Absent U.S. liberal hegemony, proxy wars will uniquely cause international disorder, exacerbate humanitarian crises, and provide the grounds for great power escalation.

Let me unpack these points further. A degree of skepticism is warranted about the extent to which realist policies of restraint and offshore balancing would be conducive to international order, and not a series of protracted proxy wars. As a recent study on proxy wars notes, “If the United States does less, it must rely on others to do more” (Berman and Lake 2019, 3). Inversely, however, if the United States does less, its proxies must also rely on the United States for more support, and when allies and partners engage in conflict for their own interests, for instance, they likely will call for support in terms of kit, including heavy arms, finance, training, and perhaps air support, even while US “boots on the ground” are denied. Where crises emerge and allies and strategic partners become unstable or engaged in a local or regional conflict, a realist-guided US foreign policy would be inclined to support US partners and allies as proxies for US forces. Because the use of US forces would have a higher threshold, but because realists also advise maintaining the material balance of power, a realist-guided US foreign policy would become more easily persuaded to engage in proxy wars. Furthermore, because it is a “cheap” way to balance, the United States could engage a wide number of proxy wars simultaneously, almost indefinitely. This strategic environment would also tempt the United States to trap Russian or Chinese forces in costly protracted wars against US proxies, along the model of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as a strategy to drain the power of China and Russia and limit their ability to engage in other conflicts.

The potential for a wide number of proxy wars could potentially condemn the twenty-first century to the miseries and suffering of a series of protracted proxy wars waged with ever-more sophisticated weapons technology. Proxy wars are an immense source of international disorder because they tend to be protracted, devastating the countries in which they are waged. They are also generative of regional consequences including humanitarian and refugee crises, as well as new military groups operating across borders, whose long-term alignment with the United States is not always ensured. The Syrian civil war, for example, evolved into a proxy war with immense loss of life and consequences for regional stability (Hughes 2014). It involved embedding of US forces in proxy forces against Russian-supported government forces. At the same time, the diminishing presence of the United States in the region and inconsistent US support for key partners has been a critical contributor to the intensity, duration, and regional involvement in the Syrian conflict (Phillips 2020). Realists rightly suggest diplomacy is required to unwind the conflict in Syria, yet, where the United States withdraws its presence, as realist policies advise, proxy wars will tend to continue and emerge without diplomatic breakthroughs, which require years to develop, achieve, and implement.

Realist thinkers foresee as an emerging “bounded order”, divided between China and the United States (Mearsheimer 2019). A bounded order pocketed by a series of proxy wars is not unimaginable and well within the realist vision of the emerging twenty-first century. The conditions of potential nuclear war and the global scope of the struggle made proxy warfare a common ingredient of the Cold War. A realist policy of US restraint and offshore balancing without sufficient additional measures to develop a stable international order likely would contribute to a series of proxy wars between the great powers seeking to support their partners and defend their vital interests through proxy forces in key regions. The fighting itself would invariably differ from that of the Cold War with state and nonstate proxies likely being mixed with use of remote weapons and cyber war, for instance (Innes 2012; Krieg and Rickli 2019). The ideological contest between the great powers will also instead likely become increasingly geo-cultural and geo-civilizational, not simply geostrategic or purely geopolitical (Coker 2019; Acharya 2020). But the conditions of security competition, high risks of direct conflict, lower costs of proxy warfare, and realist proposals for doctrines limiting the use of US forces with little other institutional measures for managing conflict likely would precipitate protracted proxy wars where conflicts emerge. Proxy wars, moreover, are an international activity with virtually no international rules beyond those applying to the conduct of war in general.