Proxy Warfare on the Cheap

This book illuminates on the US strategy of proxy warfare in modern times with the Syrian Civil War as a case study. Spyridon Plakoudas and Wojtek Michnik fuse modern history with international relations and strategic studies in order to offer an up-to-date and critical analysis of this unique partnership between a state (USA) and a non-state actor (Syrian Kurds) against another non-state actor (ISIS) - amidst the wider Syrian civil war. They argue that this partnership ended up as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it defeated ISIS at a minimum cost in money and blood in comparison to the Iraq War, but, on the other hand, it ensnared the USA into a tangled web of competition and conflict with other powers with no easy way-out.

In other words, proxy warfare may prove a not-so-cheap investment in the end.