Principal Rivalries & Proxy Dilemmas

The principal rivalries that define today’s bloody conflicts in the Greater Middle East and its periphery have a long history. The emergence of the Cold War created a bipolar security system. Yet even as a bipolar order emerged, other trends of decolonization and nationalism complicated the bipolarity. These trends combined with the accelerating forces of globalization and economic competition and strategic innovations in warfare, most notably the diffusion of high-powered and standoff weaponry, to give root to today’s new era of proxy warfare that challenges the models generated during the Cold War.

With former European colonial powers weakened by two long devastating conflicts that coincided with major technological transformations that upended the political economy of Europe, Russia and the United States emerged as the predominant powers in the international order. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, clashes between the two, and eventually China, cleaved the region between two competing economic systems: capitalism and communism. From 1945 forward, Europe emerged as the central proving ground in the tug of war of the Cold War bipolar world order.

It was not long before Asia, Africa, and the Greater Middle East were mired in post-colonial paroxysms that reignited violent competition between local elites that had long been held in check by European powers. Though some, like Britain and France, tried to exert their historical hold on colonial power, their rule never recovered. The Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia simultaneously experienced successive socio-political convulsions wrought by technological advances that progressively reshaped the local and international order.

In 1946, Soviet forces refused to withdraw from Iran, where the Allies had stationed troops to protect oil supplies for the war effort against the Nazis. The United States backed Iranian complaints, and the Soviet Union withdrew, though the early crisis pointed to the key role of the energy sector in defining the coming Cold War conflicts in the Middle East.¹ Further to the east, following the collapse of British rule in India, the country was partitioned between India and Pakistan in 1947, sparking a whole new rivalry that would become the center for future proxy wars. In 1948, British rule in Mandatory Palestine ended, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war broke out—though in that instance, Moscow and Washington aligned in backing Israel, illustrating the fluctuating process of the solidification of Cold War rivalries in the region.²

But it was when the Soviet Union successfully exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1949, ending the American monopoly on nuclear weapons and cementing a limited war dynamic between the two superpowers of the bipolar system, that competition with the United States upped the stakes in proxy wars between the two superpowers. The establishment of NATO that same year set off a race for influence in Moscow’s backyard that would ultimately prompt then Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to deploy nuclear warheads in Cuba, only a short distance from Florida’s Gulf Coast, a little more than a decade later.

Meanwhile, the scramble for control over the hydrocarbon extractive industry began to reshape alliances in the Middle East. In 1953, the United States and Britain supported a coup in Iran, overthrowing the government of Mohammad Mossadegh, which had planned to nationalize oil production, threatening American and British oil interests.³ The coup would help generate substantial anti-American feeling in Iran that would later redefine the security structure of the Middle East.⁴ It also, in part, prompted the Soviet decision to double down on its support of revolutionary movements in places like Algeria and Southern Yemen as well as to invest heavily in the Ba’athist regime of Hafez al-Assad.⁵

The rise of the pan-Arabist Ba’ath party and other Arab nationalists during the 1950s marked a new turn in Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. It marked a reconfiguration of global and regional alliances in the Middle East, leading to a solidification of new spheres of influence and devastating proxy wars along their borders. However, during this period, the United States and the Soviet Union often exercised control over their clients and partners resulting in dynamics that, though at times escalatory, also limited the scope, reach, and lethality of proxy warfare.

Determined to leverage their newfound hegemonic edge over European powers in the region and cultivate ties with rising nationalist movements, Moscow and Washington aligned against France, Israel, and Britain in the 1956 Suez Crisis and in other conflicts that erupted in the Middle East around the same time.⁶ The partnership between London, Paris, and Tel Aviv against Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Arab nationalist whose election that same year challenged European colonial interests in the region, made for strange bedfellows. But it was as much motivated by fears that Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism would fan the flames of Arab discontent in other former European colonies in North Africa and the Middle East as it was by fears of Soviet hegemony in a critical energy-producing region.

As with the Suez Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union aligned against France’s desire to maintain control in Algeria. The exercise of power by the United States in particular to restrain and reverse the action of France, Britain, and Israel illustrated the ability of the United States and Soviet Union to calibrate and control escalation dynamics in the emerging bipolar system. However, such control did not always result in restraint, as later demonstrated by the third Arab-Israeli War in 1967 and the fourth in 1973. The United States and Soviet Union backed different sides, at times escalating the violence while at other times cooperating to restrain it. The alignment of superpower interests in the region was almost always the result of a tense marriage of convenience.

