10

THE SPOILS OF WAR

“YANKEE GO HOME”

Someone had spray-painted the iconic phrase next to my hotel near Pisa’s iconic Leaning Tower. The international tourist attraction is a short drive from Camp Darby, a major U.S. weapons storage facility and logistical hub along Italy’s west coast. Beyond Italy I saw or heard “Yankee go home” from Honduras to Germany to South Korea. Many in the United States have trouble understanding such “Yankee go home” sentiment. Why wouldn’t a country want U.S. bases and troops? They provide security, not to mention jobs and other economic benefits, right? Why wouldn’t their presence be welcomed? Many assume that any “Yankee go home” sentiment must reflect a seething anti-Americanism. With bases in Europe and Asia, some might go so far as to invoke the old sarcastic joke that if it weren’t for the United States, they’d probably be speaking German or Japanese right now.

Since World War II the phrase “Yankee go home” has almost always referred to U.S. military personnel and not to all U.S. citizens or everything “American.” Protesters have often gone to great lengths to emphasize that their opposition is not motivated by anti-Americanism. While many allies welcomed the U.S. military to bases on their soil during World War II, many, such as Iceland, began requesting the removal of U.S. forces and the return of their bases soon after the fighting stopped.1 Generally, U.S. officials had promised to remove military forces at the end of hostilities or at the more ambiguous “termination of the present international emergency.” Labor unions and left-wing political parties, especially in Europe and Latin America, generally opposed the existence of any foreign bases. Leftists in France soon complained about U.S. “occupiers” and—somewhat ironically, given the history of French colonialism—“Coca-Colonization.”²

Demands to send the Yankees home also came from some of the Yankees themselves. Unsurprisingly, at the end of the war, most U.S. military personnel wanted to go home as quickly as possible after years of often horrific fighting. In 1945 and 1946 protesting soldiers, sailors, and marines in Manila, London, Paris, Guam, Honolulu, and Frankfurt pressured the Truman administration to demobilize. Millions of family members likewise wanted their sons, husbands, boyfriends, and brothers to come home. Hundreds of Bring Back Daddy clubs formed across the United States.³

In Latin America leaders had been willing to host bases during the war because of the opportunities to develop national infrastructure at the expense of Uncle Sam. Given the history of the U.S. intervention in the region and broad anti-imperial sentiment, most in the region were ready to see U.S. forces depart. In Panama, where there were as many as 134 U.S. bases during the war, public protests broke out by 1947. Signs read, “DOWN WITH YANKEE IMPERIALISM,” and “NOT ONE MORE INCH OF PANAMANIAN TERRITORY.”⁴ Panama’s National Assembly unanimously rejected a postwar base agreement. President Harry Truman asked, “Why don’t we get out of Panama gracefully before we get kicked out?”⁵

Despite opposition in Panama, U.S. bases would remain for another half century. This was typical. After World War II, U.S. leaders, like the leaders of empires past, were reluctant to give up the “spoils of war.” Military leaders were especially adamant about retaining “their” bases overseas. Even if the military had little interest in using a base or a territory, most generals and admirals felt the United States should almost never cede its acquisitions. As justification, they generally invoked two military principles. The first, “redundancy,” says the more bases, the better. The idea is that it’s always good to have backups. The second, “strategic denial,” says that it’s advantageous to hold on to bases and territories simply to prevent enemies from using them.

