12

ISLANDS OF IMPERIALISM

Stuart Barber was one of many U.S. government officials in the 1950s and 1960s who were growing concerned that decolonization would mean getting evicted from bases in newly independent countries. “Within the next 5 to 10 years,” Barber wrote as the leading figure in a Navy long-range planning office, “virtually all of Africa, and certain Middle Eastern and Far Eastern territories presently under Western control, will gain either complete independence or a high degree of autonomy.”1 The inevitable result, Barber told his superiors, would be “the withdrawal . . . denial or restriction” of U.S. and Western European military bases across the decolonizing world.² Put plainly, Barber worried that at the very least U.S. bases would face restrictions on their operations or demands for higher “rent” payments.

I learned about Barber because he was the first to suggest building a U.S. base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, the subject of my first book. Barber had been dead for years by the time I learned of him, but, given his central role in the base’s history, I tried several times, unsuccessfully, to find one of his family members. A week before my first book was due to the publisher, a research assistant, Naomi Jagers, made a breakthrough. She helped me find one of Barber’s sons, Richard, who was living in Brooklyn. It was after eight o’clock on a Friday night, but, with the impending deadline, I rushed to call.

With the sounds of dishes being washed in the background, Richard said he remembered his father talking about the base. Our phone call became the first of many conversations about Richard’s father’s contributions to the base on Diego Garcia. Over the next two days, Richard emailed several remarkable typewritten letters his father had written about the subject. I quickly incorporated the contents into my book. They were so revealing, and surprising, that the letters spawned a last-minute epilogue.

I learned that, as a child, Stuart Barber, or Stu, as he was known, had a passion for collecting the stamps of far-flung island colonies. While the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina in the South Atlantic became his favorite, Stu noticed that the Indian Ocean was dotted with many small islands claimed by Britain.3 Thirty-six years later, in 1958, Barber was working as a civilian for the Navy and drawing up lists of small, isolated colonial islands from every map, atlas, and nautical chart he could find. Barber feared that in the era of decolonization, European allies were in the process of losing their colonies (like losing stamps from a stamp collection), including many of the world’s small, strategically located islands. For the U.S. military, this would mean the loss of base access across the potentially unstable decolonizing world. At a time when the power of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc was growing relative to that of the United States and its Western European allies, this was disturbing to men such as Barber.

Barber’s answer to this perceived problem was what he called the “Strategic Island Concept”: a plan to purchase or otherwise ensure long-term access to small, strategically located colonial islands on which the U.S. military could build bases in the future whenever it so desired. The concept, and its embrace by much of the U.S. military and diplomatic bureaucracy, shows how the U.S. Empire continued to rely on imperial tools of overseas bases and military power to maintain U.S. dominance. Clearly, the Strategic Island Concept was not the only reaction to the relative decline in U.S. power during the 1950s and 1960s—there were economic, political, and other military reactions as well. But the Strategic Island Concept was an important part of a militarized response to the challenges of decolonization and the growing power of the Soviet Bloc.

While the early post–World War II period showed U.S. officials largely forsaking traditional forms of imperialism, occupation, and colonial rule in favor of indirect forms of imperial control, influence, and rule, islands proved a significant exception to this pattern. U.S. officials maintained numerous islands, most relatively small, as colonies for one reason: because the islands hosted or had the potential to host U.S. bases. Despite the transformations in empire, U.S. officials never fully abandoned traditional imperialism in the decolonization era. While large-scale colonial rule was no longer an option given the political power of the decolonization movement, U.S. leaders found a range of “underground” ways to hang on to smaller colonies and especially to islands such as Diego Garcia. In this new era, Daniel Immerwahr explains, “tiny islands . . . and other small pockets of land became the mainstays” of the U.S. Empire.4

This shouldn’t be surprising. Islands have been instruments of imperial power for centuries because of their ability to host bases to control sea lanes, guard coastlines, and protect surrounding landmasses. For more than two millennia, the leaders of empires and other powers saw Malta as the key to controlling the Mediterranean. Two hundred years before Stuart Barber, in 1769, a French lieutenant saw Diego Garcia’s strategic, military potential, given its position in the Indian Ocean and ability to safely harbor a “great number of vessels.”⁵

