort of win in
geopolitical competition. – Great powers still see
each other as a threat. They still crave dominance over their region and over the world. – Indirect ways of attacking each other, such as supporting proxies and civil wars has
become much more popular since nuclear weapons were invented. (nuclear bomb explodes) (suspenseful piano music continues) – So back to our fake map, what this looks like is
it would probably start as a conflict popping up
within a nearby country, could be a civil war or power struggle, or just some political unrest. Now, these two big
countries see an opportunity to fight each other indirectly by supporting one side of this war. They send guns, money, military trainers, and this is a proxy war. (suspenseful piano music continues) The two sides fighting
within the smaller country are the proxies or sometimes
referred to as clients, and the outside supporters
are called patrons. Now, remember in this case,
they’re just sending support to their side of an internal struggle, a civil war in another country. – [Jeremy] A war is instrumentalized by outside parties to use it as a proxy for their external or larger dispute. – From the great power perspective, what is the advantage or benefit of choosing this tool of engagement, rather than more direct versions? – Depending on the situation,
a great power can hope that they can really sap the strength of their rival through
support to a proxy war. – Unfortunately, this is
a really rational thing for big countries to do. They get deniability. They can say, hey, we’re not
really involved in this war, and they don’t have to
sacrifice any of their citizens, and they’re able to contain the violence in someone else’s country. They get to fight their rival and have someone else pay the price. – That’s proven to be inefficient and somewhat from a
great power perspective, less dangerous way of
geopolitical competition than direct wars. – Now, technically, proxy wars can take slightly different forms,
like if the two big countries support two smaller countries
that are fighting each other, or if one big country
invades another country and then the rival supports the
resistance of that invasion. There’s lots of different forms, but the whole idea is that
these two great powers are fighting each other
via a different country or different groups. (suspenseful piano music ends) Let’s be done looking at the fake map and look at the real map, the real history of what proxy wars look like in real life. This dynamic has existed
for a really long time, but the modern version of it starts to really crop up in the Cold War. (suspenseful piano music continues) (rocket whooshing) (plane engine roaring) – [Air Traffic Controller] 116. – We’ve got these two great powers, the two big patrons, Soviet
Union and the United States, using proxy war as a
way to fight each other, turning the entire globe
into a battlefield. This is why it was a Cold War. They never fought each other directly. They just chose local conflicts to support and fuel in an effort to win
more influence over the map. Right after World War II,
the superpowers focused on China’s civil war
supplying opposite sides with military hardware, money, training. This paid off for Moscow
when the communist side won. It was a major blow to the United States, but the support in this proxy
war was nothing compared to what happened right after in Korea. – [Reporter] Korea had become
a place of 24-hour terror, nothing and no one was left untouched by the harsh bitter reality of war. – Moscow authorized its
proxies in the north to try to take over the US-backed south, something they wanted to do. And we made a whole video
about that relationship between Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin. The Soviets supported them
with guns, money, fighter jets, and the US, which already
had troops there sent more, way, way, way more like almost 2 million. The Soviets fought back by fueling the North Korean invasion. And then China, who
remember, was supported by the Soviet Union, sent its
army to join the fight too, turning the Korean peninsula
into a battleground, not just between Koreans, but between these massive
powers who were both trying to spread their ideology across the map. All of this outside weaponry and manpower prolongs the fighting beyond what the two sides
could sustain on their own. Compared to little North and South Korea, American, Chinese, and Soviet supplies were practically limitless, and this escalated the conflict for years. (suspenseful piano music) And then you see something crazy here, which is something we’re gonna see a lot in these proxy wars. Even when North Korea
wanted to stop the fighting, Moscow wouldn’t let them. They told them to keep fighting. They had so much leverage over them that they continued to fight. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, even knew his side couldn’t win, but he directed them to keep fighting because he wanted to quote, “Draw out the war to
shake up the Truman regime in America and harm the military prestige of the Anglo-American troops.” Sometimes that’s the logic of a proxy war. Let an entire country burn just
to embarrass your opponent. We actually saw a version of
this way back in the Civil War when Great Britain sent guns
to the confederate rebels. But what happened in Korea
