A New Age of Proxy Warfare

The end of the Cold War saw the emergence of a new age of proxy warfare in which multipolarity supplanted bipolarity, globalization transformed the role of sponsors and proxies, and transnational social movements were further elevated. In many locales, most notably in the Middle East, this new age of proxy warfare rivals and perhaps exceeds the threat it posed during the late Cold War.

A review of the existing literature suggests the opening of new markets to trade, the reorganization of the global security system, and the continued acceleration of technological developments during the 1990s marked the beginning of a paradigm shift in the way wars would be waged for the next two decades. It is there, close on the horizon of the start of the twenty-first century and just before the 9/11 attacks on the United States, that the faint outlines of a new era in proxy warfare began to emerge. Not surprisingly, as the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya documented, it all began at the southern edge of Russia’s most vulnerable buffer zone.¹

Starting with Russia’s two successive scorched-earth military campaigns against Islamist rebels in Chechnya and Dagestan and the U.S. intervention in Somalia, the 1990s rewrote the post-Cold War rules of clientelism. The start of the rebellion in Chechnya in 1994 and the Russian Federation’s brutal campaign of repression ushered in a new era of proxy war marked by gloves-off extrajudicial killings, renditions, and other brutal tactics. With its military hollowed out after Afghanistan and a roughly 50 percent cut to the nearly 3 million Soviet armed forces that were dispersed across 15 of its former republics across the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, Moscow could ill afford another lengthy conflict in its near abroad.²

On the U.S. side, the devastating and politically costly Black Hawk Down incident in 1993 and deaths of more than a dozen of U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia provoked anxiety in the White House, leading Washington’s national security establishment to press heavily for more remote missile strikes and use of partners rather than direct U.S. force against groups like al-Qaeda in the Greater Middle East and its periphery.³ Israel, meanwhile, began to expand its use of unmanned aerial vehicles in the region, with attendant expansion of extraterritorial military campaigns and increased reliance on local sources to provide targeting intelligence.⁴

Even as analytical interest in proxy warfare as a strategic paradigm was supplanted by the global war on terror, the shadow of external sponsorship and the historical role of the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf States—from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya—always loomed in the Middle East. At the same time, the massive project of deconstructing the Soviet army, one of the world’s largest militaries, on the margins of these developments was by no means a singular or insignificant event. The United States, along with many other countries, began imposing steep cuts to its standing forces.

Some of the earliest hints of reinvestment in proxy warfare strategies emerged in the breakaway former Soviet territories of Chechnya, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova, where Moscow successfully leveraged ethnic divisions and political instability to redraw the boundaries of its imperium. At the periphery of the Black Sea, political and economic transformations obscured the depth of internal fissures in former Soviet republics and Kremlin anxieties. In these conflicts, the Kremlin tested a model that would become central to its gray zone strategy early in the twenty-first century. Short of conventional war, gray zone tactics leveraged a combination of support to irregular forces and weaponized narratives predicated on nationalism to advance strategic objectives.

This new age of proxy warfare rivals and perhaps exceeds the threat it posed during the late Cold War.

After 9/11, the U.S. counter-terrorism campaign against al-Qaeda across the Middle East ignited new debates about just war theory, the limits of state-to-state clientelist strategies, and Cold War alliances in the face of a rise in transnational social movements.⁵ In Afghanistan, American exceptionalism clashed with Salafist extremism and confronted norm-distorting tactics that included targeted strikes against civilians; suicide raids on religious sanctuaries, schools, and other protected spaces; and mass atrocities perpetrated by the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and armed Salafist affiliates. CIA renditions of alleged high-value detainees, detention operations at the U.S. military bases in Guantanamo and Bagram, and targeted drone strikes in areas outside the hostilities in Afghanistan only seemed to deepen questions about how to respond effectively to a violent transnational social movement that operated outside of the more traditional and territorially-bounded revolutionary movements that had been the hallmark of the Cold War era. This shift to tactics that bent the norms of international law cast a particularly long shadow over U.S.-led interventions that relied to a great extent on third party proxy forces that acted outside of or even sought to topple the constitutional order of existing regimes.

