Arming the Other: American Small Wars, Local Proxies, and the Social Construction of the Principal-Agent Problem

A state that enlists foreign fighters as extensions of its own military power confronts an acute principal-agent problem. While the state (principal) might benefit by delegating security responsibilities to foreigners (agents), it risks seeing its aims partially implemented, unfulfilled, or even subverted. For more than a century, the United States has attempted to mitigate this problem as it has raised, trained, and armed proxies to fight its small wars. But we find considerable variation in its approach across time and space. Why? Rationalist treatments of the agency problem face difficulty in accounting for this variation, as they focus on goal incongruity between the principal and agent. This downplays, if not ignores, the historical and social process that leads to different manifestations of goal incongruity. Thus, I propose a constructivist reworking of agency theory. I stress how the principal draws upon, and deploys, social knowledge to identify and manage the particular hazards that it believes its agent poses. Mining primary sources, I show that changing characterizations of local proxies—as either biologically or culturally flawed—led to different interpretations of the agency problem. In turn, this led American officials to adopt different approaches to mitigating it—ranging from outright paternalism to less direct tutelage.