Base Nation


Book Description

American military bases encircle the globe; from Italy to the Indian Ocean, from Japan to Honduras. The far-reaching story of the perils of the U. S. military bases and what these bases say about America today.




Overseas Basing of U.S. Military Forces


Book Description

This independent assessment is a comprehensive study of the strategic benefits, risks, and costs of U.S. military presence overseas. The report provides policymakers a way to evaluate the range of strategic benefits and costs that follow from revising the U.S. overseas military presence by characterizing how this presence contributes to assurance, deterrence, responsiveness, and security cooperation goals.




Base Politics


Book Description

According to the Department of Defense's 2004 Base Structure Report, the United States officially maintains 860 overseas military installations and another 115 on noncontinental U.S. territories. Over the last fifteen years the Department of Defense has been moving from a few large-footprint bases to smaller and much more numerous bases across the globe. This so-called lily-pad strategy, designed to allow high-speed reactions to military emergencies anywhere in the world, has provoked significant debate in military circles and sometimes-fierce contention within the polity of the host countries. In Base Politics, Alexander Cooley examines how domestic politics in different host countries, especially in periods of democratic transition, affect the status of U.S. bases and the degree to which the U.S. military has become a part of their local and national landscapes. Drawing on exhaustive field research in different host nations across East Asia and Southern Europe, as well as the new postcommunist base hosts in the Black Sea and Central Asia, Cooley offers an original and provocative account of how and why politicians in host countries contest or accept the presence of the U.S. military on their territory. Overseas bases, Cooley shows, are not merely installations that serve a military purpose. For host governments and citizens, U.S. bases are also concrete institutions and embodiments of U.S. power, identity, and diplomacy. Analyzing the degree to which overseas bases become enmeshed in local political agendas and interests, Base Politics will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the extent—and limits—of America's overseas military influence.




Island of Shame


Book Description

David Vine recounts how the British & US governments created the Diego Garcia base, making the native Chagossians homeless in the process. He details the strategic significance of this remote location & also describes recent efforts by the exiles to regain their territory.




Overseas Bases and US Strategy


Book Description

Overseas military bases have been the bedrock of the United States’ ability to project military power, exert political influence and deter potential adversaries since the Second World War. But fatigue with America’s ‘forever wars’, as well as more nuanced financial and strategic reasons, has inclined the public and policy community to favour reducing US global military activities and overseas presence. In this Adelphi book, Jonathan Stevenson argues that this desire does not necessarily translate into sound strategy. Overseas bases are a key element of the reassurance required to resurrect and bolster America’s reputation among its allies and adversaries. Meanwhile, strategic imperatives and geopolitical realities impose restraints in every theatre. The fluidity prevailing in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific counsels maintaining forward-deployed forces there at roughly the current level. Russia’s confrontational posture towards NATO and invasion of Ukraine, as well as NATO’s short- and medium-term reliance on US capabilities, require the American presence in Europe to increase and expand eastward. The US should not commit itself to a foreign policy that is heavy on forward-deployed military power and light on diplomacy. But paradoxically, reducing forward military presence may not be consistent with a policy that is less focused on military power as a means of achieving stability and security.




Over There


Book Description

Essays explore the social impact of Americas global network of military bases by examining interactions between U.S. soldiers and members of host communities in South Korea, Japan/Okinawa, and West Germany.




Embattled Garrisons


Book Description

The overseas basing of troops has been a central pillar of American military strategy since World War II--and a controversial one. Are these bases truly essential to protecting the United States at home and securing its interests abroad--for example in the Middle East-or do they needlessly provoke anti-Americanism and entangle us in the domestic woes of host countries? Embattled Garrisons takes up this question and examines the strategic, political, and social forces that will determine the future of American overseas basing in key regions around the world. Kent Calder traces the history of overseas bases from their beginnings in World War II through the cold war to the present day, comparing the different challenges the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union have confronted. Providing the broad historical and comparative context needed to understand what is at stake in overseas basing, Calder gives detailed case studies of American bases in Japan, Italy, Turkey, the Philippines, Spain, South Korea, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He highlights the vulnerability of American bases to political shifts in their host nations--in emerging democracies especially--but finds that an American presence can generally be tolerated when identified with political liberation rather than imperial succession. Embattled Garrisons shows how the origins of basing relationships crucially shape long-term prospects for success, and it offers a means to assess America's prospects for a sustained global presence in the future.




The Bases of Empire


Book Description

A quarter of a million U.S. troops are massed in over seven hundred major official overseas airbases around the world. In the past decade, the Pentagon has formulated and enacted a plan to realign, or reconfigure, its bases in keeping with new doctrines of pre-emption and intensified concern with strategic resource control, all with seemingly little concern for the surrounding geography and its inhabitants. The contributors in The Bases of Empire trace the political, environmental, and economic impact of these bases on their surrounding communities across the globe, including Latin America, Europe, and Asia, where opposition to the United States’ presence has been longstanding and widespread, and is growing rapidly. Through sharp analysis and critique, The Bases of Empire illuminates the vigorous campaigns to hold the United States accountable for the damage its bases cause in allied countries as well as in war zones, and offers ways to reorient security policies in other, more humane, and truly secure directions. Contributors: Julian Aguon, Kozue Akibayashi, Ayse Gul Altinay, Tom Engelhardt, Cynthia Enloe, Joseph Gerson, David Heller, Amy Holmes, Laura Jeffery, Kyle Kajihiro, Hans Lammerant, John Lindsay-Poland, Catherine Lutz, Katherine McCaffrey, Roland G. Simbulan, Suzuyo Takazato, and David Vine.




The United States of War


Book Description

2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.




Global China


Book Description

The global implications of China's rise as a global actor In 2005, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration expressed the hope that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” on the world stage. A dozen years later, the Trump administration dramatically shifted course, instead calling China a “strategic competitor” whose actions routinely threaten U.S. interests. Both assessments reflected an underlying truth: China is no longer just a “rising” power. It has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. Every day its actions affect nearly every region and every major issue, from climate change to trade, from conflict in troubled lands to competition over rules that will govern the uses of emerging technologies. To better address the implications of China's new status, both for American policy and for the broader international order, Brookings scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in a project: Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World. The project is intended to furnish policy makers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China's regional and global ambitions. The initiative draws not only on Brookings's deep bench of China and East Asia experts, but also on the tremendous breadth of the institution's security, strategy, regional studies, technological, and economic development experts. Areas of focus include the evolution of China's domestic institutions; great power relations; the emergence of critical technologies; Asian security; China's influence in key regions beyond Asia; and China's impact on global governance and norms. Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World provides the most current, broad-scope, and fact-based assessment of the implications of China's rise for the United States and the rest of the world.




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