After the 2003 U.S. invasion, norms were tested by American actors in Iraq. Sean McFate and other scholars of the post-Cold War privatization of the “market for force” mark this period as the beginning of the reemergence of “neo-medievalism.”⁶ The well-documented and controversial role of private military security contractors (PMSCs) like Blackwater in major civilian casualty incidents in Iraq raised fresh questions about accountability and command and control in an era of increasing U.S. dependence on forces outside the constitutional chain of command.

It is perhaps not coincidental that the IRGC’s Quds Force and Abu Musab al Zarqawi, bin Laden’s lieutenant in Iraq, were able to leverage local discontent with the U.S. occupation on the heels of several incidents involving American contractors. Not surprisingly, Iran also recognized an opportunity and within just three years of the 2003 U.S. incursion into Iraq, the 2006 Lebanon war renewed tension between Israel and Iran. A year later, the U.S. surge of forces in Iraq in 2007 appeared temporarily to stabilize positioning in the region but the failure to cement a status of forces agreement for American troops to remain in-country precipitated the start of a drawdown in 2009.

Around the same time, Russian anxiety over NATO expansion; the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan; and the Euro-Atlantic alliance’s involvement in the conflict in Kosovo emerged as preeminent concerns for the Kremlin.⁷ After the Rose Revolution in Georgia elevated Mikheil Saakashvili to the presidency in 2004, clashes between the government in Tbilisi and Moscow over the status of South Ossetia began to re-escalate as Georgia deployed extra peacekeeping forces to the region. Across the Black Sea in Ukraine, anger over rigged presidential elections triggered mass protests and a recount that ultimately handed Viktor Yuschenko a victory over Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin favorite. The dramatic changing of the guard in two of the most strategically important territories along Russia’s border only reinforced suspicions in Vladimir Putin’s government that the United States was determined to expand its influence over the Kremlin’s traditional power base in the Black Sea region.

For Kremlinologists, as Andrew Monaghan notes, Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference marked an important but unexpected Russian pivot away from the cooperative attitude it had adopted in the immediate aftermath of Gorbachev’s resignation. It also provided the most decisive evidence that, in Putin’s own words, “the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible” to maintain without capitulating wholesale to the peculiar brand of American exceptionalism that emerged out of the “Global War on Terror”⁸ Putin’s pushback against U.S. hegemony was as much a genuine reaction to perceived Western backing for popular democratic uprisings against the Kremlin’s handpicked post-Soviet successors in Georgia and Ukraine as it was a reflection of internal fears that Moscow could not contain security threats from Islamist separatists within its own borders. The deadly 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and the 2004 massacre of more than 300 people following the siege of a local school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan raised serious concerns about the effectiveness of state security forces and the Kremlin’s ability to suppress internal threats.⁹

The successive democratic revolutions during the 2004 to 2006 period that removed Kremlin-friendly regimes in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and Ukrainian capital of Kiev were equally decisive in shifting Putin’s government onto a more aggressive footing. Both countries border the Black Sea—home to a key contingent of Moscow’s naval force in the Middle East and, at the peak of the Cold War, a maritime rival of the U.S. Sixth Fleet. The position of Ukraine and Georgia at the main access to Russia’s only contiguous warm water port have made both central to the Kremlin’s grand strategy since the time of Catherine the Great. Indeed, Moscow’s ambitions to maintain access to its main path to the Mediterranean and southeasterly routes through the Suez and to the Indian Ocean meant that when tensions that had been simmering since 1992 over the breakaway region of South Ossetia finally boiled over into full-scale war between Russia and Georgia in the summer of 2008, few close watchers of the region were particularly surprised.

The dramatic changing of the guard along Russia’s border only reinforced suspicions in Vladimir Putin’s government that the United States was determined to expand its influence over the Kremlin.

