Proxy war

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The mechanism by which a confrontation that could not be fought directly was nevertheless fought almost continuously. The two powers supplied weapons, money, advisers, intelligence and diplomatic cover to opposing sides in conflicts elsewhere, and each accepted the other doing so, precisely because it kept the fighting below the threshold at which their own forces would meet. The arrangement had a specific and rarely stated grammar: direct combat between American and Soviet personnel was avoided or, where it occurred, denied by both sides — Soviet pilots flew over Korea and this was not admitted at the time — and escalation was managed by keeping the war inside somebody else's borders. The cost distribution follows from that. The two powers lost soldiers in the tens of thousands across the whole period; the countries in which the wars were fought lost people in the millions, and inherited the weapons, the borders and the political structures afterwards. Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan are the largest cases; there are dozens of smaller ones across Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia and the Middle East.

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