The algorithm-driven debate-industrial complex recently gifted the internet another installment of its ongoing effort to merge cable news, professional wrestling, and civic collapse into a single monetized spectacle: Jubilee Media and Straight Arrow News released a video titled “1 Journalist vs 20 Trump Supporters” in which constitutional law attorney-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald volleyed geopolitical common sense into a clown car of personalities parroting curated conservative talking points and outright falsehoods about the Iran war—“Operation Epstein Fury.” I highly recommend the video to anyone wishing to observe the effectiveness of propaganda and the failures of the American educational system in real time. Among the panel’s favorite talking points was the oft-repeated claim that Iran acts as an aggressor “through its proxies,” namely Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthis. The assertion sounds analytical until one begins examining how the architects of foreign policy narratives selectively deploy the language of “proxies” to strip some movements of political agency while affording others the dignity of acting in their own interests. The result is a public conditioned to interpret adversaries of the American-led order as foreign-controlled puppets while U.S.-aligned armed actors are understood as legitimate expressions of nationalism, security, or self-determination.
During the Cold War, Washington routinely framed left-wing insurgencies and anti-colonial movements as extensions of Moscow or Havana. Global South exertions of sovereignty, self-determination, and efforts to reverse the inequities of colonialism and neocolonialism were routinely delegitimized, framed as foreign manipulation and flattened into a global communist puppet show. Revisionist historians and anti-colonial scholars spent decades pushing back, emphasizing the local roots and political agency of movements routinely dismissed as Soviet or Cuban proxies, a position increasingly vindicated by the archival record with each wave of declassification, from Latin America to the Eastern Bloc. After the Cold War—and especially after 9/11—the proxy narrative returned with remarkable force. Soviet puppetry gave way to the Iranian proxy, the Putin puppet, and the broader assumption that smaller Western adversaries are extensions or instruments of larger geopolitical rivals.
Hezbollah did not emerge from an Iranian laboratory, but from the wreckage of the Lebanese Civil War, the marginalization of Lebanon’s Shi’a population, and the Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982. Hamas emerged during the First Intifada in 1987 amid decades of military occupation, dispossession, and collapsing faith in existing Palestinian leadership; Palestinians did not require Iranian instruction to resist life under occupation. Yemen’s Houthis emerged from the political marginalization of Yemen’s Zaydi population, government corruption, economic grievances, and repeated conflicts with the Yemeni state years before becoming fixtures in American cable-news graphics explaining “Iranian aggression.” Even mainstream explanatory outlets have acknowledged that the Houthis are not simply Iranian creations, but movements rooted in Yemen’s own political and historical conditions. In practice, the Houthis were the only actors willing to uphold their commitments under the Genocide Convention by targeting Israeli-bound ships during the ongoing Gaza genocide, while Western signatories largely confined “prevention” efforts to press releases, procedural caveats, and fresh weapons shipments. Iranian support for these groups is real, but material support does not reduce regional actors into remote-controlled Tehranian appendages. No serious historian would argue that American support for the Contras transformed Nicaragua’s anti-Sandinista forces into mindless automatons devoid of local motives, yet movements opposed to Washington or its allies are routinely denied the same analytical complexity.
The double standard becomes evident in the language Washington reserves for its allies. American-backed Cold War insurgencies, dictatorships, and death squads were rarely written off as proxies devoid of agency. Nicaragua’s Contras, the Afghan Mujahideen, anti-communist militias across Latin America, and countless Cold War client regimes were instead framed as freedom fighters, security partners, anti-terror forces, or flawed but sovereign actors pursuing legitimate national interests. Material support from Washington did not erase their political agency; indeed, that agency often became politically convenient precisely when American officials sought distance from the atrocities committed by their clients. Agency, however, is not absolution.
Movements opposing American or Israeli regional dominance are routinely denied the same analytical complexity, reduced instead to the hostile state allegedly pulling their strings. The distinction is not merely semantic. “Proxy” functions as a delegitimizing category, one that transforms political grievances, occupations, sectarian tensions, and anti-colonial resistance into the manufactured products of foreign adversaries, suitable not for diplomacy or historical understanding, but for sanctions, bombings, and regime-change rhetoric. Curiously, once the archival record begins vindicating the agency of yesterday’s alleged Soviet puppets—from Latin America to the Eastern Bloc—enthusiasm for revisiting those exaggerations tends to evaporate. Narrative management is generally less interested in correcting yesterday’s propaganda than in manufacturing tomorrow’s.
One need not endorse Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis to recognize their political agency. “Proxy” has become less an analytical category than a political branding tool, one selectively deployed to deny adversaries legitimacy while preserving complexity for allies and clients. Selling costly foreign policy interventions to the American public requires recasting movements responding to occupation, inequality, or repression as extensions of larger enemies whose villainous status has already been carefully cultivated by Washington’s foreign policy narrative architects.