What was surprising and has since become one of the key case studies in the advent of cyberwarfare was Moscow’s attack on new and government websites that ultimately choked off Tbilisi’s ability to communicate clearly what was happening on the ground.¹⁰ While state-sponsored cyberattacks between battlefield adversaries began cropping up just as the World Wide Web was beginning to mature, the series of distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) in July 2008 on Georgian state websites and on Georgian hackers skilled at counterattacks was one of the first known instances of coordinated state military action on the ground and in cyberspace.¹¹ The Georgian campaign not only signaled Moscow’s renewed confidence in its place in the great power pantheon, it redefined Russia’s strategic playbook and presaged coming clashes in other critically important theaters more central to U.S. strategic interests.

When protests over the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit seller erupted in December 2010, few could have predicted the chain of events that would follow. Though the Arab Spring began as popular protests that quickly spread from Tunisia to Egypt in early January 2011, the discontent quickly shifted into the register of proxy warfare.¹² Disruption in states within the Saudi sphere of influence led Saudi Arabia to escalate its rivalry with Iran, notably in Bahrain, where it directly intervened by sending troops across the border in March 2011 and in Yemen, where it ran an air campaign and provided support to forces on the ground with the backing of the United States and a variety of other partners against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.¹³

At the same time, the Arab Spring led to protests and an escalating civil war in Syria, where Iran, fearing the loss of a partner uniformly viewed as essential by its foreign policy elite, mobilized a range of proxies, including Afghan and Iraqi Shia militias as well as Hezbollah, to defend it against rebels who quickly received support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and later the United States and Israel.¹⁴ In Libya, the United States backed a proxy warfare strategy against the Ghaddafi regime, providing air cover to rebels. After the rebels defeated and killed Ghaddafi, the country fell into a civil war between the various factions that was fueled in part by support for competing militias by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as well as counterterrorism missions—often by proxy—by other powers, including the United States.¹⁵

The fallout from the Libyan conflict also precipitated a much more decisive break between Russia and the United States. While Russia abstained from a UN Security Council vote to establish a no-fly zone in Libya in 2011, the subsequent breakdown of order in Moscow’s longtime client state and a key node in Russia’s energy trading chain prompted a sharp rebuke from Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, which accused Washington and NATO of stretching the UN mandate.¹⁶ In many respects, the chaos that ensued in Libya was instructional for Moscow and paved the way for Russia’s eventual intervention in Syria only four years later.

To complicate matters further, Libya, Yemen, and Syria saw the rise of powerful transnational non-state movements—most notably ISIS—fueled by the adept stitching together of local and global grievances, openings for jihadist organizing in countries stressed by revolution and proxy warfare, the challenges of ongoing economic and political globalization, and the powerful impact of the rise of social media.¹⁷ Some analysts have gone as far as to argue that this phenomenon requires a reconceptualization of proxy warfare itself.¹⁸

A simple review of the news reveals the extent to which inter-state conflict expressed through proxy war roared back in the wake of the Arab Spring. Headlines refer to an increasingly heated “Israeli-Iran Cold War,” discuss how an “Iranian-Saudi Proxy Struggle Tore Apart the Middle East,” and express concern about a “Growing U.S.-Iran Proxy Fight,” and the fact that “Russia is Roaring Back” in the Middle East.¹⁹

An examination of the number of battle deaths in the Middle East reveals that the number of such deaths in the period following 2011 rivaled the peak during the late Cold War and surpassed the toll during other periods of the Cold War in the region.²⁰ According to the United Nations, there are more refugees today than at any point since the end of World War II, driven in large part by the proxy conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen that followed the Arab Spring.²¹ Far from leaving the dark days of Cold War proxy warfare behind, the Greater Middle East continues to struggle with new and complex forms of the problem.

Substantive shifts in the geopolitical landscape proved key to this dawning age of proxy warfare. One of the driving trends is the re-emergence and escalation of inter-state competition between a resurgent Russia, a rising China, and the United States, as well as the escalation of other rivalries including those between Iran and the United States, Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, among numerous others. To the extent that the international system is returning to bipolar or multipolar great power conflict between the United States, Russia, and China, a strategy of containment by proxy will appeal to policymakers as far less risky than the overt state use of military force and interstate war, especially where there is the possibility of a catastrophic war between nuclear powers.²²

Substantive shifts in the geopolitical landscape proved key to this dawning age of proxy warfare.