was on whole new level. It was so much more deadly. It turned this entire
peninsula into scorched earth, all so that these great
powers could play out their rivalry using Korea
as their battleground. (suspenseful music) Okay, so you would think that
after the Korea situation, both sides would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that got really bad. Let’s like rethink this. But instead, both sides
enshrined proxy war in their wartime doctrine. (suspenseful music continues) The policy was to give
military support to any nation that was resisting Soviet
political aggression, pledging military support. Now, of course, to the public, this was framed very
differently than proxy war. – The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedom. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world. – A tremendous number of examples
of this, where in essence, the intervention of the great
powers ended up creating or defining the sides and
internationalizing the conflict or even creating the conflict. So some of these wars
were of indigenous origin, probably most of them, but some of them were actually
started from the outside as weapons against each other. And others were sort of
combination of the two. – And this gets kind of crazy because what it does is it
hijacks local conflicts, turning them into an existential conflict between the Soviet Union
and the United States when the local conflict maybe
had nothing to do with that. Now, that incidentally
almost led to World War III and taught us that proxy wars
not only exacerbate conflicts and turn them into these
highly ideological things, but also if one side escalates, it can spiral to become really dangerous. (suspenseful music ends) Okay, let’s speed things up here. ‘cause we now have the basis
for what a proxy war is and sort of how it worked
during the Cold War. I’m gonna do a speed round now where I give you a few more examples. So you can pick up on the patterns of how cold war/proxy
wars actually worked. (suspenseful violin music) In the 1960s, you had the newly independent
and resource-rich Congo. The US supports the rebel
groups that are seeking to overthrow this Soviet-backed president. The country plunges into a civil war. And the great powers each
support their own side, which ultimately leads to the installation of an American-friendly dictator. Vietnam, like the Vietnam
War that a lot of us are familiar with was a proxy war. The Soviet Union had
armed and funded one side, and the US eventually
sent millions of troops to prop up the other side, showing us the madness of proxy wars. The US would sacrifice
so many of its citizens to prevent this one spot on
the map from turning red. And in the end, the
US-backed side lost anyway. Now, this wasn’t the only proxy war that turned out to be fairly pointless. Look at Afghanistan in the late ’70s. The Soviet Union was supporting their puppet government there
and a rebellion broke out. The Soviets invaded to prop up their ally and then here comes the US because they both
opposed the Soviet Union. The Mujahideen took all of
those weapons and money, and training and funding
from the United States. They were their temporary ally. (suspenseful violin music continues) – What the US recognized
quite early on in the war is that the Soviets had exposed themselves. They’d created a situation
in which they needed to occupy a very difficult country and in which relatively inexpensive and easy provisions of arms and training to Afghan rebels,
the so-called, Mujahideen, could sap the strength in
a very disproportionate way of the Soviet army. And that was incredibly successful. – This totally worked and
the Soviets were driven out, the Soviet Union, collapsing
a few months later. (calm piano music) Okay, we’re done with the Cold War ‘cause I wanna get to modern day. I wanna explain this
graph why it’s going up. If you wanna learn more This global competition between the two superpowers was over. So you would think that proxy wars, which is conflict fueled
by two big patrons, would go down like they would be over. But the opposite is true. Proxy wars after the Cold War skyrocket, and Jeremy helped me understand why. (gun bangs) I notice a shift in the
kind of flavor of proxy wars and how they look after the Cold War. How would you characterize
a proxy war in the ’70s between with the Soviet
Union and the US feels and looks different than one
happening in the Middle East or you know, all around the world today? – There are many more players,
I guess, is the issue. – So instead of just these
two big patron powers, we now have so many more powerful and semi-powerful countries
that are sponsoring proxy wars, using them as a tool to gain influence and to damage their rivals. This means that more and
more conflicts looked like what Lebanon looked like
in the ’70s and ’80s. A civil war that had so
many different factions and that had so many
outside patrons sponsoring the different factions. when Kim Il Sung wanted
to negotiate a peace deal, but his patron wouldn’t let him? In conflicts like this, like Lebanon, we have so many different patrons. You don’t just have two big
powers that can veto peace. You have like four or five. – It makes it last a lot longer. It makes it very, very
difficult to end them. This is in the one instance because it dramatically
