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Notes -
Because what was written doesn't make sense
If you indirectly force or empower someone to wage a conflict they could not, or would not, do without your support, that's a proxy war.
Let's pick out parts of this by excluding some of the not relevant or's.
If you empower someone to wage a conflict they could not do (wage) without your support, that's a proxy war.
If someone wages a conflict that they would want to as long as you were not outright stopping them, that is not a proxy war.
These statements contradict, the second is too broad. If you're enabling them or encouraging them but they want to do it anyways it's both not a proxy war and a proxy war.
Reduces to basically any conflict in which a powerful foreign country influences the conflict, while w/e party within the state they're enabling wants to wage a conflict, not being a proxy war. So nothing can be a proxy war as long as you can find some faction within a country that doesn't like current leadership.
Because you don't think it makes sense that countries that are allied with the US can have agency and act outside of being a proxy of the United States. This is a common American-centric myopia, particularly those who buy into oppressor/oppressed frameworks of the western left that the Americans culturally dominate, but it is still a myopia.
There is no contradiction, you simply ignored the identified category which you cut off- that the party being supported in the war they would already be doing is waging their own war.
That's all it needs to be- the party who would wage war for their own interests can be the responsible agent, and not demoted to the proxy of those that back them. They do not become subordinate merely because they are supported, even if it serves the interest of those supporting them to support them. The contradiction only comes if you demand people who are supported be framed in subordinate terms to those who support them.
This is not only a false requirement, but support-without-proxy is a common state in international relations, where partners / allies will provide various levels of support to eachother simply because the relationship entails an expectation of mutual support as long as the other partner's interests do not conflict with your own. Germany will support France in various European trade disputes regarding French interests not because Germany is using France to wage proxy economic war against the other side, but because maintaining the relationship is itself a beneficial arrangement and they have an expectation of the favor being returned in the future. The Arabs will frequently vote as a block in the UN in favor of not just collective interests, but in solidarity of a fellow member, unless there are specific interest differences. The archetypical cold war alliance was that someone with a UN veto will veto the resolutions condemning their partner, and in return the partner would support the patron's UN priorities to a general extent.
The same dynamics can, and do, apply to military aid and support. Some people struggle to make sense of a difference between vassals and partners, but it does exist, and those who can't make sense of it will forever struggle as long as they default to pejoratives as 'proxy' or 'manipulation' to describe relationships in ways that not only dismiss the agency, but even the leadership, that supported parties can have in even unequal relationships.
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