Since the expansion of the United States into a truly global empire during and after World War II, some of the most significant U.S. bases abroad have been on islands. To this day many have been critical to launching and sustaining U.S. wars: Iceland, Greenland, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the British Isles, Crete, and Sardinia amid “Cold War” competition; the Philippines, Guam, Japan, Okinawa, and Hawaiʻi during the wars in Korea and Southeast Asia; the Azores to resupply Israel during its 1973 war with a coalition of Arab nations; and Bahrain, Sicily, Ireland, Ascension, and Diego Garcia during the post-2001 wars. Soviet leaders also understood the importance of island bases. When the Soviet military developed a missile base in Cuba in 1962, U.S. officials reacted fearfully and aggressively. The “Cuban Missile Crisis” that followed was the most dangerous moment of the U.S.-Soviet conflict and the closest the world has come to nuclear Armageddon.

If the people of the Philippines at least got a neocolonial kind of formal independence, many other peoples wouldn’t get independence at all. Bases were the main the reason why. Hawaiʻi, for example, was on the UN decolonization committee’s list of territories that were not self-governing, given its colonial status since the overthrow of the indigenous Hawaiian Kingdom and annexation by the U.S. government. U.S. officials could not contemplate Hawaiian independence as an option; the Pearl Harbor naval base remained too important to risk losing. They gave voters two choices during a 1959 vote: statehood or continued “territorial” status. Military personnel and other settlers were allowed to vote, outnumbering indigenous Hawaiians. Alaska and Hawaiʻi became the forty-ninth and fiftieth states added to the union.6 Many indigenous Alaskans and Hawaiians still consider themselves colonized.

Government officials also maintained bases in the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific, where the United States had de facto sovereignty over hundreds of small islands, including base-construction rights. The U.S. military wasted little time before taking advantage. Beginning in 1946, the Bikini Atoll and other atolls in the Marshall Islands became U.S. nuclear weapons test sites. The Marshalls’ Kwajalein Atoll saw a growing base and missile-testing infrastructure.

In parts of occupied Japan, the question of whether occupation would be temporary or permanent was unclear for decades. When the occupation of Japan ended in 1952, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and other small Japanese islands remained de facto U.S. colonies.⁷ This arrangement was politically palatable to Japanese leaders because concentrating U.S. bases and troops on islands previously colonized by Japan meant reducing the U.S. military’s impact on the main Japanese islands. The U.S. ambassador to Japan openly called Okinawa “a colony of one million Japanese.”⁸ Some U.S. military officials argued for holding on to Okinawa permanently.

In Okinawa neither the new (U.S.-imposed) Constitution of Japan nor the Constitution of the United States applied. The occupation government required Okinawans to obtain a U.S.-issued travel pass to visit Japan and controlled the movement of Japanese visitors to Okinawa. By the mid-1950s the military had seized more than 40 percent of Okinawa’s farmland and displaced a similar proportion of its people.⁹ A Navy officer would later say to high-ranking Pentagon official Morton Halperin, “The military doesn’t have bases in Okinawa. The island itself is the base.”10

U.S. leaders continued to support fading European empires in holding on to some of their last colonies, in no small part to maintain bases and base access. Among the colonies of the United Kingdom, the military kept bases in the Destroyers-for-Bases islands, including Bermuda, Trinidad, Newfoundland, and the Bahamas; on Ascension Island, off the east coast of Africa; and in Bahrain and Libya. Additional installations and access could be found in Danish Greenland and the French colonies of Morocco and Réunion.¹¹ In Portugal U.S. officials’ desire to hold on to bases in the Azores meant that a succession of presidential administrations helped keep one of Europe’s last dictators in power until 1974, thus helping keep the peoples of Angola, Mozambique, and Cape Verde colonized.¹²

