Since this is a nice forum and all, and you've never come across as an asshole (just cryptic AF), the benefit of the doubt dictates we assume A. :-D
At any rate, my point is, I'm sure that under _some_ definition of the term, you could reasonably argue that Ukraine isn't a proxy war; but I think the Duck Principle illuminates why that approach is a mistake. If it looks like a proxy war -- the West is materially supporting a not-officially-allied country against a geopolitical adversary in order to avoid a hot war against said adversary -- and walks like a proxy war -- both sides are operationally doing all the same sorts of things they've done in every proxy war they've had since WWII -- and talks like a proxy war -- both sides have made communicating openly about their intentions and actions a core and explicitly-avowed element of their anti-escalation strategies -- well, it's a proxy war, my dude. If it doesn't match various definitions in foreign policy textbooks, well, that doesn't mean it's not _broadly_ a proxy war, nor _specifically_ at least something close to it. Rather, it means that Ukraine serves as a useful test case for probing the limitations of those definitions, and developing new theories of their dynamics based on whatever new phenomena we observe in Ukraine.
And I'm not exactly sure why you care so much about declaring it to not be one in the first place -- feel free to enlighten me! Is it pure defense - just not ceding any points to the Russian gaslighting? Or about escalation? I mean, sure, one could be disturbed about the potential for an overt proxy war to escalate, but... at the risk of sounding naïve... we DID get through at least 4 major proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam, USSR-Afghanistan, and Syria) and dozens of smaller ones without starting WWIII. Not to cast aspersions directly at you, because I've never really been able to figure out your politics to begin with, but the nervousness I've seen elsewhere about calling this a proxy war strikes me as having more to do with the antiwar/communism-curious far left's generational trauma over never being able to actually stop big dumb marches into big dumb wars like Vietnam and Iraq (2003). They feel like they're never listened to despite always being right, and they extrapolate from said powerlessness an imagined rule that no escalation spiral can ever be stopped because the hawks always irresistibly appeal to something dark, primal, and flawed deep within human nature (rather than admit that no one listens to them because no one likes them), so in their eyes anything that smacks of ceding rhetorical ground to the hawks is tantamount to cheering for a nuclear apocalypse.
Which, to me, isn't a very convincing reason to not call a spade a spade.
FWIW, I completely agree on your second point about Russian gaslighting over supposed "NATO aggression". NATO was *always* a red herring. For its entire several hundred years of existence, the foundational question of Russian politics has always been whether to look East or West. This is informative because I personally believe there was a TINY blip in the Overton Window after the Soviet collapse, where it could have been possible to create a Russian "roadmap into the EU/NATO" and head off at least today's _specific_ scenario from being the one to lead the world into a Second Cold War. (As Matt might say, it was a causally thin moment, but the inevitability of a Second Cold War is probably much causally thicker.)
The closing of that window circumscribed for Russians how they would answer the question of the new (post-Soviet) Russia's relationship with the West. NATO appears in this as a cartoonishly surreal boogeyman because Russians are externalizing their fears about what a world looks like in which they are *not* officially part of Europe -- again, fears that Russians have ALWAYS had, in one form or another -- because if they can't _join_ Europe, then they must be doomed to _conflict_ with Europe. That last bit isn't as unreasonable as it might at first sound, because any basic student of history would know that every time Russia has looked West, a war eventually resulted. (cf: Thirty Years' War, Seven Years' War, Napoleonic Wars, the Great Game, and the World Wars) To many Russians, it must inchoately feel just fundamentally dangerous to even *consider* playing the West's games - they're the new-money debutante who's always getting shafted by the old noble elites' machinations. (sorry, I've been watching too much Bridgerton)
Anyways, Westerners keep making the mistake of misinterpreting these complaints about NATO as actually being about _NATO_, and thus we keep having this utterly stupid debate about whether we actually encroached or not, whether we promised the Russians something in some back room in the 90's, whether they didn't understand or willfully misinterpreted said promises, whether they're gaslighting about NATO today, etc. Countless pixels have been spilled over the entirely wrong debate because it's an easier vehicle for everyone to grind their personal axes: the antiwar left wants to pillory its hawk archenemies, the Blob wants to exonerate NATO expansion, neolibs and Reaganites want to keep their sins in the '93 coup from being revisited too deeply, and the new right/natcons/Trumpists want to end NATO altogether.
But the reality is that unlike any previous point in the history of Russian-European relations, Europe is more or less unified now. European fragmentation had kept them fighting for their entire 2+ millennia, so any time Russia looked West, of COURSE it got dragged into one of their wars. Today, though, that doesn't necessarily have to happen. If the EU can, for the foreseeable future (nothing's permanent!), end intra-European war, then Russians have less to fear from looking West. Sure, one could point out that a unified Europe poses a potentially _greater_ threat than ever, but that only underscores the need to integrate a West-facing Russia: if conflict between Russia and a united Europe is the only risk left, then we should be mitigating it, not gearing up for war.
It'd be far more productive for the West to be debating THIS question, of how to build a new framework for peace between a unified Europe and a West-facing Russia, than to keep wasting time on this silly bullshit of whether NATO is truly a cartoon boogeyman or not.
