North Macedonia (Brussels Morning Newspaper), The fraying relationships between Ukraine and Israel and their ostensible ally, the United States, brought to a sharp focus an age-old conundrum.
From time immemorial, small countries acted as clients and satellites of bigger ones. Regional and global superpowers insisted on establishing spheres of influence to protect their citizens and safeguard their interests. Even the nascent USA promulgated the Monroe Doctrine to make sure that Europe did not interfere in hemispheric affairs in the Americas.
Client states fulfill several important functions and render services to their hegemonic patrons:
1. They engage in proxy wars with proxies of other powers;
2. They serve as buffer zones for the hinterlands of the regional or superpowers;
3. They act as testing grounds for new weapon systems, tactics, and strategies;
4. They provide the colonial power, empire, or sponsor state with raw materials and cannon fodder (soldiers);
5. They carry out secret “dirty” operations – including in cyberspace – on behalf of the regional or superpower to afford the latter plausible deniability;
6. They gather intelligence and share it with the hegemonic state.
In return, the bigger members of these asymmetrical alliances guarantee the safety and territorial integrity of their client states, supply weapons and military training as well as economic loans, and share intelligence.
They also intervene diplomatically to shield their client states from the impacts of sanctions and other steps taken by their adversaries.
Small polities have always shopped around for protection. Egypt has pivoted from the USA to the USSR in the 1950s and back to the USA in the 1970s, for example. So did Israel, albeit in the opposite direction: from the Communist East to the capitalistic West. In a multipolar world, the leverage and bargaining power of small countries are increasing. But so does the aggression of regional potentates. We are in for an unusually turbulent period in human history, as state actors are attempting to settle on a new, workable equilibrium.
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