Buffer state

Examples

Americas

• Bolivia, created by Gran Colombia as a buffer between Peru and Argentina during the Upper Peru question, also between Chile after the War of the Confederation.
• Uruguay, served as a demilitarized buffer between Argentina and the Empire of Brazil during the early independence period in South America.
• Paraguay, maintained after the end of the Paraguayan War in 1870, as a buffer separating Argentina and Brazil.
• Georgia, a colony established by Great Britain in 1732 as a buffer between its other colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America and Spanish Florida.
• Ecuador, served as a "cushion state" between Colombia and Peru, which had a bigger extension and military force and fought a war in the 1820s in what is now Ecuador.

  Asia

• Multiple buffer states played major roles during Roman–Persian Wars.
• North Korea during and after the Cold War, seen by some analysts as a buffer state between the military forces of China and U.S. forces in South Korea, Japan and U.S. fleet in Taiwan.
• Manchuria was a pro-Japanese buffer state between the Empire of Japan, the Soviet Union, and Republic of China during World War II.
• Siam, whose king had to surrender his country's hegemony over Laos and Cambodia and to grant commercial concessions to France but managed to retain independence as a buffer state between British Raj, British Malaya, and the French Indochina.
• Korea was acting a buffer zone between the growing superpower, Empire of Japan and the northern mainland neighbor, Russian Empire.
• The Far Eastern Republic was a formally independent state created to act as a buffer between Bolshevik Russia and the Empire of Japan.
• Afghanistan was a buffer state between the British Empire and the Russian Empire during the Anglo–Russian conflicts in Asia during the 19th century, with the Wakhan Corridor later extending the buffer eastwards to the Chinese border.
• The Himalayan nations of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim were buffer-states between the British Empire and China, later between China and India, which in 1962 fought the Sino-Indian War in places where the two regional powers bordered each other.
• Mongolia, acted as a buffer between the Soviet Union and China until 1991 and currently serves as a buffer between Russia and China.
• Armenia was a frequently contested buffer between the Roman Empire and the various Persian and Muslim states.

  Africa

• Morocco served as a buffer state between the Ottoman Empire, Spain, and Portugal in the 16th century.

  Europe

• The United Kingdom of the Netherlands, composed of today's Belgium and Netherlands and created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 in order to maintain peace between France, Prussia and the United Kingdom. This state existed for 15 years until the Belgian revolution.
• The Rhineland served as a demilitarized buffer-zone between France and Germany during the inter-war years of the 1920s and early 1930s. There were early French attempts at creating the Rhineland Republic.
• Qasim Khanate, between Muscovy and Kazan Khanate.
• Poland and other states between Germany and the Soviet Union have sometimes been described as buffer states, with reference both to when they were non-communist states before World War II, and to when they were communist states after World War II.
• Yugoslavia acted as a buffer state between NATO and the Warsaw Pact blocs after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split during the Cold War.
• Ukraine has been described by experts such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as a buffer state between Russia and the NATO bloc, at least up to the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.