Iran has long provided support to Hamas and Hezbollah to act as proxies against Israel. In Iraq, it supports numerous militias to expand its influence,²³ and in Yemen, it provides ballistic missiles and drones to the Houthis.²⁴ Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States arm Syrian rebel groups, often with the support of the United States.²⁵ Meanwhile, Syria relies upon non-state backers like Hezbollah and militias to bolster its shrinking military, while these groups simultaneously receive aid from Iran.²⁶ Russia seeks to protect its interests in Syria while keeping its own troops out of a direct role in the conflict by bolstering its support with private military contractors from the Wagner Group and other Russian PMSCs that have been pivotal in joint operations with Hezbollah and Afghan militia fighters.²⁷ The United States backed Kurdish groups to fight ISIS and Syrian rebels against Assad.²⁸ Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates battle it out for influence in Libya through their support for competing militias in the country.²⁹

In Syria, the United States and Russia carefully deconflict operations and America has avoided striking Russian targets even when conducting direct strikes on the Syrian regime.³⁰ Yet American and Russian proxies have clashed there. For example, the United States bombed Russian private military forces, themselves a form of proxy, that attacked U.S.-backed forces in Syria, killing hundreds, according to some reports.³¹ In responding to the bombing, Russia emphasized that “no Russian servicemen were involved,” demonstrating the role proxies play in restraining direct and open clashes between the two powers.³²

The move towards proxies as a way of avoiding the costs of direct confrontation is not restricted to rivalries of great powers. According to a 2016 RAND report, Iran has adopted strategies and methods of war that intentionally fall below the United States’ threshold for direct warfare, similar to the tactics adopted by Russia and China.³³ Moscow’s strategic innovations are most manifest in the Black Sea region in its annexation of Crimea and in the eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine, where hundreds of Russian operatives or so-called “little green men” have helped buttress an armed rebellion against the government in Kiev.³⁴ The RAND report also points among other examples to Iran’s backing for numerous militias in Iraq. In addition, proxies are often used as a way of avoiding retaliation because their use conceals responsibility—a common explanation for the use of terrorists as proxies.³⁵

Nor is fear of retaliation only a matter for superpowers and those locked in rivalries with them. In addition to its use of proxies against the United States, Iran has revived its proxy networks in western Afghanistan to counter Saudi and Emirati influence in South Asia and the Middle East while avoiding a direct war. Michael Knights has noted that Iran and Saudi Arabia are extremely vulnerable to one another, so they seek to avoid direct conflict while using proxies to wage war.³⁶ On the other side of the region in South Asia, Pakistan continues to use proxies to counter India’s comparative conventional military strength, a legacy policy that continued even after Pakistan developed nuclear weapons.³⁷

Fear of retaliation is not the only trend driving a resurgence of proxy warfare. It is also influenced by a desire to avoid the steep costs of occupying territory. Proxies offer a means of extending supply lines, creating strategic depth where it might not otherwise exist, and projecting power at a discount. The United States has shown itself increasingly unwilling to respond to conflict in the Middle East with its own forces and its appetite for military operations in South Asia is clearly on the wane following the costly occupation of Iraq and continuing engagement in Afghanistan. Andrew Mumford argues in his book Proxy Warfare that “the inevitable consequence of the War on Terror on the American purse (with the Iraq war alone estimated to eventually cost $3 trillion in the midst of a global financial downturn) and on American national pride (with over 4,000 combat deaths even after President Bush proclaimed ‘mission accomplished’ in May 2003) is that the U.S. will revert to engagement in proxy warfare.”³⁸ Mumford notes that many of the United States’ proxy wars during the Cold War followed the disillusionment of the Vietnam War, when direct intervention was similarly sullied.³⁹

In a 2016 speech summarizing his counterterrorism strategy, President Barack Obama stated, “we cannot follow the path of previous great powers who sometimes defeated themselves through over-reach,” adding that while “I have never shied away from sending men and women into danger where necessary…I've seen the costs.”⁴⁰ The impact of the Obama administration’s wariness regarding the costs of direct intervention are particularly clear in the case of Libya. In Burning Shores, his authoritative review of the history of Libya from the Arab Spring, Frederic Wehrey writes, “in weighing responses [to ISIS’ rise], Obama ruled out ground troops.…That left the option of working with Libyan forces on the ground.”⁴¹ A similar logic would shape the Obama administration’s interventions in Syria.