complicates the negotiation, but maybe even more fundamentally, it is because wars tend
to end when one side or both can’t fight them anymore. And the existence of these
multiple external supporters means that if one side gets
sort of pushed to the very edge, there’s an incentive for one
or more external supporters to come in and sort of resurrect them, resurrect them at least enough to be able to continue the war. And this is the great
tragedy of proxy wars, is that they have a sort
of dynamic equilibrium to them where they can
be fought for decades because the external supporters can always do enough to continue the war, but rarely do enough to
actually end the war. (calm piano music continues) – Okay, so that’s our
first major reason why this graph is going up. We live in a multipolar world. There’s a lot more of these
powers willing to be patrons. The other big reason is that proxy wars are
becoming increasingly cheap. (machine gun bangs)
(calm suspenseful music) Back to the Congo. Now, we’re in the late ’90s, and you have a lot of rebel
groups that are fighting for influence, fighting for resources. This civil war became the battleground for neighboring nations
to fight with each other, but indirectly using the
Congo as their battlefield. Uganda and Rwanda sent money and weapons to rebel groups on one side and even invading to help them fight. Namibia, Angola, and Zimbabwe armed and funded the other side, each hoping to install
a friendly government. And when you’re talking
about small rebel militias in the Congo, you don’t have
to do a lot to support them. Sending small arms, a
little bit of training, some logistics support, that goes a long way in
giving them influence or in using them to support your troops that are there as well. And in this case, in particular, to add more complexity to it, supporting a certain group
could mean getting access to a resource-rich piece of
land, which you can then exploit and kind of pay yourself back for the support you
gave to those militias. All of this leading to one of the deadliest conflicts
in modern history and showing us how these new
kinds of proxy wars burn slowly and for a very long time
and can be very destructive. They’re really hard to
stop once they start. (APC engine revving) (calm suspenseful music continues) Now, let’s see how this plays out in Libya in more recent years. (calm mysterious music) 2011, the people rose up. They threw out their longtime
dictator only to fracture and find themselves in a
power vacuum and a civil war. And here come the patrons to choose which side they want to win. – [Jeremy] The Russians, the Turks, a couple of European
countries, the French, and the United States, and Egypt, all have various external roles. – [John] These patrons
have poured money, weapons, and even sending in airstrikes
to support their side. – [Jeremy] And they’re all quite important in sustaining that Civil War. – Libya is still divided between these foreign-backed groups. We often think of a
revolution that overthrows a dictator as like a really good thing because sometimes it leads to democracy, but because of these
modern proxy war dynamics, sometimes it can go the other way. What is dislodging a strong
man, maybe create fertile soil for this sort of
internationalized civil war? – Well, typically, what
happens when you dislodge a strong man is that you don’t have another one to replace him. Different groups are vying for power and vying to reestablish governance or even reestablish total control. One of their instincts is to go out and find external supporters who can add a tremendous amount of
capacity to their ability to fight those domestic struggles. You think about it for
yourself, you’re there, you’re the Johnny Harris Liberation Front, and you are fighting the
guy across town who has, you know, an up-and-coming video podcast. You’re kind of evenly matched. If you can go and get some big money from HBO, you can crush him. But at that point, HBO owns you. If he then goes out and gets some money from Netflix, you guys can be fighting
these podcast wars for many decades. I hope that into language
you can understand. – Love the analogy.
(Jeremy laughs) Which is how we got a horrific war. like the Syrian Civil War. (calm piano music) It started as an uprising
to overthrow the dictator. It descended into a civil war eventually attracting powerful patrons that fueled a decade and a
half of horrific bloodshed. (calm piano music continues) This is one of the deadliest
proxy wars of our time. Not just because over a
half a million people died. Because of what outside
support did to fuel that, it escalated it year after year, leading the dictator to gas his own people and giving rise to violent
extremists all while being fueled by patrons that seemingly
had endless supplies to keep fueling the fighting. (calm piano music continues) A similarly horrific thing is
happening in Sudan right now, a civil war that has
been internationalized, which is making it way
worse than it would’ve been had these patrons not gotten involved. (calm music) This is what modern proxy war looks like. It is longer, it is deadlier, and it is more resistant to peace, but there’s one proxy war
that doesn’t really fit with the model we’ve talked about here. (foreboding music) (Putin speaking in Russian) Let’s talk about Ukraine.
