The Cold War was cold only for the superpowers. For Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, Angolans and many others it was searingly hot. Most of the people killed in Cold War conflicts died in Asia, Africa and Latin America, in wars where local struggles over land, nationhood and power became tangled with the global rivalry.
What a proxy war is
A proxy war is a conflict in which major powers back opposing sides without fighting each other directly. Proxy wars let the superpowers compete while avoiding the nuclear risk of direct combat. They supplied weapons, money, advisers and sometimes their own troops, but usually stopped short of fighting each other. Local actors were never mere puppets. They had their own goals, and they often drew the superpowers in as much as the superpowers pushed them.
Korea, 1950 to 1953
Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel in 1945, with Soviet troops in the north and American troops in the south. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded the South. Soviet archives later showed that Stalin approved the invasion after Kim Il Sung assured him it would be quick. The United Nations Security Council authorized a defense of South Korea. The Soviet Union could not veto the UN decision on Korea because it was boycotting the Security Council in protest at the Chinese seat being held by the Nationalist government on Taiwan rather than the new communist government in Beijing.
United Nations forces, mostly American and South Korean, were pushed to the southern tip of the peninsula, then landed at Inchon in September 1950 and drove north toward the Chinese border. China then sent hundreds of thousands of troops into the war, pushing the UN forces back. The fighting settled near the original line. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a peace treaty, and Korea remains divided today. Around 36,000 Americans died, along with hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and, by most estimates, more than two million Koreans, a large share of them civilians.
Vietnam, 1954 to 1975
Vietnam's war began as a fight for independence from France. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a conference at Geneva divided the country temporarily at the 17th parallel, with nationwide elections planned for 1956 that never took place. American leaders worried that a communist Vietnam would set off a chain reaction. The domino theory held that if one country fell to communism, its neighbors would follow. After a disputed naval clash in 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Johnson broad power to use force in Vietnam, and by 1968 more than half a million American troops were there.
To the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and his followers, the war was a struggle for national reunification and independence, first against France and then against the United States and its South Vietnamese ally. To American leaders and many South Vietnamese, it was a defense of a non-communist state against conquest from the north. The war divided American society deeply. American forces withdrew after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, and Saigon fell to the North in April 1975. About 58,000 Americans died. Estimates of Vietnamese deaths range from about 1.5 million to over 3 million, and the war spilled into Laos and Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge regime that took power in 1975 went on to kill roughly a fifth to a quarter of Cambodia's people.
Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989
In December 1979 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to prop up a struggling communist government. The Soviet war in Afghanistan lasted from 1979 to 1989. Afghan resistance fighters, the mujahideen, received weapons and money from the United States, Saudi Arabia and others, mostly channeled through Pakistan's intelligence service. From 1986 American shoulder fired Stinger missiles made Soviet helicopters vulnerable. About 15,000 Soviet soldiers died, while Afghan deaths are commonly estimated at around a million, and millions more became refugees. Gorbachev came to describe the war as a wound that would not stop bleeding, and Soviet troops left in February 1989. The weapons and armed networks the war left behind fed decades of further conflict, and some foreign volunteers who fought there later formed the core of al Qaeda.
Worked example: testing the domino theory
Was the domino theory right? Look at what happened after 1975. Laos and Cambodia did fall to communist movements that year, as the theory predicted. But Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines did not, and several grew rapidly richer in the decades that followed. More striking, the communist states then fought each other. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and drove out the Khmer Rouge, and in February 1979 China attacked Vietnam to punish it. Defenders of the theory reply that the long American stand in Vietnam bought time for its neighbors to grow stronger. Critics answer that the theory treated communism as a single bloc and missed the force of nationalism, which made Vietnamese, Chinese and Cambodian communists bitter rivals. The case shows why careful thinkers test a strategic idea against what actually happened, not only against what its supporters feared.