The move towards proxies as a way of avoiding the costs of direct confrontation is not restricted to rivalries of great powers.

The Trump administration has shown a similar hesitancy to expand the direct U.S. footprint in the Muslim world, with Trump repeatedly calling for an end to nation-building both as a candidate and as president, citing its cost to Americans.⁴² This tendency has been reflected in policy development, including his call for rapid withdrawal from Syria and efforts to mobilize an Arab force to take over in the country.⁴³ The administration even considered, although seemingly eventually rejected, outsourcing U.S. military action in Afghanistan to private military contractors.⁴⁴ The fact that this idea could be seriously entertained builds on the significantly increased role of contractors at every level in the post-9/11 wars, as well as a clear interest among many global players for developing new modes of projecting force while avoiding the responsibilities, costs, accountability, and related issues associated with formal state military action.

The United States is not the only actor to seek to avoid the costs and risks of occupation and direct governance through the use of proxies. Iran adopted a strategy of influencing Iraqi politics through multiple proxies rather than supporting a single one in part because it sought to maintain long-term influence rather than seeking to dictate specific policy outcomes.⁴⁵ Similar ambiguity has obtained in the Persian Gulf and Levant, where Iran’s backing of popular militia forces in Iraq, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria has precipitated sharp responses from Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Russia, for its part, has rushed to shore up one-time client state regimes in Syria and Libya, deploying Chechen task forces and private military security contractors in line with long-held strategic visions of using private forces to extend power where it would otherwise be difficult to do so.⁴⁶ This dynamic was visible in the Black Sea region and Ukraine where Moscow’s use of “little green men” has helped keep action under the United States’ threshold for war and achieve plausible deniability.⁴⁷ In South Asia, more recently, debates have cropped up about the degree to which Russia is funneling support to the Taliban. Several American military officials have suggested that Moscow has funneled weapons to Taliban contingents but proof has been scant and it is unclear whether such a move is predicated more on a desire to see the U.S. exit the region altogether or rather is simply meant to ensure that Moscow has a seat at the table when it comes to shaping a region it has long considered part of its near abroad.

Russian involvement in Syria and Ukraine, and suspected interference in U.S. elections, has prompted a spate of commentary on the emergence of a “New Cold War,” or “Cold War 2.0,” but little in the way of serious analysis that breaks beyond the confines of past paradigms.⁴⁸ The few policymakers in Washington’s interagency national security apparatus familiar with these trends often frame much of their analysis in terms of the U.S. experience of proxy warfare during the Cold War. As Michael Innes suggests in his edited volume Making Sense of Proxy Wars, “the use and role of armed proxies have featured only sporadically as a serious subject of either academic or public inquiry” since the end of the Cold War. Innes adds, “In that Cold War formulation, proxies were little more than third-party tools of statecraft without any agency, intent, or indeed interest visibly separable from those a well-resourced state sponsor.”⁴⁹ Little consideration has been given to the anti-colonialist drives for independence and self-determination and the political and military modernization processes that have shaped so many of the conflicts that have shaped the Greater Middle East and its periphery.

An understanding of proxy war based on Cold War models fails to capture the strategic innovations since the Soviet collapse that have dramatically altered the character of armed conflict and the nature of proxy warfare. Proxies today operate with much greater flexibility and autonomy and are able to exploit deeper connections because of more integrated supply chains supported by a wide range of networks in the private and public sector. Several key factors distinguish today’s proxy wars from those of the past, limiting the ability of prior analysis to shed light on today’s conflicts.

