Puppet State / Real Life

• The Trope Namer was the relation between Egypt and Britain from the 1880's to the Egyptian Revolution of 1956. (And until 1914, Egypt was a de jure Ottoman vassal, plus from 1899, Sudan was a de jure vassal of Egypt and the British, though of course it was the British pulling all the strings.)
• A hegemony is when a nation has dominating influence over the foreign and military policy of other countries within its region.
• After the Spanish-American War, newly-independent Cuba became a Puppet State when the United States passed the Platt Amendment which gave Congress the ability to override any Cuban foreign policy decision.
• Most of the Central American Banana Republics were made that way by the machinations of the United States at the behest of the MegaCorp United Fruit Company.
• The satellite states of the Soviet Union. The most frequently cited are those in the Warsaw Pact (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria), though most of them at various points in the Cold War tried to exercise their own policies away from the Soviet model - sometimes they got clobbered with tanks for it (Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968) and sometimes they got away with it (Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu developed comparatively close ties with the West and even defied the Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Hungary's "Goulash Communism" after the '56 crushing that implemented some elements of free-market economics and comparatively better human rights).
  • The view that any and every socialist-leaning group and state in the world was a Soviet puppet colored mainstream American political leadership for much of the Cold War (especially in the early days), regardless of how accurate that description was in reality. When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, the general belief in the US was that Kim Il-Sung was acting on Stalin's orders - not until long after the war did it come to light that it was Kim Il-Sung who proposed to Stalin of the idea and had asked him for support. Along similar lines, in 1951 Dean Rusk (later to become Secretary of State under John F. Kennedy) called the People's Republic of China "a Slavic Manchukuo" to draw comparisons to the Imperial Japan-controlled puppet state (part of the reason the US did not switch official diplomatic recognition from Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist government on Taiwan until 1979). This being international diplomacy, suffice to say that reality was far more complicated than such broad generalizations would imply.
• Some of the nations conquered by the Nazis during World War II, such as Vichy France and Norway under the Quisling regime. This even gave rise to colloquial use of "Vichy" to denote puppet regimes and "Quisling" to denote the treacherous sellouts in charge of those regimes, hence the trope names Vichy Earth and The Quisling referring to specific subtropes of Les Collaborateurs. Also, the Italian Social Republic during the latter part of the war. These puppets aided the Nazis' control over Europe significantly in this respect, as the Germans simply didn't have the manpower to occupy or staff all of their shortlived empire directly.
  • The USSR also set up its own puppet governments in the lands it conquered. For example, on the first day of the invasion of Finland during the Winter War, Stallin set up the Finnish Democratic Republic (nominally ruled by Finish politician Otto Wille Kuusinen) in the first town "liberated" by the Soviet army (I.E. the town of Terijoki, which was abandoned by the Finnish).
• Scotland technically ended up briefly being a vassal state of England when John Baliol was persuaded to swear fealty to Edward I. John Baliol quickly reneged on this however, and Edward squandered any moral claim he might have had in the situation with a show of stunning brutality during his march north, nearly destroying Berwick upon Tweed, once considered a second Alexandria and reduced by 8,000 people after Edward was through with it to the status of a minor sea-port. Although his hold on southern and midland Scotland lasted up until his death despite a considerable struggle with William Wallace, the sheer hatred of the English stirred up in Scotland went a long way towards being the reason Edward's heirs ultimately lost the country. Ironically, the Scots, after a long period of their noble houses anglicising, were drifting towards the English in terms of culture naturally. Edward I's clumsy attempt to unite the two kingdoms ironically drove the cultures apart and cut an everlasting wedge between the countries that, even with unification, has lasted to this day and could still see the two nations part ways once more. In some ways, the devolved governments of the UK could be seen as this, though it is generally agreed that a referendum would see them a fully independent state, be it Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
• The client states of the Roman Republic and later Empire.
• The princely states of British India.
• The Philippine Islands were a fairly successful example of this under the United States despite the brutal Pacification Campaigns. This seems to have been because of a string of highly successful proconsuls (including General MacArthur who to some degree went native). The locals fought very bravely on the US side during World War II because they believed the promise of future "independence".^note Although there were also many guerrillas that fought the Japanese independently of the U.S.-allied local forces (the Huk rebels, most prominently); the mere fact that they weren't technically allied with the U.S. in WWII, coupled with their mass origins and radical-progressive leanings, made American leadership so paranoid that they were Communist agents, that Washington (working through local, oligarchic Filipino lackeys, including many confirmed Japanese collaborators, foremost of all President Manuel Roxas Sr., pardoned by his best buddy MacArthur himself) did everything in its power to crush and discredit them, and even write them out of the war effort.
  • Although that didn't stop the country from acting as a Voluntary Vassal to the US long after "independence", with the sheer level of pro-American loyalties among the Filipinos entirely eclipsing any memory of the brutalities of the Philippine-American War. (It is on record that several of the Filipino oligarch leadership privately opposed even a nominal independence because it would cut off their access to the vast American markets, and they—as landowning exporters of sugar and other cash crops—stood to lose enormous profits if they had no guaranteed buyers.)