In October 1945, two months after the end of the war, the Secretary of War, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of State, and Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a plan for a permanent peacetime global system of bases.6 Notably, the focus was on bases on islands in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. No basing presence was planned for the Eurasian landmass, with the exception of bases occupying Germany; most assumed they were temporary.⁷ Gen. Leslie Groves gave instructions to acquire base rights rights quickly, even though there was no direct threat to the United States “and plan not for ten years but for 50–100 years ahead.” Melvyn Leffler writes, “[Military] officials regarded overseas bases as one of the keys to retaining US strategic air superiority and its world leadership role.”⁸

At the direction of the military hierarchy, State Department officials pursued diplomatic agreements that would allow U.S. bases and troops to remain in other countries. Officials understood that the immediate development of bases wouldn’t be possible everywhere they desired, given domestic pressure to cut the postwar military budget and international pressure to remove foreign military forces. Instead, writes Leffler, the plan was to negotiate for and secure base rights that would allow base construction and base use when needed in the future.⁹ The military would monitor other potential base locations to ensure they didn’t fall into the hands of the Soviet Union or other competitors. U.S. officials prioritized securing long-term access to bases in Iceland, Greenland, the Azores, and Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, among others. Military officials considered Iceland and Greenland increasingly important because of their proximity to the Soviet Union over the North Pole. The Azores provided a critical transit point between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Galápagos offered protection for the western entrance to the Panama Canal.

In most cases U.S. negotiators faced opposition from local officials wary of allowing a foreign base presence amid heightened nationalist sentiment in most of the world. In the case of the Azores and Iceland, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes asked British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin for help in advancing negotiations.10 In the case of Danish Greenland, the State Department appears to have offered to buy the world’s largest island for $100 million. The Danish government rejected the deal but allowed a U.S. base presence, which continues to this day.¹¹ (Nearly seventy-five years later, President Donald Trump again proposed buying Greenland. Some thought the proposal was a joke. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen immediately rejected it, saying, “Greenland is not for sale. Greenland is not Danish. Greenland belongs to Greenland.”)¹²

Facing host nation resistance, Congress funded bases for fiscal year 1946 primarily in places where there was little question about U.S. control and no diplomatic agreements were needed: Hawaiʻi, Alaska, the Philippines, Guam, Wake, Midway, Johnston, Christmas, Manus, Espiritu Santu, Okinawa, and the other previously Japanese-occupied islands of Ogasawara (Bonins), Saipan, Tinian, Eniwetok, Majuro, Kwajalein, Truk, and Palau.¹³

The maintenance of a permanent collection of U.S. bases overseas reflected a profound change in how U.S. elites thought about the world, warfare, threats to the country, and even the very ideas of “defense” and a newly expansive concept of “national security.” During World War II President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other leaders inside and outside of government developed a vision of the world as intrinsically threating. Instability, no matter how far removed from the United States, was seen as a threat. The military needed to be a “permanently mobilized force” ready to confront threats wherever they might appear.¹⁴

This threatening view of the world developed even before the United States entered World War II. “No attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored,” argued Roosevelt in 1939.¹⁵ “If the United States is to have any defense,” Roosevelt and others believed, “it must have total defense.” In this way, Michael Sherry explains, the mentality of the U.S.-Soviet “Cold War” started to take hold long before the “Cold War” had even begun.¹⁶

After World War II the role of the U.S. military transformed into a force that would patrol the world and protect against any and all perceived threats twenty-four hours a day.¹⁷ The result was a machinery of war centered on a perpetually mobilized military and an expanding “national security bureaucracy.” That the country needed a large collection of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops constantly stationed overseas, as close as possible to any potential enemies, became a major tenet of U.S. strategy. “Experience in the recent war,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote in March 1946, “demonstrated conclusively that the defense of a nation, if it is to be effective, must begin beyond its frontiers. The advent of the atomic bomb reemphasizes this requirement. The farther away from our own vital areas we can hold our enemy through the possession of advanced bases . . . the greater are our chances of surviving successfully an attack by atomic weapons and of destroying the enemy which employs them against us.”18

In the minds of policy makers, patrolling the world and protecting against threats meant maintaining a large collection of overseas bases where hundreds of thousands of troops could be stationed and from which they could be deployed at any moment. The overseas base infrastructure became an unquestioned keystone of the U.S. government’s approach to the “Cold War.” This policy emphasized defending the United States and the West as close as possible to the enemy—initially the Soviet Union and later China, after the communist takeover. U.S. (and allied) forces, the strategy held, needed to create a line of defense against any future Nazi Germany–like expansion. This strategy of “offensive defense” was akin to the military (and now sports) principle that “the best defense is a good offense.”

