When I first encountered the work of a Houthi cartoonist whose drawings circulate from Sanaa to Tehran to Moscow, what struck me was how badly we have misunderstood what a proxy actually is. We imagine proxies as instruments, hollowed out and pointed in a chosen direction. The reality is stranger and more durable.

The proxy relationship is fractal. It operates by the same logic at every scale, and that logic is not coercion but consent. Iran did not force the Houthis but offered them a bargain: keep your identity, keep your resistance vocabulary, point it where we need it, and we will make you more powerful than you have ever been. The Houthis believe themselves to be sovereign actors, and in some meaningful sense they are. That belief is not a delusion the system needs to maintain; it is the mechanism by which the system holds.

The same logic operates one scale down. The Houthis offered Sharaf, the cartoonist, a version of the same bargain in the vocabulary of his craft, and he accepted. He, too, believes himself to be free.

This is coercion through conviction. The system does not produce it in everyone, but it is what the system aims for. It activates talent, rewards alignment, dignifies it, and lets the aligned believe the choice was theirs all along. Just as the Houthis transformed their religion from Zaidism into Khomeinism, Sharaf went from holding exhibits that promoted religious tolerance and rejected violence to drawing cartoons of children planting explosives under boats while shouting "death to America."