Across the Middle East, the clash between Arab nationalists, led in large part by Nasser’s Egypt and more conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia, became progressively intertwined with the Cold War clash between the Soviet Union and the United States.⁷ In 1958, under a push by Nasser, Egypt formed the short-lived United Arab Republic, drawing together Pan-Arab nationalist regimes in Syria and Iraq and pushing both deeper into the Soviet sphere.

The growing Soviet influence in the Middle East via Nasser’s Egypt reflected a shift in Soviet policy towards building relationships with emerging nationalist movements in the Global South. In prior years, Soviet foreign policy under Stalin focused heavily on cultivating Communist Party ties at the local level and on the assassination of perceived traitors and defectors from the communist camp rather than cultivating nationalist movements.⁸ A key moment for this shift came during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, when Khrushchev not only denounced Stalin in his famed “Secret Speech” but abandoned Stalin’s “two camps” theory⁹ that divided the world into opposing communist and capitalist camps that left little room for co-opting national liberation movements.¹⁰

The alignment of superpower interests in the region was almost always the result of a tense marriage of convenience.

In 1963, Israel and Iran began to provide joint support to the Kurds in northern Iraq, embracing a proxy warfare strategy of their own. They built upon pre-existing, low-level Iranian aid, to counter what they feared was growing Iraqi influence in the wake of the 1963 Ba’athist coup.¹¹ The effort was part of a broader Israeli-Iranian-Turkish intelligence partnership known as Trident. It was not simply a local struggle, but closely tied to the tension between the two superpowers as Israel and Iran sought to sell themselves, the broader Trident partnership, and the proxy war against Iraq using the Kurds, to the United States as a bulwark against the Soviet Union’s solidifying sphere of influence.¹²

While Trident shaped Iran-Israel relations for a time, leading both states to invest in Kurdish and other ethnic minority proxies in the region, it was the outbreak of a new round of warfare between Israel and its Arab neighbors that helped solidify Israel’s partnership with the United States. Ba’athist flirtations with the Soviets, Nasser’s increasing assertiveness, and a desire to exact a toll for its failure to contain the rise of a powerful Chinese-backed Communist bloc in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, prompted an American pivot to the Middle East in the late 1960s. At the same time, the rising power and influence of OPEC, after its founding in 1960, escalated anxiety in Washington and allied European capitals over what the reconsolidation of Arab nationalist power in the region might mean for energy markets and critical maritime trade routes in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Gulf of Aden.

Tensions boiled over when Nasser threatened to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships in response to long-simmering enmity over Israel’s incursion into the Sinai. Unlike the Suez Crisis in 1956, the clash between Cairo and Tel Aviv found the United States facing off against the Soviet Union as the Soviet Union’s Arab clients, Syria and Egypt, confronted Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.¹³ Israel’s push into the West Bank and Golan Heights delivered a stinging defeat to Egypt and its Arab allies. It also ultimately led to the slow-burning destruction of the War of Attrition, a significant but often under-analyzed turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict that colored the competition between the United States and Soviet Union in the region. During the low-level conflict, from 1968 to 1970, artillery exchanges between Israel and Egypt across the Suez Canal resulted in thousands of fatalities on both sides and ultimately led Nasser to turn to the Kremlin for weaponry, fighter pilots, and military advisers.¹⁴

Shortly before his death, Nasser turned to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah to create a Palestinian buffer and broker the Cairo Agreement with the Lebanese military. This allowed PLO fighters to use Lebanon as a base to launch attacks in the disputed territories, setting the stage for future proxy wars in the region and the 1975 civil war in Lebanon.¹⁵ The rise of international terrorism also emerged as a prominent issue shaping proxy warfare as Palestinian groups took on a more active role, with greater independence from Arab states—though still drawing on state support—in the wake of the 1967 defeat.¹⁶

The collapse of the United Arab Republic and rise of the Ba’ath Party, Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt’s loss to Israel in 1967, and Nasser’s death in 1970 paved the way for a rebalancing of military and economic power in the Greater Middle East. The aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War saw the growth of a period of proxy conflict among newly empowered former client states, driven by a decline in Soviet influence, military modernization, and renewed revolutionary politics—in particular, the Iranian revolution. As a result, during this period the superpowers found their ability to impose escalation control increasingly challenged.

