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Proxy wars aren’t just for great powers anymore. Whereas during the Cold War the primary strategic sponsors of proxy warfare were the United States and the Soviet Union, today the three Gulf Arab monarchies, two of which were not even independent until 1971, have played a core role in sponsoring proxy warfare in the Middle East.¹

The Gulf states’ opportunistic approach to proxy warfare in the early years of the Arab Spring played an important role in initiating and escalating conflicts, as the Gulf states sought to re-order the region to their advantage.

At the same time, the growing number of sponsors, exemplified by the Gulf states’ actions, created multiple layers of complexity that challenged efforts to stabilize the region. Not only did the Gulf states represent a pole of sponsorship, but they competed amongst themselves, driving factionalization and the growth of a multiplicity of competing proxies even where they appeared to share the same goals.

While this competition was briefly put on hold due to shared perceptions of threats from ISIS and Iran, an even greater diplomatic rift opened in June 2017, when Saudi Arabia and the UAE led a coalition of countries in breaking diplomatic relations with Doha, closing land crossings at the border with Saudi Arabia, and banning Qatari planes and ships from using their airspace and sea routes.² The crisis represented a second attempt by the Saudi and Emirati-led GCC bloc to coerce Qatar towards adopting policies more in line with their perceptions of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Arab Spring movements.

The consequences of the Gulf states’ sponsorship of proxy warfare implicate the United States. The United States cannot inoculate itself from the resulting problems of instability, terrorism, and a level of social polarization that may be past the point of no return, nor can it hope to contain them in the region alone. The U.S. also cannot dismiss the moral implications of humanitarian disasters in these places, especially in contexts like Yemen, where U.S. logistical and diplomatic support has facilitated the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention. The Gulf states have not been able to achieve their strategic objectives via proxy war and even as they pull back towards more status quo aims, intractable conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen continue. At the same time, all three of these Gulf states are important U.S. security partners who receive a great deal of military support from the United States, which gives U.S. policymakers some leverage over their behavior. The United States therefore can and should take proactive measures to wind down the use of proxies and support good-faith negotiation efforts to end proxy wars in order to mitigate these global threats.

These ongoing conflicts, and the fragmentation rooted in intra-Gulf competition have provided potent recruitment grounds for terrorist organizations like ISIS in Libya and Syria, and the AQAP in Yemen. Sustained state weakness and a lack of governing institutions in these places makes it difficult to sustain military counterterrorism gains made by drones or special forces. Importantly, the Gulf states wrestling with these consequences are U.S. security partners upon whom the United States is largely reliant in the Middle East, exposing weaknesses in the current U.S. security posture in the region.

Furthermore, the ongoing wars have significantly exacerbated humanitarian catastrophes and spurred the wide-scale movement of internally displaced peoples (IDPs) and refugees. In addition to the deep humanitarian costs, these population movements have had significant implications for the politics of western countries, which have seen a corresponding rise in right-wing populism in recent years.³ In Libya, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that 1.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. Up to 90 percent of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe depart from Libya’s shores, and human trafficking remains prevalent due to a sustained lack of institutional capacity.⁴

In Syria, there are an estimated 5.7 million registered refugees who have fled the country as of April 2019,⁵ in addition to 6.2 million internally displaced persons. Since April 2019, the Syrian Observatory on Human Rights has documented more than 2 million civilians fleeing advances in Idlib Province by the Assad regime backed by Russian forces.⁶ Since early December 2019, as of the time of this writing, some 900,000 people, most of them women and children, have been forced to flee.⁷ These civilians are trapped between advancing forces and the Turkish border, which has been closed to Syrian refugees since 2015, and many of those fleeing have already been internally displaced at least once from other parts of the country over the last nine years of conflict.⁸

Yemen’s civil war has seen the largest cholera outbreak in epidemiologically-recorded history.⁹ The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that 24.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, and 3.6 million have been displaced.¹⁰ There have been more than 90,000 battle-related fatalities in Yemen since 2015.¹¹ Across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa, Gulf support for proxy actors has fueled fighting in Somalia, a failed state that has been war-torn for decades.

Throughout the region, experts warn that conflict-torn countries and displaced populations are especially vulnerable to the outbreak of contagious disease like COVID-19, although they are already facing cuts to services and anti-migrant violence heightened by fears about the spread of the pandemic.¹² Proxy wars have directly harmed these societies’ resilience to large-scale health crises like COVID-19. At the same time, the collapse in oil prices in April will not only limit the resources that the Gulf monarchies have on hand to fund their regional proxies, but will also have wide-ranging implications for their domestic politics, economies, and societies.

Most worrisomely, these impacts are only the consequences that are visible today. The Middle East’s proxy wars will have unpredictable, long-term consequences for the politics and societies of these states and others. Frederic Wehrey has stated about Libya that “Most tragically, [the ongoing proxy war] is fueling a toxic polarization and fraying the social bonds of this country of six million. Unless swift action is taken to end the clashes and return to a political process, the damage may be irreparable.”¹³ Academic research suggests that civil wars are more likely to occur in states that have recently experienced political instability, institutional weakness, poor governance, and poverty: In other words, conflict begets conflict.¹⁴ If the outlook in the Middle East today looks dire, the region’s future will look increasingly dire without international efforts to end the proxy wars fueled by the dynamics of competition amongst regional and global players.

This means that for U.S. policymakers, understanding the proxy wars of today—and the future—requires a deeper understanding of the regional dynamics of competition amongst state and non-state actors, as well as the strategic perceptions and decision-making of regional powers.

The best thing that U.S. policymakers can do to increase stability in the Middle East, an important U.S. strategic goal, would be to end the conflicts that provide regional states with opportunities for intervention. Research has shown that policymakers’ efforts to end civil wars via mediation can have an important effect.¹⁵ The United States also has quite a bit of leverage with these three Gulf security partners that it can expend in order to prevent military interventions and proxy sponsorship, and encourage negotiation.¹⁶ The United States’ initial signals that it might back proxy war played a role in leading the Gulf states to embrace opportunistic strategies, and the cutting of that signal encouraged a shift toward status quo maintenance.

However, U.S. disengagement from proxy warfare and conflict is not enough. Even with signals regarding the United States’ unwillingness to play a major role, the Gulf States continue to compete in Libya and, increasingly, the Horn of Africa. Sustained diplomatic attention and development funding will be needed to end these deeply complex and intractable conflicts. Such efforts will be relatively small investments compared to the price of proxy war.