Perhaps the most obvious limiting factor is the shift in the international system away from bipolarity. During the Cold War, the superpowers often intervened to restrain their client states from escalating conflicts. For example, the superpowers sought, often successfully, to restrain the reach of the Arab-Israeli conflict.⁵⁰ Today, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has struggled to establish a stable security system in the Middle East, as multiple states, empowered by globalization and technological advancements—whether Iran, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey—compete with each other often via proxy warfare.

Compounding this dynamic is that during the Cold War, warfare, including proxy warfare, was primarily state-centric. Where states with highly centralized militaries once predominated as the principal sponsors of proxies and were able to exert tighter (though admittedly less than complete) control over supply chains, the new and emergent political economy of conflict has empowered proxies themselves to develop their own proxies. The spread of advanced weapons and communications systems that enable more effective and cost-efficient long-range targeting and new forms of security operations; the rise of private security companies; innovations in finance and energy production; and the democratization of information technologies have not only seen non-state actors take pride of place in the strategies of rival states, but also become drivers of strategy themselves.

There is a major gap in the literature on the role of the globalized and tightly interconnected international financial system. As seen from the release of the Panama Papers, banking secrecy, the rise of offshore banking, and tax havens have had a real impact on the growth of complex networks of proxies.⁵¹ In one of the few book-length accounts of this phenomenon, former Harvard scholar Brooke Harrington has documented the rising importance of wealth managers and their connections to the wide network of offshore banks in supporting the easy transfer of licit and illicit funds to today’s many conflict entrepreneurs.⁵²

A case in point is Rami Makhlouf, a close associate and cousin of Bashar al-Assad, who has reportedly used shell companies in the Caribbean to perform an end run around U.S. and European Union sanctions on supporters of Assad’s regime.⁵³ A longtime client of Mossack Fonseca & Co., Makhlouf reportedly tucked away millions in offshore tax havens and used the international financial system to help fund Syria’s pro-government so-called “Shabiha” militias.⁵⁴ Similarly, the proxy warfare in South Asia has long been facilitated in part by innovations in international banking and financial arbitrage, as noted by the UN’s 1267 Sanctions Monitoring Team. The team has long called for more comprehensive sanctions on non-state actors who facilitate funds transfers to the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and al-Qaeda in South Asia.⁵⁵

In contemporary proxy warfare, newly empowered non-state actors are both principals and agents, marketing their comparative advantage over direct intervention to potential sponsors and sponsoring groups themselves. Daniel Byman and Sarah E. Kreps examine this dynamic by applying principal-agent analysis to state-sponsored terrorism, writing:

Different individuals, groups, and firms have different areas of expertise that make it more efficient for them to undertake an activity than for one group to do everything. A principal might seek to delegate to an agent who has a comparative advantage in a particular skill.⁵⁶

Byman and Kreps argue that “Lebanese Hizballah, for example, has evolved a specialized set of terrorist capabilities, [and] the group has its own training sites in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon where several Palestinian groups have received training, a well-run and widely viewed television channel (Al-Manar), and a proven record of tactical effectiveness” that it offers to supporters.⁵⁷

In the past, this may have been a footnote within the broader incentive structure of proxy warfare. Today, potential proxies are actively seeking to implant themselves within conflicts. Hezbollah, while acting in part as a surrogate of Iran, has placed itself at the center of a large network of non-state groups engaged in conflict across the Middle East, providing training to the Houthis in Yemen and support to pro-regime forces in Syria.⁵⁸ Many of these groups have revolutionary or apocalyptic ideologies that hardly fit the vision of proxy warfare as the “great game” of old, with great powers moving proxies like chess pieces around the global map. For example, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nathaniel Barr have argued that al-Qaeda adopted a strategy of rebranding as a bulwark against Iranian influence in part as a way of seeking Arab state support.⁵⁹ As the 9/11 attacks showed, allowing al-Qaeda and similar groups to grow within the context of a broader proxy war is an immensely dangerous proposition. And the al-Qaeda of the 1990s did not have armed drones, cyberwarfare capabilities, or the global reach of today’s terrorist propaganda machines.