Spooked by Moscow’s growing closeness to Tel Aviv and its cultivation of stronger ties with Iraq after the failure of the United Arab Republic, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat began disentangling Egypt from its alignment with the Soviets. Cairo’s leadership was also increasingly suspicious of the Soviet military’s advice to avoid a confrontation with Israel at the highly fortified Bar-Lev Line, and began to suspect the Soviets were holding back weapons sales to avoid escalating a conflict that could draw in the United States.¹⁷ Egypt’s realignment dealt a major blow to Soviet influence in the Middle East, setting the stage for a period of American dominance, albeit one in which the United States would soon find itself in conflict with and seeking to manage tensions among former client states.

Israel, for its part, cleaved closer to the United States even as it secretly grew its nuclear weapons capabilities in the late 1960s.¹⁸ In the midst of Egypt’s realignment, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the last true inter-state war of the Arab-Israeli conflict, broke out. Israel demonstrated for a third time its conventional superiority over its Arab neighbors. This and Israel’s widely recognized, if unofficial, status as a nuclear state, brought the logic of deterrence and limited war to regional conflicts even without the role of nuclear armed superpowers.¹⁹ By the end of the decade, Egypt and Israel signed a peace deal formally ending their conflict and cementing the United States role of powerbroker and peacemaker in the region.

The 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed shah in Tehran again reshaped the region’s security architecture. It sparked an enduring rivalry between the United States and its former client state, fueled by Iranian anger over American support to the Shah’s repressive regime, American anger over the embassy hostage crisis, and Tehran’s increasing alignment with Shia revolutionary fighters in southern Lebanon.²⁰ At the same time the revolution revived old tensions with Saudi Arabia over claims to leadership of the Islamic world. Iran’s transnational internationalist revolutionary ideology, combined with traditional strategic concerns regarding the Iranian state’s economic and military power relative to Arab states, threatened Saudi Arabia.²¹ The revolution also quickly put an end to the Israeli-Iranian intelligence cooperation under Trident, though a tense, more limited cooperation would persist through the 1980s, despite growing enmity.²²

Iranian investment in ballistic missile development and a nuclear program also increased Israel’s perception of its one-time friend as a threat.

In September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, sparking the Iran-Iraq War. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States backed Iraq and provided funding, viewing Iraq as a buffer against Iran, which in turn vastly escalated the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.²³ The Iran-Iraq War, along with Iran’s transnational revolutionary roots, also led Iran to develop ties with Shia militias in Iraq that would become an important part of its foreign policy in the future.²⁴ The United States provided support to Iraq to aid the remaining Arab pillar of its failing regional security strategy, but found itself increasingly taking on a direct military role in ensuring the flow of oil from the Gulf, notably during the Tanker War of the late 1980s.²⁵

In June 1982, amid the heat of the Iran-Iraq War and ongoing attacks from Lebanon into its territory, Israel sharply escalated its participation in the Lebanese civil war with an invasion aimed at placing the Christian Phalange militias, one of its proxies, in control of the country. The strategy quickly faltered, revealing the strategic costs of investing in proxies who bend battlefield norms, as when Phalangist forces slaughtered hundreds in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps with the help of weapons and support from Israel.²⁶

A mix of revolutionary zeal and strategic hedging prompted Iran to jump into the Lebanese fray. It drew upon its cultural cachet as the de facto leader of Shia Muslims in the region; substantial funding; and a contingent of the IRGC to organize a ragtag assembly of Shia militias under the banner of Hezbollah.²⁷ Syria, under Hafez al-Assad’s leadership, provided the main base for the IRGC-Hezbollah partnership, overcoming, in time, initially tense relations with revolutionary elites in Iran as shared interest in pushing back against American hegemony grew and the crucible of the Iran-Iraq War reinforced ties between Damascus and Tehran.²⁸ Hezbollah’s bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the subsequent kidnapping of CIA station chief William Buckley deepened the enmity between the United States and Iran, setting up an acrimonious rivalry that continues to this day.²⁹

