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Honestly it's becoming a sort of Iranian strategic devolution at this point.
Most of the point of a proxy war is that the proxy is distant enough from the state so as to minimize the costs of engaging in a conflict. 'Plausible deniability' works as a mutual fiction, as it lets the person being attacked focus on fighting the proxy instead of you, but it also lets you not get exposed if the proxy starts to lose. Just like offensive-alliances are a strategically untenable idea since it drags parties into other people's wars they don't want to contribute to, a proxy relationship is not a defense treaty.
Treating an attack on a proxy as the same as an attack on one's self is losing the plot, and actively bringing the proxy into your political center is blurring the identification lines that make the proxy, well, a proxy. If the Iranian government wanted to launch a multi-day attack on Israel by Iranian forces, it could do so without the proxy. If Iran feels obliged to because Israel attacked the proxy, then it's no longer a proxy, but a vassal-ally to whom state-deterrence applies. But if you're applying state-deterrence theory in protection of a proxy, that in turn applies state-deterrence on what the proxy does... which is the whole historical mess of empires getting dragged into conflicts their vassal-allies drag them into.
This is an understandable mess given how the Iranian theocracy has cultivated the IRGC into a deep-state, and the IRGC has very personal relationships with the axis of resistance members, but it's still a mess of bad strategy. Iran has wanted and gotten used to the benefits of plausible-deniable proxy warfare over the last decades, but stopped putting in the work- or the mental discipline- to keep the distance between itself and its proxies enough for the distinction to be relevant.
There are ways to manage a proxy relationship so that they are active but the backer remains safe. You could look at how the Ukraine coalition has managed to support Ukraine, but you could also look at how Pakistan approached the Pashtun-Taliban against the US, or the Chinese in the Korean war, and so on. There are ways... but Iran's breaking some basic principles, and we're seeing the results.
I don't understand how all of this reasoning (apart from the value judgements regarding Iran, the IRGC etc., which seem orthogonal to any determinations about the proper way to treat proxy wars) wouldn't apply to Ukraine and NATO. Do you see the same binary choice between "the backers should just attack (Russia/Israel) themselves" and "the backers must keep a sanitary cordon around the proxy that entails not inviting its representatives into own territory, and if they do it anyway they can't complain if the proxy's representatives get attacked on their soil" in that case? If not, what is different?
I could imagine someone as on board with the official US line as you would have the reflex to say that Ukraine/Russia is not a proxy war because Ukraine decided to fight out of its own volition, but I have not seen a case being made that Hezbollah does not have the will (nor have I seen the suggestion that in a proxy war the proxy must be unwilling). If you wanted to say that it's all different because Ukraine is a real country blessed by the US while Hezbollah is a terrorist militia and therefore doesn't get agency, then it seems like you would just be taking roundabout steps to Russell-conjugate "proxy war" so that the bad-sounding word does not apply when your side does it.
The nature of the relationship with the proxies, the nature of the threat the proxies pose to the opponent, the nature of the ways to provide both off-ramps to the target to stop the proxy war, and the relative difference in escalation risk of attacking proxies in the backer's countries as a contrast to the status quo.
(Or- in other words- Russia is not already in a conventional military conflict with NATO, and both does not face existential risk from the proxy and can end the proxy war by a return to conduct that respects Russia's existence. Iran's coalition instigated the framing conflict, is already in the attempted Intifada, is already executing a sustained bombardment campaign, is already disrupting maritime shipping- Iran can't really leverage threats it is already executing as deterence against an Israeli escalation.)
In case you were reading a moral judgement, don't. This was a utility-viewpoint assessment.
If you missed the argument, I suppose, but even that wouldn't mean that the distinction between being a country and not being a country isn't rightfully a dominant distinction, or even the only distinction that needs to be defended.
The international system revolves around the premise of state sovereignty. States are owed / entitled / accorded certain privileges and presumptions that non-state actors, hence why Russia spent it's pre-war justification narrative trying to discredit that there was a Ukrainian nation to have an independent state. While Iran and its axis of resistance have also rejected the right of an Israeli state to defend itself, Israel is indeed a state, and states do have a right to defend themselves against other states who perpetrate attacks against them.
Iran's mistake in disregarding the plausible deniability / gap between proxy and state backer is that this gap is what is required to try and exploit an advantage of unilateral aggression between states, even as Iran set up a weak paradigm that decreased it's deterrence against being called out. Israel pre-attack was already in the midst of an Iranian-backed attempted Intifada, major artillery campaign, maritime disruption campaign, and global anti-jewish terrorism efforts... and these all were instigated / arranged while competition with Iran was at a much, much lower level. Iran doesn't get deterrence value out of threats it is already executing- it's the threat of retaliation that drives deterence, and pre-emptively executing it just leads to targets accepting it as a sunk cost and retaliating.
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I would argue that both you and @Dean are right. It is a bad strategic mistake, and it’s one that both Iran and the United States are making.
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NATO didn’t react to the war on Ukraine the way it would react to an invasion of a member state, though. That’s the entire reason the Ukrainians want into NATO.
Even if the Ukrainian Defense minister was assassinated on say, German soil it is still unlikely that the US would send American soldiers to fight the Ukraine War, or that we’d bomb Moscow. So again, the situation isn’t really the same as Hezbollah/Iran.
I actually think that German boots on the ground in Ukraine would be a fairly likely response in that event (and American ones if the assassination happened in the US) - and, well, Iran hasn't sent physical soldiers to attack Israel yet, and we are seeing American and German hardware raining down on Russia every day. I'm sure Iran would have been happy to let its rocket volley be launched by Hezbollah or Hamas rather than sending it directly, too, if they had had the logistical possibilities to move the launchers there, as the Western alliance has with Ukraine.
It would be incredibly unlikely. NATO members absolutely do not want to get into an actual shooting match with russians.
Some of them seemed to be quite open to the idea (though they were probably also hoping that the troops would act as a shield and the Russians, themselves not wanting a shooting match with NATO members, would essentially avoid striking anywhere near them). My sense from German media is also that there is a general drive to warm up the populace to the idea; either way, everyone involved probably understands that Russia in its present state would in fact be too risk-averse to seriously retaliate outside of the Ukrainian theatre or even target the troops unless they show up at the front.
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