As a result, one scholar explains, “the security of the United States, in the minds of policymakers, lost much of its former inseparability from the concept of the territory of the United States.” With the national government increasingly organized around preparations for war and permanent, intervention-ready military mobilization on a global basis, U.S. officials “did not wait to be invited” virtually anywhere on Earth.¹⁹ Especially in the Pacific Ocean, military leaders pursued the creation of a large collection of island bases that would enable the use of air power to control East Asia without large ground forces. This strategy was rooted in a widely held strategic belief that the security of the nation and the prevention of future wars depended on dominating the ocean through an Alfred Thayer Mahan–inspired combination of unparalleled naval and air forces and island bases. “This imperial solution to American anxieties about strategic security in the postwar Pacific exhibited itself,” writes bases expert Hal Friedman, “in a bureaucratic consensus about turning the Pacific Basin into an ‘American lake.’ ”20

For Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Japan, and other military leaders, securing the Pacific meant creating an “offshore island perimeter.” The perimeter was to be a line of island bases stretching from north to south across the western Pacific. It would be like a giant wall protecting the United States, yet with thousands of miles of moat before reaching U.S. shores. “Our line of defense,” MacArthur explained, “runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain, to Alaska.”²¹

Military leaders demanded complete sovereignty over Guam and the other islands in the Marianas and in Micronesia, along with the retention of Okinawa and other captured Japanese islands. Some suggested making Guam and other Pacific islands into new states or including them in an anticipated new state of Hawaiʻi. The military felt especially justified in retaining captured Pacific islands because of the financial costs and “sacrifice of American blood” involved.²² “Having defeated or subordinated its former imperial rivals in the Pacific,” a group of bases experts explain, “the United States military was in no mood to hand back occupied real estate.”²³ In many cases the armed services pressed for full annexation of former Japanese-controlled islands. Many in Congress “shared the feeling that no one had the right to give away land which had been bought and paid for with American lives.” Louisiana Representative F. Edward Hébert explained the imperial logic prevalent after the war: “We fought for them, we’ve got them, we should keep them. They are necessary to our safety. I see no other course.”²⁴

Others in Congress, the State Department, and the media differed. Many State Department officials opposed full U.S. sovereignty over any island except Guam. With the decolonization process gaining momentum at the United Nations and pressure growing for Britain and France to give up their colonies, U.S. diplomats were sensitive to being attacked as colonialists. Amid congressional and public pressure to cut the military budget and demobilize, President Truman ultimately opposed the formal annexation of conquered islands. His administration struck a compromise. It ensured that the former Japanese-controlled islands of Micronesia and other Pacific islands became a U.S.-administered UN “strategic trust territory.” Like League of Nations “mandates,” the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was a paternalistic, racist, and de facto colonial system based on the supposed inferiority of Pacific islanders. With the blessing of the United Nations, the United States gained control over the islands, including the right to maintain bases, in exchange for ensuring inhabitants’ well-being and eventual right to self-determination. The Navy assumed direct administrative control of the islands, which it retained until the Department of the Interior took over in 1951. As one observer put it, the trusteeship was “de facto annexation, papered over with the thinnest of disguises.”25

By the time Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech in early 1946, tensions between the United States and Soviet Union were growing amid public signs of a “Cold War” between the wartime allies. For a time a war between the two remaining world powers, the two empires, appeared possible, even likely in the minds of some people. U.S. officials, on the other hand, shared a “widespread assumption” that the Soviets had no interest in military aggression and would “seek to avoid war” with the United States for at least five to ten years. Although the Soviet Army had millions of men who had defeated Nazi armies in Eastern Europe, overall Soviet military capabilities were quite limited: the country essentially had no strategic air force, no real navy, and no atomic bomb. “Nonetheless,” writes Leffler, “US officials felt threatened.” They felt threatened not because of Soviet military power but because of a “growing apprehension about the vulnerability of American strategic and economic interests in a world of unprecedented turmoil and upheaval.” They also feared the possibility of an accidental conflict set off by Soviet attempts to expand control of territory or resources in Eurasia.²⁶

