THE UNCERTAINTY DEPARTMENT
Program on Strategic Competition and International Order
Geopolitical Analysis Series
Dr. Yusuf Adeyemi-Kovacs, Senior Fellow
Contemporary proxy conflicts are typically analyzed as regional power competitions with geopolitical implications. This analysis argues that framing is insufficient: the major proxy conflicts of the current period — Ukraine, Gaza, the Sahel, and the various theaters of Iranian-aligned proxy activity — are better understood as the primary arena in which the rules of the international order are being rewritten. The United States and its allies are attempting to enforce 20th-century norms (sovereignty, territorial integrity, R2P, Geneva Conventions) through 21st-century instruments that are inadequate for enforcement at the scale required. Russia, China, and Iran are not simply contesting specific territorial or political outcomes; they are conducting a sustained norm-replacement campaign that uses proxy conflicts to demonstrate that the old rules do not apply, normalize new conduct thresholds, and establish alternative legitimating frameworks for the new rules they are installing. The question is not whether the liberal international order is under pressure. It is whether the institutions built to sustain it have the capacity to enforce it against actors who have concluded that non-enforcement is achievable.
Ukraine is the clearest case of the distinction between a territorial conflict and a norm conflict. Russia’s stated objectives — preventing NATO expansion, protecting Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine — are territorial and political in the conventional sense. But the methods chosen and the reactions solicited have been calibrated to produce norm-setting effects that exceed any specific territorial outcome.
The sustained targeting of civilian infrastructure — electrical systems, water treatment, heating — is not militarily necessary for the territorial objectives Russia has stated. It is a demonstration that the Geneva Conventions’ protections for civilian infrastructure are not enforceable against a nuclear power. The demonstration is addressed not only to Ukraine but to every other potential target of great-power pressure: the rules you believed would constrain how a conflict would be conducted do not constrain it if the party conducting it has nuclear weapons and strategic patience.
The Western response — providing weapons systems sufficient to prevent Russian victory but insufficient to produce Ukrainian victory, while declining to impose direct costs on Russian territory — has its own norm-setting effect. It establishes that NATO members will support states facing Russian aggression up to but not including the level of support required to defeat that aggression. This is also a demonstration, and it is addressed to the same audience: states weighing the costs and benefits of alignment with different great powers.
The conflict is not generating a winner in the conventional military sense. It is generating a set of facts about what the international system will and will not enforce, and those facts will be operative regardless of the specific territorial outcome.
Iran’s role in the current period is most usefully understood not as a regional power pursuing regional objectives but as the institutional sponsor of an alternative to the Western security architecture in the region. The network of armed proxies — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, various Iraqi militias — is not simply a collection of aligned forces; it is a distributed deterrence and coercion architecture that Iran has built over three decades precisely because it could not compete with American and Israeli conventional forces.
The architecture’s strategic logic is to impose costs on adversaries at levels below the threshold that would provoke direct military response, while demonstrating that the formal security guarantees of the Western system cannot protect states and actors that rely on them. The Houthi missile and drone campaign against Red Sea shipping illustrates the architecture’s capabilities: a relatively low-cost operation that has imposed significant disruption on global trade, demonstrated the limits of naval power projection against asymmetric threats, and established that non-state actors with state-level external support can hold critical global infrastructure at risk.
The architecture is not designed to win in the conventional military sense. It is designed to make the cost of maintaining Western security commitments in the region progressively higher while establishing that alternative arrangements — alignment with the Iranian axis — provide forms of deterrence that Western alignment does not. This is norm replacement through demonstrated capability: the norm being replaced is that formal security guarantees from Western powers constitute the most reliable form of protection.
China’s strategic positioning in the current period is analytically distinct from Russia’s and Iran’s. While both Russia and Iran are primarily contesting specific territorial or political outcomes (Ukraine’s alignment, Israel’s security posture), China is operating at the level of the international system’s architecture — contesting who has the authority to define the rules under which the system operates.
The Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by China in 2023 was significant not for its specific terms but for its demonstration that China can play the mediating role that the United States had claimed as a prerogative. China’s posture as a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system — promoting multilateral frameworks while avoiding the direct military commitments that would expose it to enforcement costs — is a sustained strategy for achieving norm change without norm conflict. China seeks to change the rules from inside the system’s institutions rather than by direct challenge to them.
This strategy is visible in China’s approach to the South China Sea, to Taiwan, and to its Belt and Road investment architecture. In each case, the strategy is to create facts on the ground that the existing rules cannot reverse, while maintaining the formal posture of a state committed to the rules-based order. The contradiction between the posture and the facts is managed through the legal ambiguity of the specific cases and the institutional difficulty of enforcement in cases where the rules’ application is genuinely contested.
The following characterizes the contested transitions in specific norm domains:
| Domain | Current Norm | Contested Replacement |
|---|---|---|
| Territorial integrity | Borders inviolable except by consent | Ethnic/linguistic self-determination overrides formal borders |
| Civilian protection | Geneva Conventions bind all parties | Major powers exempt from enforcement in conflicts they define as security-essential |
| Security guarantees | Formal alliances provide reliable protection | Deterrence through proxy networks may provide comparable protection |
| Conflict mediation | UN/Western powers as legitimate mediators | Regional powers and alternative blocs as alternative mediation venues |
| Humanitarian intervention | R2P authorizes intervention to prevent atrocities | Sovereignty absolute; external intervention requires Security Council authorization |
| Economic sanctions | Collective Western action can impose decisive costs | Sanctions-proof economy architectures make Western economic coercion limited |
Each contested replacement is being established through demonstrated fact rather than formal rule revision. No state has proposed that the Geneva Conventions should be amended to exempt major powers. Russia has simply demonstrated that they can be violated without enforcement consequences. No state has proposed that the R2P doctrine should be abolished. Russia and China have simply demonstrated that Security Council veto power makes it inoperative in cases they oppose. The rules remain formally in place while the demonstrated enforcement capacity that gives them operational meaning is progressively eroded.
The fundamental dynamic the current period has exposed is the enforcement gap: the distance between the norms the international system formally claims to uphold and its practical capacity to enforce those norms against states with sufficient power and strategic patience.
The enforcement gap has always existed; it is not new. What is new is the systematic exploitation of the gap by actors who have concluded that the gap is large enough to bear the weight of sustained norm violation. The calculation has been demonstrated to be correct in several high-profile cases, which makes the gap larger for the next actor who needs to make the calculation.
The enforcement gap has a specific institutional character. The mechanisms through which the liberal international order enforces its norms — UN Security Council authorization, Western sanctions coalitions, military deterrence — all have veto points that major adversaries can exploit. Russia and China have permanent veto power in the Security Council. Sanctions require coalition maintenance that becomes progressively more difficult as the costs of sanctions compliance accumulate for third-party states. Military deterrence requires credible commitment to escalation that becomes progressively less credible as the costs of escalation become more visible.
The institutional architecture for norm enforcement was designed for a period in which the major adversaries of the liberal order were either weaker or more isolated than Russia and China currently are. The adaptation of that architecture to current conditions — designing enforcement mechanisms that are effective against states with veto power, economic heft sufficient to resist sanctions, and nuclear deterrents — is the central institutional challenge of the current period.
The alternative to successful adaptation is not that the liberal international order collapses overnight. It is that the enforcement gap expands progressively until the order’s norms function primarily as rhetoric, with enforcement reserved for actors too weak to resist it. That outcome would not be declared; it would simply be the accumulated result of each individual instance in which enforcement proved too costly to attempt.
Dr. Yusuf Adeyemi-Kovacs is Senior Fellow in the Program on Strategic Competition and International Order at The Uncertainty Department. His research focuses on norm change through demonstrated practice in contemporary great power competition.