To further complicate matters, today’s terrorist organizations have woven their own networks of proxies. Hezbollah, as discussed above, is a case in point. Similarly, while the Islamic State engaged in direct conventional warfare with the predictable result of the destruction of its quasi-state, al-Qaeda worked through front groups and coalitions rather than engaging in direct efforts to seize territory and exercise governance itself, as Gartenstein-Ross has written, along with others.⁶⁰ This strategy echoes al-Qaeda’s origins as an organization based around providing training and financing to independent groups and individuals—in essence, a proxy strategy of terrorism.

The rising power of non-state actors and globalization has helped connect conflicts that previously were largely isolated from each other. Global and regional trends identified by Idean Salehyan and others as influencing the supply side of external support for proxies, including the existence of transnational constituencies, suggest that proxy warfare will be even more common in the future.⁶¹ According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,⁶² the world is facing its largest refugee crisis in history, surpassing the number of displaced persons following World War II; one out of every 113 people on Earth has been displaced. As Salehyan notes, the presence of refugee flows from civil conflict increases the probability of international conflict.⁶³ At the same time, in his book Foreign Fighters: Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts, David Malet finds that foreign fighters are increasingly appearing in conflicts, and that this growth in transnational mobilization is not merely a product of ethnic ties.⁶⁴ ISIS drew tens of thousands of foreign fighters to Syria from around the globe, deftly tying local grievances into its larger global narrative.⁶⁵

The rising power of non-state actors and globalization has helped connect conflicts that previously were largely isolated from each other.

Further complicating the situation is the acceleration of technological development, wider availability of dual-use technologies, and technical know-how and its diffusion across borders. During the 1990s and early 2000s, concern about potential migration of Russian scientists looking to earn higher salaries by serving in WMD programs in states like North Korea, Syria, and Iran prompted the United States to spend millions on grant programs designed to keep Russian scientists at home. While those programs proved fairly effective, at least one major study suggested that the temptation to work for so-called rogue states has not been entirely extinguished.⁶⁶

Long- and mid-range missiles have always been a trigger for conflict, as illustrated by the Cuban missile crisis. The establishment of the Missile Technology Control Regime in 1987 was meant to mitigate risks associated with the proliferation of technical know-how and loose import-export regimes by establishing clear standards for the export of missiles and supporting materials and technologies for missile production and maintenance. With some 35 member states, the regime has been credited with shutting down wholesale transfers of missiles to states with the purported intent to develop nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons capabilities. But participation is voluntary and a number of countries that are either endowed with WMD capabilities or harbor such ambitions—such as China, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran—remain outside the regime.⁶⁷

While the export control regime is credited with slowing access to weapons for states like Libya, poor reporting routines and information-sharing mechanisms about the export of restricted technologies has blunted the MTCR’s effectiveness. The advancement of missile technology and its proliferation in the Greater Middle East has helped escalate conflict and bring rivals who were previously separated by large distances closer to conflict. For example, the Iranian-Israeli clash was not only driven by increasing Iranian support for Hezbollah and Palestinian groups but also the growth of its ballistic missile and nuclear programs during the 1990s and its transfer of advance rocket and missile technology to its proxies.⁶⁸ The impact of the diffusion of standoff weapons became particularly clear during the 2006 Lebanon War, when Israel fought a Hezbollah which had benefitted from such weapons and training on them from Iran.⁶⁹ Today, fear of the proliferation of powerful weaponry has motivated an aggressive campaign of Israeli air strikes against Iranian-backed groups in Syria that has brought it into tension with Russia.

Escalatory pressures are likely to increase as technological development accelerates, remote targeting capabilities proliferate, and new developments in areas like cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence allow weaker states, armed actors, and other conflict entrepreneurs to advance their strategic aims from further and further away. Long supply chains, poor controls, new forms of financial liquidity such as cryptocurrency, increased human migration flows, and the wide availability of information on the internet all combine to expand the range of conflict stakeholders who can support and sustain proxies. Today, a complex mesh of states, corporations, armed groups, and wealthy individuals increases the likelihood that conflict will only become more entrenched in the Greater Middle East and its periphery. Continuing to rely upon Cold War understandings of proxy warfare to address this increasingly complex environment is likely to produce analytical failure and increase the likelihood of strategic surprise.