Amid the fears a globe-encircling collection of overseas bases became an important part of U.S. officials’ conception of security. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin had agreed at the Allies’ 1944 meeting in Yalta to withdraw their forces from foreign lands. U.S. officials now insisted on staying in the Galápagos, Iceland, Greenland, and the Azores, among other locations, while insisting equally that Soviet forces leave Iran and gain no basing rights in the Dardanelles. Army officials and other leaders understood the “logical illogicality” of this position but persisted nonetheless. U.S. intentions were pure and defensive in nature, they thought, while they did not trust what they believed to be the expansionist ambitions of Russia and international communism. Military and State Department leaders agreed that U.S. forces “could not withdraw from critical locations.”27

U.S. leaders saw access to British bases in the Middle East as particularly significant in the event of war with the Soviet Union. Installations in the region would be critical to attacking Soviet oil refineries and industrial regions and to protecting U.S.- and U.K.-controlled oil supplies. The base complex between Cairo and the Suez Canal, for example, hosted two hundred thousand British troops in 1945 and one hundred thousand in the first years after the war. As early as the summer of 1946, secret meetings with U.K. officials included discussions about using Middle East bases to launch U.S. atomic bombers in the event of a new war. Negotiators reached an agreement to build infrastructure at five British bases to allow their use by U.S. B-29 nuclear-capable bombers. Within a few years B-29s at Cairo-Suez were a threat to 94 percent of Soviet oil refineries.²⁸

The Soviet military maintained foreign bases after the war’s conclusion. Most were in neighboring countries that came under Soviet occupation or influence, as well as in East Germany, Kaliningrad, and North Korea. In total the number and scope paled in comparison to the entrenched U.S. base network, which was more expansive still, given U.S. access to the “intertwined” bases of British and French allies in their remaining colonial possessions and in the metropoles. By September 1946 a Russian Navy admiral was publicly describing U.S. basing policy as “clearly offensive in nature.” According to a contemporaneous account, the admiral “declared that [U.S.] far-flung peacetime naval bases cannot be intended for the defense of the American continent, since some of them are situated at the close approaches to the Asiatic continent (Okinawa) and of Europe (Iceland and Greenland).”²⁹

Former Roosevelt vice president Henry Wallace was similarly concerned. “How would it look to us if Russia had the atomic bomb and we did not,” he wrote in a July 1946 memo to Truman. How would it look “if Russia had 10,000-mile bombers and air bases within a thousand miles of our coastlines and we did not?” Wallace warned that an arms race was most likely to bring about war rather than ensure peace. He ticked off major elements of this aggressive U.S. policy, including “the effort to secure air bases spread over half the globe from which the other half can be bombed”; $13 billion in military spending since war’s end; atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands’ Bikini Atoll and the production of additional bombs; plans to arm Latin America with U.S. weapons; the continued production of B-29 bombers and plans to build newer B-36 bombers. All these steps, Wallace said, “make it appear either 1) that we are preparing ourselves to win the war which we regard inevitable, or 2) that we are trying to build up a predominance of force to intimidate the rest of mankind.” Although Wallace had been one of the most popular Democratic Party politicians in the country during his time as Roosevelt’s vice president, his views on military policy were clearly in the minority.30 Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign failed to pose a serious challenge to Truman, securing less than 3 percent of the national vote.