  • For that matter, the wartime Second Republic was an even better example, with Jose Laurel being President, but in reality the government was controlled by the Japanese military.
    • Not quite the traditional example of a puppet state. President Laurel was in many ways independent of the Japanese, having refused Japanese "counsellors" (i.e., what effectively made the state a puppet). Also, he was ordered to remain back in Manila and cooperate with the Japanese by the exiled President Quezon, making him something of a puppet for two enemy sides. He also protected members of the resistance in the Presidential Palace, refused (unsuccessfully) to declare war on the Allies and refused (successfully) to form a pro-Japanese Filipino Army. These are some of the reasons why the Second Republic is just one out of five republics and the word President, when used with the name Laurel, does not carry quotation marks (he's considered a legitimate President since the 1960s). One could almost argue that Laurel was no more or less a puppet of Japan than his successors were puppets of the U.S.—especially since under him the Japanese, for all their other abuses, literally beat the Americans to granting Philippine independence in 1943.
• For that matter, every US State is theoretically this. At some times in history it has been feared that the Federal government would reduce them to provinces, and at other times, it was feared that the states had unusual powers. On the whole, during isolationist periods in US history the state governments prevailed, and during periods of more active foreign policy the Fed prevailed.
  • This is most blatant in Washington, D.C.. Congress can and frequently does override the city's locally elected government for its own benefit.
• Historically the Kingdom of Ryukyu was this to Japan, or more specifically the Satsuma, the most powerful feudal lords of southern Kyushu. Following the Meiji Restoration and the Satsuma Rebellion, it was annexed outright to become the modern day prefecture of Okinawa.
• Manchukuo under "The Last Emperor" Puyi is the most (in)famous of Japan's puppet states in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Wang Ching-Wei, a rival of Chiang Kai Shek, headed another puppet state in Central China.
• The former colonies of The British Empire went through this phase on their way to becoming either the independent Commonwealth Realms or republics. An odd example, since their status was always somewhat vague and it evolved over time. For instance, Canada began in 1867 as four colonies united under a Dominion government. This status effectively gave "responsible government" status to an intermediary between the colonies and London. Over the decades, Canada would take more powers for herself, including the right to raise an increasingly independent army, ending the system of British honours for her citizens (replaced by Canadian equivalents), choosing an actual Canadian as Governor-General (alongside Parliament's right to choose the Privy Council, this guaranteed Canadian control over the executive), and the Statute of Westminster gave effective de facto independence in all remaining home and foreign affairs to the Dominions (for the most part, ending this trope regarding these states). After a few decades of haggling (mostly with the provinces/states of their respective governments), the Realms were able to negotiate the passing of laws that severed Britain's last remaining prerogative: London's right to pass laws affecting the constitution of the former colonies. This effectively solidified Queen Lizzie's position as Sovereign over 16 independent countries, instead of the former satellite states they once were.
• The German Empire tried to set these up throughout Eastern Europe and via its plan for Mitteleuropa. The German plan was to annex Luxembourg, either annex Belgium or turn it into a puppet state, turn the Netherlands into a German member state in all but name, turn France into an economic puppet, and set up puppet states from Finland to the Don Republic and Kuban in an attempt to form a buffer between Russia and Germany, and, eventually, establish the means for Germany to begin Germanization of the Region. And all of this would be held together by Mitteleuropa, a political and economic alliance that would have been Germany's idea for a United Europe, including its wartime Allies. Germany's attempts to create them during World War I obviously went sour.
• The Irish Free State created by the Anglo-Irish treaty was a British puppet state until 1948, although some nationalists argue it still is to this day. However, they did remain neutral during World War II.
• The "Bantustans" in South Africa, ridiculously shaped and economically unviable territories chiefly existing so that the Apartheid regime could assign a new nationality to the blacks they were trying to disenfranchise. Officially they were governed by blacks but those in charge were paid large amounts of money by the South African government. Four of them (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei) were officially granted independence but no one except South Africa recognized them. With the fall of the apartheid regime they were abolished and said lands were reintegrated back into South Africa.
• The two statelets known as Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic that formed in Donbas, Eastern Ukraine, were puppet states used by Vladimir Putin's Russia to weaken Ukraine since 2014. Only Russia and a handful of countries aligned with Russia's foreign policy (such as Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus, Bashar al-Assad's Syria and Kim Jong-un's North Korea) have officially recognized them. There were also plans to create more of them in oblasts that are occupied by Russian forces since the start of the full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This fell to the wayside when the invasion stalled, and following a referendum widely derided as rigged, the oblasts were annexed by Russia alongside two other partially occupied Ukrainian oblasts, likely so the Kremlin can pretend it isn't illegally deploying conscripts abroad.