The Iranian-Israeli rivalry also steadily intensified as Hezbollah expanded its operations beyond Lebanese borders during the 1990s. Hezbollah’s role in the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was a wake-up call for Tel Aviv, which had remained too entrenched in its rivalry with Baghdad to read the warning signals clearly. Israel remained hopeful for quite some time that it could revive the periphery doctrine and resuscitate its pre-revolutionary accord with Iran.³⁰ Iranian investment in ballistic missile development and a nuclear program also increased Israel’s perception of its one-time friend as a threat.³¹

Iran, sidelined during the administration of George H. W. Bush because of the Iran-Contra affair and deepening U.S. acrimony and cut out of the Clinton administration’s efforts to advance the Oslo Accords, took up the mantle of spoiler in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by backing Palestinian groups like Hamas. Tehran’s efforts to regain leverage in the long-simmering conflict also marked the beginning of Hezbollah’s on-again, off-again flirtation with Hamas.³² This would escalate as Israel accused Iran of support for Palestinian groups during the Second Intifada, setting off yet another wave of investment in proxies in the region that to this day is reverberating around the world.

Throughout this era of proxy proliferation in the region, many Gulf countries began to increase the size of their conventional weapons arsenals while attempting to modernize their militaries and expand their ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction. During the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran reportedly launched an estimated 600 ballistic missiles.³³ Iraq, meanwhile, swelled its military ranks to nearly 1 million and deployed chemical weapons.³⁴ The accelerated acquisition of Soviet-made Scud missiles and Soviet and American conventional weapons such as tanks and armored vehicles was likewise a game changer for the region, while the expansion of U.S. basing rights in the Gulf region set the stage for future confrontations.

As tensions escalated between the United States, Israel, and Iran in the Middle East, a new front in the Soviet-American Cold War opened in Afghanistan, illustrating the continued influence of the bipolar Cold War system in proxy warfare as well as that system’s further weakening. The proxy wars in Afghanistan combined with the military modernization in the Middle East to help sow the seeds of future conflict.

The opening of the proxy conflict in Afghanistan began with the assassination of Adolph Dubs, America’s ambassador in Kabul, in February 1979 following the Saur Revolution in 1978. Not long before he was kidnapped and sequestered in the Kabul Hotel, U.S. embassy staff had released a highly critical report on human rights as a result of Hafizullah Amin’s crackdown on protesters.³⁵ The failure of Amin, the embattled leader of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), to secure Dubs’s freedom and suspicions that Soviet advisers were involved in the kidnapping had goaded Afghan police to move aggressively against the kidnappers and only increased the growing acrimony between Washington and Amin’s regime.³⁶ The subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was ostensibly meant to bring Amin’s government to heel, but the invasion quickly precipitated a violent backlash across Afghanistan.

It also drew the United States deeper into the conflict. The incursion and subsequent installation of Babrak Karmal following Amin’s assassination at the hands of Soviet Spetsnaz forces during Operation Storm-333 provoked a harsh reaction from the Carter White House. The Carter administration imposed a grain embargo against the Soviet Union in 1980 and led a multinational boycott of the summer Olympic Games that same year. Part policy response to what it viewed as aggressive Soviet expansion, and part opportunistic payback for its losses to the Soviets and Chinese in proxy wars in other parts of the world, American-led sanctions against the Soviet Union were the first step on the road to an extensive covert campaign to beat back Soviet entrenchment in South Asia. Alongside Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Arab states, the United States leveraged its long-standing support of its client state Pakistan to provide substantial support for the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen.³⁷

Under pressure from the UN to withdraw, the Soviets began to internally debate the efficacy of the Afghan campaign as early as 1982.³⁸ Devastating losses in a bloody proxy guerilla war and a slow-burning economic crisis at home triggered by a precipitous drop in oil and coal production—a key source of much-needed hard currency—sparked a crisis of confidence in the Politburo.³⁹ Struggling to finance a bloated military and maintain generous pension guarantees to veterans and retirees, the Kremlin found itself early on in the Afghan conflict looking for the nearest possible exit.⁴⁰ Washington’s decision to distribute Stinger missiles to the mujahideen in 1986 arguably only increased the urgency in Moscow to end an increasingly costly war.