The military’s grandest plans for postwar bases were ultimately trumped by concerns about costs, demands for demilitarization, and local opposition. The calls to bring GIs home were especially difficult for the Truman administration to ignore. The government shrunk the military from over 12 million men and women in 1945 to just 1.5 million by June 1947. In the same period military spending decreased from 83 percent of federal expenditures to 38 percent.³¹

Less than a year after the war’s end, as a result of the slow pace of negotiations for base rights and “budgetary trends,” the military had reduced its desired base locations to seventy bases, with six deemed “essential”—Iceland, the Azores, Greenland, the Galápagos, Panama, and Casablanca, or the Canary Islands. By September 1947 the Joint Chiefs of Staff reduced their “requirements” to fifty-three bases.³² To the disappointment of military leaders, the nation ultimately returned about half its foreign bases after the war.³³ In the Pacific, for example, the military abandoned plans for an offshore island perimeter. Instead, to keep the Pacific an “American lake,” the military relied on key bases in Okinawa and mainland Japan, Guam, Hawaiʻi, and the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

Map 16. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1946–1949.

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. The map reflects the relative number and positioning of bases, which totaled just under six hundred, in 1949. Oceans not to scale. Key sources: Blaker, United States Overseas Basing; Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007).

Despite the significant cutbacks, U.S. leaders found a range of ways to ensure the country entrenched a “permanent institution” of bases in peacetime.34 The budget cuts may have “limited the depth of the base system,” writes Leffler, “but not the breadth of American ambitions.”³⁵ Increasingly, economic aid, diplomatic support, and military assistance became tools and incentives to acquire base rights. In response to local opposition in places including Ecuador, Denmark, Portugal, France, and Saudi Arabia, military and diplomatic officials found ways to reduce the profile of the U.S. presence and avoid the perception of an ongoing foreign occupation. In Iceland, for example, where many locals were clamoring for U.S. forces to leave, the military shrunk its forces from forty-five thousand to around one thousand personnel who could service U.S. aircraft but were barred from wearing uniforms.³⁶ In 1948 the two governments agreed on the removal of U.S. forces and the appearance of a “U.S. base” by having a civilian company run the U.S.-built Keflavik airfield. U.S. officials complained that the country had a “jealous regard for its absolute independence and sovereignty” and a “deep fear of ‘Americanization.’ ”³⁷

In the Azores U.S. officials ensured a Portuguese flag continued to fly over what the U.S. military considered a critical base. With the help of agreements signed in 1946, 1948, and 1951, Portuguese personnel ran the base in Lajes, while U.S. personnel serviced aircraft transiting between the United States and Europe, North Africa, and beyond. In French colonial Morocco U.S. Navy personnel secretly serviced aircraft at the Port Lyautey naval airfield, which officially remained under the command of the French Navy.³⁸ In Japan U.S. officials, reportedly at the suggestion of Emperor Hirohito, insisted on retaining full control of Okinawa and other small islands, such as Iwo Jima, after the end of the occupation of Japan’s main islands.³⁹ The U.S. government asserted the right to establish military facilities and to govern the islands effectively as part of the United States. Neither the new U.S.-imposed Japanese Constitution nor the U.S. Constitution applied. To avoid accusations of colonialism, U.S. officials described Japan as maintaining “residual sovereignty” over Okinawa and the other islands.⁴⁰

Elsewhere there was little effort made to disguise the U.S. presence. In the rest of Japan and in Germany, U.S. forces occupied bases under the terms of armistice agreements made with the defeated nations, although they were initially considered temporary. The military kept facilities in most of the British territories occupied under the Destroyers-for-Bases agreement and gained further access to British facilities in Ascension, Bahrain, Libya, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa. When Britain wanted to grant complete independence to India and Burma, the U.S. State Department asked its ally to maintain control of three airfields in the former and one in the latter. There were so many U.S. bases in the British isles that many began referring to Britain as the U.S. Air Force’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” (the phrase has been used to describe other hosts, from Honduras to Okinawa).

