Description
The provision of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and military hardware by NATO member states to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in March 2022 has raised in important question: can military alliances wage war by proxy? This has been an underexplored component of analysis of the Ukraine war, despite the total of US assistance alone standing at close to $5billion. Whilst Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused NATO of waging a proxy war against Russia by supporting Ukraine, Western policymakers have been reluctant to use the term to explain their attempt to undermine Russian military advances. So how can we best explain co-ordinated indirect intervention in a conflict by third parties and what are the implications for our understanding of such alliances? This paper will use the Ukraine conflict as a lens through which to look at the literature on proxy war and military alliances and put them together to explore a fundamental set of issues: firstly, whether the informal provision of weapons to a third party in warfare compromises the formal nature of alliances like NATO; secondly, whether tactical alliances forged for the purposes of defeating a common enemy are intrinsic to the nature of proxy warfare; thirdly, whether interventions like that seen in Ukraine mean that the term ‘alignment’ is a more accurate reflection of the strategic landscape than ‘alliances’ given the absence of formal military arrangements; and finally, whether arms transfers, like the provision of HIMARS and NLAWS to Ukraine, should conceptually be seen as acts of proxy war and whether they mark the formation of a new era of military alliance.