But as the United States continued to pump aid and weapons to Afghan factions operating out of Pakistan and sub-contracted command and control over the mujahideen to the ISI in Islamabad, the Politburo was riven between an older generation of hawkish stalwarts committed to avoiding humiliation at the hands of American proxies and a faction led by Mikhail Gorbachev that reluctantly acknowledged that a clean and clear victory was far out of reach.⁴¹

The proxy wars in Afghanistan combined with the military modernization in the Middle East to help sow the seeds of future conflict.

By 1987, Gorbachev had more or less won the argument, declaring in a media interview that July that Soviet withdrawal was all but a done deal.⁴² The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan also appeared to mark, for a time, the end of the Soviet strategy inaugurated by Khrushchev of seeking influence in the developing world via client states and proxies.⁴³ From there forward, UN efforts to push the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran to pull support for their proxies ebbed and flowed but the resulting Geneva Accords, calling for non-interference in Afghan affairs, far from ended the conflict.⁴⁴ While the accords articulated the terms of Soviet withdrawal, the cessation of aid to the mujahideen, and the return of Afghan refugees, and were agreed to by Pakistan and Afghanistan and endorsed by Moscow and Washington, they did not spell out a post-war political dispensation.

As internecine battles broke out between the seven main mujahideen factions, the cross-linkages between networks of sponsors and volunteer fighters from the Middle East and Afghan factions in South Asia propelled the emergence of a violent Salafist-jihadi transnational social movement just as the Soviets began to wind down their involvement in the late 1980s.⁴⁵ Although the movement’s roots well predate the emergence of al-Qaeda on the rugged edge of Peshawar, its dynamic transformation into a global juggernaut first briefly under Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Sunni Islamic scholar who graduated from al-Azhar in Cairo, and later Osama bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Saudi construction dynasty, illustrated the growing complexity and risks of proxy warfare in a more globalized and interconnected environment. The roots of the next wave of proxy conflicts in the Greater Middle East and its periphery stretched deep into the Arab-Israeli and Afghanistan conflicts and continue to roil the world today.

At the time, however, few would have predicted the rise of al-Qaeda and its particularly violent brand of vanguardist jihadism. Many in Washington instead viewed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the end of the Cold War’s bloody proxy conflicts. For all intents and purposes, it appeared to many that the United States was the last superpower standing, as the world turned the page on the ideological battles between socialism and capitalism. Before the start of the Balkan crisis, the promise of political and economic change in former Soviet states and the reunification of East and West Germany produced widespread hope that the post-Cold War thaw would transform rivalries in the Middle East and the world more generally.

The hope was not entirely unfounded; during the 1990s, Iran and Saudi Arabia experienced a short rapprochement even as both sought to gain greater influence and step into the vacuum left by the Soviets in Central and South Asia. Saudi support for Salafist groups, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, however, remained a sore point with Iran.⁴⁶ Tehran’s anxiety about the rise of these groups in its neighborhood escalated in 1994 when Pakistan backed a Taliban push to gain dominance in the southern province of Kandahar. Iran responded by providing substantial arms and support to the loose confederation of anti-Taliban fighters that would ultimately constitute the Northern Alliance.⁴⁷ Unsettled by the prospects of a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, particularly after the Taliban’s involvement in the hijacking in 1999 of an Indian commercial airliner, India also jumped into the Afghan civil war by providing support to the Northern Alliance.⁴⁸

It is well beyond the scope of this report to comprehensively recount the intricacies of the post-Cold War years of the Afghan conflict. However, it is worth noting that the mood of triumphalism in Washington set off by the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989 and collapse soon after is perhaps one of the most stinging cautionary tales about the challenges scholars of the era wrestled with in terms of confirmation bias. Only a few years before the fall of the Soviet-backed government of Mohammed Najibullah, Francis Fukuyama’s now-famous “End of History” lecture at the University of Chicago in 1989 and the companion articles that followed marked the opening salvo in a long intellectual skirmish between the realist, liberal, and constructivist wings of the international relations field over the causes and impact of the Soviet collapse.

