America’s Foreign Legions: How We Treat Our Proxies Defines Us
The real and present history of American warfare is one of outsourcing; of volatile marriages of convenience between the United States and its partisans, partners, and proxies. Like all relationships, they come with mixed expectations and varied intentions.
PERHAPS NO image better represents America’s many small wars since the end of World War II than that of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer on the roof of the U.S. embassy, back bent and arms extended, assisting waiting Americans into a UH-1 Huey helicopter. In that one frame, the photographer captured the final outcome of almost two decades of American involvement in Vietnam. Paired with images of aircraft shoved from the deck of an American warship into the South China Sea, one senses the essence of a hurried exit amid chaos engendered by wretched excess. However, that photograph snapped almost half a century ago embodies more than a single event in a single war. It is a snapshot of a string of American failures involving partisans, partners, and proxies who fought at our side or on our behalf, perhaps believing more in us and in our professed values than we have ourselves. In the intervening decades since that signal moment in the South China Sea, and really since 1945, America has engaged in a string of small wars and some that outgrew the title. Consistently, our wars requiring more than pure mass and unrestrained force have resulted in outcomes ranging from failure to inconclusiveness. The only consistent aspect is our continued inability to retain critical lessons repeatedly learned, each time preferring instead to pretend they never occurred.