From The Comments: Proxy Wars and Boogeymen
From The Comments: Proxy Wars and Boogeymen
From The Comments: Proxy Wars and Boogeymen
I think declaring that "Ukraine isn't a proxy war for the West" is either (A) splitting hairs about definitions while missing the forest for the trees, or (B) willful blindness.
Since this is a nice forum and all, and you've never come across as an asshole (just cryptic AF), the benefit of the doubt dictates we assume A. :-D
At any rate, my point is, I'm sure that under _some_ definition of the term, you could reasonably argue that Ukraine isn't a proxy war; but I think the Duck Principle illuminates why that approach is a mistake. If it looks like a proxy war -- the West is materially supporting a not-officially-allied country against a geopolitical adversary in order to avoid a hot war against said adversary -- and walks like a proxy war -- both sides are operationally doing all the same sorts of things they've done in every proxy war they've had since WWII -- and talks like a proxy war -- both sides have made communicating openly about their intentions and actions a core and explicitly-avowed element of their anti-escalation strategies -- well, it's a proxy war, my dude. If it doesn't match various definitions in foreign policy textbooks, well, that doesn't mean it's not _broadly_ a proxy war, nor _specifically_ at least something close to it. Rather, it means that Ukraine serves as a useful test case for probing the limitations of those definitions, and developing new theories of their dynamics based on whatever new phenomena we observe in Ukraine.
And I'm not exactly sure why you care so much about declaring it to not be one in the first place -- feel free to enlighten me! Is it pure defense - just not ceding any points to the Russian gaslighting? Or about escalation? I mean, sure, one could be disturbed about the potential for an overt proxy war to escalate, but... at the risk of sounding naïve... we DID get through at least 4 major proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam, USSR-Afghanistan, and Syria) and dozens of smaller ones without starting WWIII. Not to cast aspersions directly at you, because I've never really been able to figure out your politics to begin with, but the nervousness I've seen elsewhere about calling this a proxy war strikes me as having more to do with the antiwar/communism-curious far left's generational trauma over never being able to actually stop big dumb marches into big dumb wars like Vietnam and Iraq (2003). They feel like they're never listened to despite always being right, and they extrapolate from said powerlessness an imagined rule that no escalation spiral can ever be stopped because the hawks always irresistibly appeal to something dark, primal, and flawed deep within human nature (rather than admit that no one listens to them because no one likes them), so in their eyes anything that smacks of ceding rhetorical ground to the hawks is tantamount to cheering for a nuclear apocalypse.
Which, to me, isn't a very convincing reason to not call a spade a spade.
FWIW, I completely agree on your second point about Russian gaslighting over supposed "NATO aggression". NATO was *always* a red herring. For its entire several hundred years of existence, the foundational question of Russian politics has always been whether to look East or West. This is informative because I personally believe there was a TINY blip in the Overton Window after the Soviet collapse, where it could have been possible to create a Russian "roadmap into the EU/NATO" and head off at least today's _specific_ scenario from being the one to lead the world into a Second Cold War. (As Matt might say, it was a causally thin moment, but the inevitability of a Second Cold War is probably much causally thicker.)
The closing of that window circumscribed for Russians how they would answer the question of the new (post-Soviet) Russia's relationship with the West. NATO appears in this as a cartoonishly surreal boogeyman because Russians are externalizing their fears about what a world looks like in which they are *not* officially part of Europe -- again, fears that Russians have ALWAYS had, in one form or another -- because if they can't _join_ Europe, then they must be doomed to _conflict_ with Europe. That last bit isn't as unreasonable as it might at first sound, because any basic student of history would know that every time Russia has looked West, a war eventually resulted. (cf: Thirty Years' War, Seven Years' War, Napoleonic Wars, the Great Game, and the World Wars) To many Russians, it must inchoately feel just fundamentally dangerous to even *consider* playing the West's games - they're the new-money debutante who's always getting shafted by the old noble elites' machinations. (sorry, I've been watching too much Bridgerton)
Anyways, Westerners keep making the mistake of misinterpreting these complaints about NATO as actually being about _NATO_, and thus we keep having this utterly stupid debate about whether we actually encroached or not, whether we promised the Russians something in some back room in the 90's, whether they didn't understand or willfully misinterpreted said promises, whether they're gaslighting about NATO today, etc. Countless pixels have been spilled over the entirely wrong debate because it's an easier vehicle for everyone to grind their personal axes: the antiwar left wants to pillory its hawk archenemies, the Blob wants to exonerate NATO expansion, neolibs and Reaganites want to keep their sins in the '93 coup from being revisited too deeply, and the new right/natcons/Trumpists want to end NATO altogether.
But the reality is that unlike any previous point in the history of Russian-European relations, Europe is more or less unified now. European fragmentation had kept them fighting for their entire 2+ millennia, so any time Russia looked West, of COURSE it got dragged into one of their wars. Today, though, that doesn't necessarily have to happen. If the EU can, for the foreseeable future (nothing's permanent!), end intra-European war, then Russians have less to fear from looking West. Sure, one could point out that a unified Europe poses a potentially _greater_ threat than ever, but that only underscores the need to integrate a West-facing Russia: if conflict between Russia and a united Europe is the only risk left, then we should be mitigating it, not gearing up for war.
It'd be far more productive for the West to be debating THIS question, of how to build a new framework for peace between a unified Europe and a West-facing Russia, than to keep wasting time on this silly bullshit of whether NATO is truly a cartoon boogeyman or not.