Conclusion: What is the Future of America’s Proxy Warfare?

George Kennan traveled from Washington, D.C. to Moscow in the summer of 1944 to take up the post of Minister-Counselor (now usually called the Deputy Chief of Mission) at U.S. Embassy Moscow. From that position, less than two years later, he would write the so-called “Long Telegram,” the famous cable in which he outlined the nature of the U.S. struggle against the Soviet Union for the next half-century.

To travel from Washington to Moscow during World War II, Kennan had to fly by military plane through the Middle East and North Africa, with stops in Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. Kennan expressed glibly intolerant views while in the Arab world. Egypt was a “triangle of irrigated desert around the delta of a polluted stream.” Iraq was “a country in which man’s selfishness and stupidity have ruined almost all natural productivity.” Reflecting on this time in his memoirs, Kennan expressed remorse, describing his comments as “shallow and misleading” and admitting the Middle East and North Africa were “blind spots” in his understanding of the world.¹

While Kennan’s observations of Middle Eastern society may indeed have been bigoted and shallow, his analysis of the future of the United States in the region was more characteristically incisive. The United States would not be able to carry out a consistent policy in the Middle East, he mused, because its democratic system privileged well-organized, “vocal minorities” who might hold very specific views. America’s democratic system, he argued, “is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas remote from its own territory.”²

Kennan’s assessment is just as valid in 2019 as it was in 1944. U.S. proxy warfare in Syria was, in the end, too complex to meet its objectives. This was even true for the U.S. partnership with the SDF, where, for a time, the United States aligned its political strategy with the capabilities of its proxy and built a strong working relationship with the SDF and global partners. But then the counter-IS coalition collapsed—with a helpful push from Presidents Trump and Erdogan—giving adversaries of the SDF and the United States all the evidence they needed that simply waiting out the United States and its allies without having to give anything away at the bargaining table was their best move.

It is just as likely that the flaws Kennan pointed to will endure, as America will rely more heavily on proxy forces in the Middle East in coming years. There is little public or political support for the large-scale combat deployment of American troops, let alone for a return to wars of occupation. Yet, there is also no end in sight to the Middle East’s wars. Conflicts continue in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the Palestinian territories, and the potential for new wars exists in other regional states, such as Algeria and Lebanon.

Conflicts create opportunities for America’s adversaries to shift the balance of power in the Middle East in ways that could, over time, overwhelm American allies. In some cases, regional conflicts also allow new safe havens to emerge for insurgents to plan attacks against Americans. To counter these threats at a reasonable cost to American lives and treasure, the United States must work with allies in the region. Sometimes, in the absence of formalized relationships with a state partner, those allies can be proxies—in effect, non-state allies.

But as attractive as proxies are, it is difficult to get them to advance U.S. strategic interests. Without the right preexisting capabilities or extensive in-country support, U.S.-backed non-state proxies in the Middle East can do little more than disrupt a state adversary or conduct counterterrorism operations that hurt an insurgent militarily. They cannot address the complex social factors that gave rise to a terrorist group or civil conflict in the first place. America increasingly uses proxies to fight its wars, but these are political wars that cannot be won by military force alone. U.S.-backed proxies in the Middle East might solve short-term dilemmas, but they hardly contribute to the long-term resolution of core issues affecting American interests in the region.

The product of this study is a framework to guide policymakers on how to fight proxy wars. According to that framework, three factors must align for a proxy warfare relationship to work: 1) a clear political strategy from the sponsor, 2) a clear assessment of the capacity of the proxy, and 3) an ability to reduce the three factors that can undermine a sponsor-proxy relationship: the information deficiency problem, the principal-agent problem, and the international coordination problem.

As Brian Katz, a fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes in his study on proxy warfare, there is a gap between the military objective for engaging proxies and the political strategy needed to use them in the first place. “Recent CT campaigns conducted via non-state proxies,” he writes, “had a primarily military objective—the defeat of the Islamic State—with no clear or achievable political end-state for which military operations were intended to serve.”³ Katz noted that using violence without a political strategy may be a “sub-optimal but necessary option when terrorist threats are exigent and diplomatic solutions are dubious.” But, he warns, “Sustaining those battlefield gains may be tenuous, however, if there is no political outcome to solidify them over the long-term.”⁴ Our research supports this assessment.

However, forming a clear or achievable political end-state is just the beginning. If the political strategy includes controlling territory, then those proxies need to have more than coercive capabilities. They must have a strategy or an ability to govern effectively. Finally, partnering with a proxy means trying to reduce the three factors that can undermine the relationship, even if the political strategy is clear and the proxy has well-demonstrated capabilities. The Turkish proxy war effort in northeastern Syria provides a warning of the dangers of engaging in proxy war with a clear strategic goal but without resolving the management challenges this paper has described.

The recent failure of the U.S.-SDF partnership shows that problems can emerge even when the proxy force is capable and the relationship is structured in such a way as to mitigate the downside risk of information deficiencies, agency problems, and coordination gaps. However, the partnership also provides a model for how the United States government could approach proxy warfare in the future, insofar as the United States is able to reduce shifts in strategic purpose and address the mismatch between presidential intent and agency planning.

The fatal flaw of the U.S.-SDF partnership recalls Kennan’s 1944 observation. Can the United States develop a long-term strategy for dealing with security challenges in the Middle East and carry them out with the strategic clarity necessary to succeed? The complexity of proxy warfare in general, and in the Syrian war in particular, should give policymakers pause when considering future engagements in the region.