Among its own colonial possessions, the United States retained important bases in Guam, Puerto Rico, and Wake Island, as well as Guantánamo Bay. During talks that led to independence for the Philippines in 1946, U.S. negotiators threatened to withhold military assistance when Philippines government representatives opposed some U.S. basing demands. At Subic Bay Naval Base, Clark Air Base, and elsewhere, the United States effectively continued formal colonial rule, maintaining sovereignty over the city of Olongapo, adjacent to Subic Bay, as well as control over Filipino workers, criminal prosecutions, and taxation. In return the Truman administration sent limited aid and some military advisers. As in other countries, the interests of U.S. officials and Filipino elites converged; the latter wanted economic aid, access to U.S. markets, and U.S. military help repressing the Huk Rebellion.41

Diplomat George Kennan was one of the chief architects of early “Cold War” strategy. His views were typical of policy makers and other elites of the day. “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population,” Kennan wrote in a memo drafted when he was part of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. “Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.” Kennan added, “The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”42 Like most other elites, Kennan believed that the exercise of sheer military and economic power was critical to ensuring U.S. dominance globally. Guided by such beliefs, U.S. leaders entrenched a global system of military bases abroad in the first years after World War II, despite the calls to send the Yankees home coming from many allies and U.S. citizens alike.

Kennan called his policy “containment.” It quickly came to guide “national security” strategy. In the eyes of Kennan and other government officials, the aim of containment was to establish a worldwide balance of power favorable to the United States. For Kennan this meant the use of not just military force but also political, economic, and psychological power as well. Economic aid, such as the Marshall Plan, came to be a primary tool of Truman administration foreign policy in an attempt to rebuild Japan and the nations of Western Europe as strong anti-Soviet allies and markets for U.S. businesses. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other treaty organizations played an equally important political-military role as part of Kennan’s vision for a selective approach of using the military to defend key strategic strongpoints.⁴³

A set of “interlocking interests” supported this kind of expansive and expensive containment policy, Sherry explains. These interests included the military branches, military industries, and powerful individuals in both settings. All faced contraction or economic slowdown after the war. Collectively, they advocated for the maintenance of hundreds of bases abroad and a historically large military. While self-interest at bureaucratic, corporate, and individual levels continued to shape leaders’ thinking and planning, Sherry points out that policy makers’ fears did as well. “Real and frightening changes in the technology of war and the conduct of international diplomacy” meant that “the makers of postwar policy would have been derelict in their duty had they failed to incorporate those changes into their strategic thinking.”44

“Obsessed by the pattern of Axis aggrandizement” in the last war, U.S. officials “were primed to see that pattern in the activities of other nations”—namely, in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for the United States, the Soviet Union, and the world, the strategy of U.S. leaders remained, as Sherry says, “simplistic.” They “overrated the usefulness of military solutions for postwar policy problems.” They maintained a “misguided faith” in U.S. air power, nuclear weapons, and bases “to deter or check future aggressors” by failing to see how, from the Soviet perspective, their actions were threatening and encouraged the Soviets to build up their own military forces to counter the U.S. threat.⁴⁵ To this day, writes Andrew Bacevich, U.S. leadership “expects others to view US military power, the Pentagon’s global footprint, and an American penchant for intervention not as a matter of concern but as a source of comfort and reassurance.”⁴⁶ In the 1960s, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev spent time at a vacation home on the Black Sea, he would ask visiting guests what they saw. Referring to the threat just over the horizon, Khrushchev would say, “I see US missiles in Turkey, aimed at my dacha.”⁴⁷

After the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic weapon in 1949, a new iteration of the containment policy emerged with the drafting of National Security Council Report 68 of 1950 (NSC-68). The report was written in large part by Paul H. Nitze, a powerful foreign policy official whose influence would extend into the 1980s. Unlike Kennan’s strategy, NSC-68 emphasized the military aspects of containment. Instead of defending key strategic strongpoints, NSC-68 saw danger everywhere and emphasized defending the United States and the West at every point on its “perimeter.”⁴⁸

