Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 December 4

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December 4

the meaning of 'surrogate'

Would you please teach me the meaning of 'surrogate'in the following sentence? Two presidents saw the Soviet Union and its surrogates expand their power and influence in Afghanistan, southern Africa and Central America by subversion and outright military invasion.---Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p.9.153.178.118.63 (talk) 00:45, 4 December 2016 (UTC)dengen

Here, it means "one who acts on behalf of". So Thatcher meant the nations that were closely aligned with the Soviet Union, and at that time it probably meant nations of the Eastern Bloc that aligned with the Soviet Union's policies. Akld guy (talk) 01:00, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

I'd omit of from that definition, since surrogate also requires it (Castro was a surrogate of Brezhnev). —Tamfang (talk) 00:39, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

IIUC, in the modern political parlance this is called proxy. --2A02:C7D:8E50:2600:2DE0:F358:8306:40DF (talk) 20:17, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Client states of the Soviet Union included much of the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance. But influence goes beyond proxy wars to "soft power" - e.g. providing scholarships for students from what were then called Third World countries to study in the USSR or its satellites. See for example Afro-Russian, Angola–Soviet Union relations, the Soviet–Afghan War, and many other examples within Category:Bilateral relations of the Soviet Union. And then there's Cuba - from Cuba–Soviet Union relations to Cuba's reach towards Latin America. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 20:28, 4 December 2016 (UTC)