Afghanistan. A similar logic worked itself out in the Balkans in the 1990s, when Austria's attempt to gain from Slovenian independence from Yugoslavia led to Germany encouraging Croatian independence and then the US Bosnian independence, even though the result was bound to be bitter ethnic conflict.
The worst suffering from proxy wars has probably been in Africa. During the last decade and a half of the Cold War the US and the USSR backed rival sides in wars and civil wars as part of their attempts to gain a strategic advantage over each other. In the 1990s the US and France vied for influence in Central Africa. They backed rival sides in the war cum civil war that broke out in the border regions of Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Congo-Zaire. They helped set in motion a catastrophe resulting overall in 3 or 4 million dead. In such situations freelance armies emerged whose commanders emulated the great imperial powers on a small scale by waging war in order to enrich themselves, and enriching themselves in order further to wage war. Imperialism meant encouragement to local rulers to engage in the bloodiest of wars and civil wars-and then occasionally the sending in of Western troops to enforce "peacekeeping" when the disorder reached such a scale as to threaten to damage Western interests. Contradictions which arise from the inter-imperialist antagonisms of the advanced capitalist states in this way wreak their worst havoc in the poorer parts of the world.
From the new period of crisis to the new imperialism
The pattern of the old imperialism was one of coalitions of states with comparable levels of economic and/or military capacity confronting each other. Today there is great unevenness even between the biggest states when it comes to their capacity to advance the interests of their domestically based capitals. At the top of the hierarchy is the state which has the greatest capacity for getting its way, the US. At the bottom are very weak states, hoping to be able to beg favours off those above them. The states in the middle alternatively squabble with each other over their position in the global pecking order and form ad hoc alliances in the hope of forcing concessions from those above them.
This cannot be a stable hierarchy. The unevenness in rates of economic growth (or sometimes contraction) in a period of recurrent crises means that the balance of forces between the different states is always changing, leading to rival displays of might between those who want to advance up the hierarchy and those who want to keep them in their place. Weak states get entangled in conflicts with neighbours which draw in powerful states to which they are allied, while powerful states see exemplary interventions in weak "rogue" states as a way of gaining advantage over other strong states.
270
The New Age of Global Instability