The “forward strategy,” as this policy became known, insisted that the United States maintain bases and military forces as close as possible to the Soviet Union to block any possibility of Soviet expansion or any other threat.⁴⁹ Both NSC-68 and Kennan’s containment strategy shared an almost limitless global vision of U.S. foreign policy and an aim of encircling perceived enemies with offensive nuclear and nonnuclear military power. Although there are precedents for such a policy dating to the nineteenth-century acquisition of naval and coaling stations in the Pacific, the postwar policies of Kennan and Nitze represented a shift in U.S. foreign policy. At a time when the “national security state” itself became entrenched in the fabric of U.S. life, the entrenchment of the global basing system embedded the forward strategy in the minds of policy makers, other elites, and the institutions in which they were located. The idea that the country should have a large collection of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops permanently stationed overseas became one of the most fundamental and unquestioned precepts of U.S. foreign and “national security” policy throughout the “Cold War” and beyond it as well. Members of this foreign policy establishment, as well as many others, came to treat as gospel, as common sense, the idea that bases overseas provide forward lines of defense against potential threats; allow the nation to intervene in world crises by quickly deploying military forces most anywhere on the planet; make the world and regions of the globe safer and more peaceful by maintaining global and regional balances of power; protect and promote U.S. economic and political interests; and spread democracy.

Nearly three-quarters of a century after the war, base expert Kent Calder observed that “a strong bias toward [the] forward deployment” of bases and troops remained “clearly embedded in twenty-first-century America’s political-military institutions” and even “in much of our traditional psychology.”50 The policy has been shared by both major political parties, as well as by most of the U.S. media, think tank analysts, academics, and many others. As a result, U.S. citizens “have long since become accustomed to the stationing of US troops in far-off lands,” writes Bacevich. To many “this global military presence is ostensibly essential to the definition of American freedom even in places where the actual threat is oblique or imaginary.”⁵¹

With so many bases maintained as “spoils of war” in so many places worldwide, U.S. policy makers were more likely to use them. Bases abroad became a tempting policy solution to problems that generally had no military solutions. Overseas bases appeared to provide protection, safety, and security. They appeared to hold out the promise of never having to fight a world war again. But by making it simpler to wage foreign wars, they made military action an even more attractive option among the foreign policy tools available to U.S. policy makers. As Catherine Lutz and others remind us, when all you have in your foreign policy toolbox are hammers, everything starts looking like a nail.52 Overseas installations made overseas wars not just easier but also more likely. The spoils of war came to significantly shape U.S. foreign policy.

With overseas bases framed as a pillar of U.S. security, the acquisition of new bases and the buildup of existing bases became a seemingly logical and relatively easy solution to growing U.S.-Soviet tensions and U.S. citizens’ fears. In Japan, for example, the Navy began discussing the possibility of maintaining bases there after the signing of a peace treaty and the end of the formal occupation period. When the State Department was negotiating the eventual 1951 U.S.-Japan peace treaty, John Foster Dulles, adviser to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, noted that carefully crafted language in the draft “gave the United States the right to maintain in Japan as much force as we wanted, anywhere we wanted, for as long as we wanted.”⁵³

While some officials’ broadest desires for overseas bases after World War II were stymied, a still-massive, entrenched collection of bases laid the foundation for a rapid expansion of the base network within a few years. While the Yankees actually closed their bases and left Italy (among other locations) after the signing of a peace treaty in 1947, they would return after Italy joined NATO in 1949, amid communist forces’ seizure of power in China and escalating East-West tensions. After the start of the war on the Korean peninsula in 1950, an unprecedented buildup of installations and troops followed in Italy, Germany, and other parts of Europe and Asia. Rather than going home for good, the Yankees were coming back in unprecedented numbers in “peacetime.”