Even as skirmishes between Pakistani, Saudi, Iranian, and Indian proxies raged in the Hindu Kush, Fukuyama argued that the end of Washington’s Cold War rivalry with Moscow delivered the final blow to capitalism’s main competitors—fascism and communism.⁴⁹ The article set off controversy within the academy and in Washington policy circles, stoking fierce debates about what led to the Soviet collapse and how to interpret the role of the macro politics of the nuclear race versus the micro politics of proxy warfare in shaping the Cold War. Most notably, Fukuyama’s arguments found a powerful echo in John Lewis Gaddis’s The Long Peace, which contended that the United States and Soviet Union had effectively avoided direct confrontation in large part due to understanding that escalation would ultimately end in mutually assured destruction.⁵⁰

In reality, as more recent scholarship on the Cold War suggests, Gaddis’s and Fukuyama’s framework left far too much outside its margins. Many of the proxy conflicts set off in South Asia and the Greater Middle East by Washington’s 45-year-long contest with Moscow not only did not end, but escalated and grew in reach during the 1990s. Moreover, the “Long Peace” formulation failed to take accurate stock of the proxy strategies adopted by Moscow, as Cold War scholars Paul Thomas Chamberlin and Alex Marshall have noted.⁵¹

Early on, Lenin in particular was conscious of the strategic role played by the plethora of “useful brigands” whose allegiance fluctuated with prevailing winds on the battlefield. Rather than acting as mere pawns on a global chessboard caught up in a zero-sum game, proxies like Fatah, the PLO, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance in fact skillfully maneuvered their patrons to serve their own ends, as demonstrated by the fierce fluctuations in alliance politics during both the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Afghan war. The resulting bloodbaths at the edges of Asia Minor in highly contested and rapidly decolonizing territory in many cases dictated the tempo of Soviet-American competition, as Chamberlin suggests in his book The Cold War’s Killing Fields. This competition was often over control of the global commons—the sea, air, space— which has been pivotal in the rivalry between Moscow and Washington, shaping everything from economic policies at home to military alliances and interventions abroad.

Three other important dynamics colored the post-Soviet era and presaged a resurgence of proxy warfare: a rising tide of economic globalization; technological advancements, particularly in the area of computer engineering and communications; and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and remote targeting capabilities among superpower client states in the region. As Washington reveled in post-Cold War triumphalism, pushing a twin agenda of promoting peace through globalizing prosperity and American predominance through NATO expansion, debates about whether a “revolution in military affairs” justified new approaches to U.S. global military operations.⁵² In the meantime, the very states the United States sought to isolate throughout the 1990s—particularly Syria, Libya, Iraq, and North Korea—became the subject of great concern because of proliferating access to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

In 1997, CIA Director George Tenet detailed the expansion of Syria’s chemical and biological weapons program in official reports and Congressional testimony and warned of potentially catastrophic attacks against Israel.⁵³ In May 1998, Pakistan launched its first nuclear bomb test after cobbling together a secret program that relied on a network of suppliers that ran from Tripoli to Tehran and Pyongyang. Only one year later in Kosovo, NATO and Russian troops clashed at the Pristina International Airport, reigniting Moscow’s anxiety over U.S. hegemony. All of these dynamics combined to gradually escalate long-simmering rivalries between principal states with a stake in the current conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and Ukraine even as interest in the topic of proxy warfare faded among academics, analysts, and journalists.

The failure to recognize the continuation of conflict and its escalation in the Greater Middle East and its periphery may be partly ascribed to mistaking driving economic and material forces for ideological issues. For those who viewed the Middle East’s late-Cold War conflicts as driven largely by economic and material factors and increasingly carried out by breakaway regional client states in the Soviet-American contest, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the American decision to step in into the breech provided little solace, and for some even suggested a coming escalation.⁵⁴

This dynamic was in many ways presaged by the Gulf War, when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who had benefited from American, European, and Saudi and Gulf Arab State support in his war against Iran, rapidly building up Iraq's military capabilities, invaded Kuwait. While the swift victory over Hussein’s forces was widely hailed as the start of a “New World Order” and global American hegemony, the first Gulf War in reality marked the beginning of a broader conflict. Amid substantial support for the Gulf War, Christopher Hitchens presciently noted the danger at the time when he warned that stepping into the role of policing these conflicts would be a commitment on the order of 100 years.⁵⁵ Almost three decades later, with every American president since George H. W. Bush having conducted air strikes in Iraq, the United States is well on its way to making that prophecy come true.⁵⁶ Whether the latest phase of the Iraqi conflict and other proxy wars in the region and its periphery marks the end of an old era or the start of a new one is an essential question.