Superpowers wage wars abroad through proxies rather than their own troops

Evidence

While this situation may lead to a suspension of war between the nuclear powers (or so we all must hope), it scarcely prevents them from engaging in military adventures outside their own territorial domains. The two superpowers in particular engage in what might be called “orchestrated wars” in peripheral areas of military strength. By these I mean military encounters, with the governments of other states or with guerilla movements or both, in which the troops of the superpower are not necessarily even engaged at all, but where that power is a prime organising influence. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 187

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘orchestrated wars’ — the disengaged, system-level organizing influence that parallels institutional ‘faceless commitments’ where the actor isn’t present at the point of action.
• XREF: A near-perfect analogue for faceless commitment: the superpower exercises power without direct face-to-face engagement, like an employer or institution acting through systems — directly relevant to the reader’s Giddens/Luhmann thesis. — connects to: Cold War proxy wars functioned like animal display as low-risk sizing-up — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 574; Remote-controlled warfare was predicted to radicalize the asymmetry between imperial powers and colonized peoples — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 141; Drone warfare establishes a norm neither war nor peace via imperial immunity (+7 more)

Related

• Contemporary imperial wars resemble pre-World-War-I brinkmanship more than the 1930s (similarity 0.82)
• The global base network is what enables the U.S. to wage distant wars (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Remote-controlled warfare was predicted to radicalize the asymmetry between imperial powers and colonized peoples #expands (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 141
• Cold War proxy wars functioned like animal display as low-risk sizing-up #exemplifies (0.60) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 574
• Drone warfare establishes a norm neither war nor peace via imperial immunity #expands (0.55)