Ukraine’s kind of a weird one. How do you see Ukraine and
the proxy dynamics there? How do you think about
what’s going on there? – [Jeremy] It is hard. I mean, it’s interesting
the US-Ukraine relationship is a sort of classic
proxy war relationship. But on the other side of
the equation is Russia, which at the same time
is the main combatant and feels like it’s almost
fighting a proxy war. – So you have Ukraine who was invaded and is being supported
by the west to fight, but they’re fighting
against Russian troops, but also Russian-backed
militias that are fighting to control territory in eastern Ukraine. – The Russians are very convinced that they’re fighting the United States and the West and Ukraine. And so, I’ve come to
think of Ukraine as a sort of half proxy war, which
is why it’s so dangerous because, you know, one nuclear power is already deeply engaged and already deeply
believes that the outcome of the war is of an
existential importance to them. But I think the Russian
attitude that they have to win this war, that they’re
deeply involved in this war, that they have sacrificed enormous amounts and that the very existence of their state and regime depends on it,
means that the possibilities for escalation outside of a proxy war context are very severe. This is an important distinction. (foreboding music continues) – And Ukraine highlights something that we haven’t really talked about yet and is very important here,
which is the perspective of the people on the ground
experiencing the conflict. Why would they accept support
from an outsider knowing that it will just make
this conflict more deadly? And you can see the answer
on our little map here. (calm piano music) People on this side of the battle line have been under Russian occupation that’s massacred civilians. It’s erased Ukrainian culture. It’s kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children into Russia. So if you live on this side of the line, of course, you would take foreign help to reclaim your country,
to push the invaders back. To you, this isn’t a proxy war in all of its sterile language. This is a struggle for your survival, for your very existence. And that is often why local
groups will take support from the outsiders because they know their enemy’s gonna do it, too, and they know that it’s the
only way that they can survive. And this is the deadly
psychology of a proxy war. (calm piano music ends) (mysterious music) Okay, now, we haven’t talked about China. Like we’ve talked about the
United States and Russia, and all these other patrons. Where’s China in all of this? It turns out China doesn’t
play the proxy game. Very surprisingly, this is not their style of geopolitics. As best we know, they haven’t directly
supported Russia in their fight with Ukraine, though, of
course, they do continue to support in shipping them
technology and all these things, but not in the traditional proxy war way. Now, there’s a few
likely reasons for this. Number one, Beijing likes stability and proxy wars are like
the opposite of stability. They’re also very
interested in not bringing any kind of conflict into their borders. They want peace and
stability in their borders. And then, and this is a
really interesting one, China has this foreign policy tenet, they call one of their golden rules, which is that they do not get involved or interfere in the internal
affairs of other countries. This is like a pretty big value
in Chinese foreign policy. It’s one of the big critiques
of the United States is that the US is always sort of meddling other people’s countries trying to influence them this way or that. China’s pretty strong about the idea that they will make trade deals, and they’ll try to influence people with like sending them
stuff and giving them debt. But this kind of like meddling
in a civil war on a matter of principle, China stays
out of it, at least for now. And this is kind of being tested right now on Chinese southern border. There’s a civil war happening in Myanmar. A rational great power would
pick a side and support them, but China hasn’t done this. Now, they have sent a war plane and are considering giving drones to one side of this conflict. So this may turn into a
full-blown proxy situation. But for now, it looks like
China’s actually sticking mostly to its principle of trying
to stay out of interfering with the affairs of another
country in a very direct way, trying to prolong a conflict
to weaken the other side. And honestly, it’s hard not to wonder what could happen if China starts to play the proxy war game
like other big powers. This is a country with advanced weaponry and cyber capabilities
and a global network of allies and connections. And with a world that already has so many patrons creating all of these cross-cutting geometries
between different forces, I’m not sure we can handle China being another one of these patrons. Like what does that do to the system? So that is why this graph exists, why proxy wars are spreading. It is a fairly disastrous trend, especially for the people caught in the middle of wars that are fueled by outsiders paying the
price for a conflict that has nothing to do with them. So we need to pay attention to this. Proxy wars are the way
the world works now. It’s the way great
powers fight each other. And as international tensions heat up, we need to understand how
to look for proxy wars, how to look at a conflict,
not just as a civil war, but look at who is supporting, who are the sponsors, who are the patrons? That’s gonna become
increasingly important. We will certainly be covering
these different conflicts in different ways as they heat up. Thank you all for being here, and I will see you in the next one. I’ll see you in the next one. (calm piano music)