Most postwar decolonization movements were opposed to the presence of foreign military facilities after independence, given fears about bases perpetuating forms of neocolonialism. As a result, U.S. officials grew increasingly fearful that they were losing control of the world. These fears reflected a decline in the relative supremacy of the United States. Despite unparalleled U.S. power at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had acquired its own nuclear arsenal, rebuilt from the ravages of war, and become another global superpower. China was emerging as a regional competitor. With the decolonization movement gaining momentum, Britain, France, and other Western European nations were clearly in their last days of empire. In the confrontation between East and West, the alignment of newly independent nations was up for grabs. A perception was building that many of the new nations and the world were tilting toward the East. In reality, the erosion of U.S. power and influence was less significant than it was in perception. U.S. military and economic power remained unparalleled. Soviet military strength was often exaggerated by U.S. politicians and military leaders for political and economic purposes. Still, the perception of decline, of supremacy challenged, was significant among some U.S. officials. Stuart Barber’s solution to this perceived threat of losing bases and global control had its roots in the days when he was collecting stamps from the world’s small colonial islands.13

According to Barber’s Strategic Island Concept, the Navy needed to ensure it would have bases without the kind of “political complications” that might lead to eviction in the decolonizing world. Traditional base sites located in populous mainland areas would likely face local protest and opposition. Instead, Barber thought, “only relatively small, lightly populated islands, separated from major population masses, could be safely held under full control of the West.”¹⁴ Having island bases near hotspots in the so-called Third World, he argued, would increase the nation’s ability to rapidly deploy military force wherever and whenever officials pleased. Island bases would help maintain U.S. dominance for decades to come. But if the United States wanted to protect its “future freedom of military action,” government officials would have to act fast to “stockpile” future basing rights by buying or otherwise ensuring that Western allies maintained sovereignty over as many small, little-noticed colonial islands as possible. Otherwise, the islands could be lost to decolonization forever.¹⁵

After considering hundreds of possibilities from the Galápagos in the Atlantic to the Marshalls in the Pacific, Barber remembered those small British-controlled islands in the Indian Ocean that he noticed as a child. There, Barber later recounted, he found “that beautiful atoll of Diego Garcia, right in the middle of the ocean.”¹⁶ The island was isolated but within striking distance of a wide swath of the globe, from southern Africa to the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia. There was enough room for a runway, and the lagoon would be perfect to host entire naval strike forces. Plus, Barber noted, Diego Garcia had “unquestioned UK sovereignty” and a population “measured only in the hundreds.”¹⁷

Barber’s numbers were not entirely correct. There were around 1,000 people on Diego Garcia alone in the 1960s. With the other islands of the surrounding British-controlled Chagos Archipelago, the population numbered between 1,500 and 2,000. The people were then called Ilois—the Islanders. Now called Chagossians, they were the descendants of enslaved African and indentured Indian laborers who had been living in Chagos since around the time of the American Revolution.¹⁸

Others in the “national security bureaucracy”—who were almost without exception considered white and of Euro-American ancestry—embraced Barber’s idea and the selection of Diego Garcia as the most important target for acquisition. Navy officials approached their British counterparts in 1960 and began secret negotiations for the Chagos Islands. U.S. negotiators emphasized that they wanted Diego Garcia, as they wrote in a secret memo, under their “exclusive control (without local inhabitants).”19 Officials wanted the Chagossians gone. Or, as another document said more forthrightly, they wanted the islands “swept” and “sanitized.”²⁰ British officials agreed to the plan. Under a secret 1966 agreement, the Pentagon transferred $14 million to the British military without telling Congress or Parliament. In exchange Britain provided basing rights and promised to carry out the removal of the Chagossians.²¹

When the Navy asked Congress for base-construction funds, officials said Diego Garcia’s population was “negligible . . . for all practical purposes . . . uninhabited.”²² U.S. and British officials had agreed to, as one document explains, “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population.” A British diplomat was blunt: “We are able to make up the rules as we go along.” If anyone bothered to ask, they would call the Chagossians a “floating population” of “transient contract workers” with no connection to the islands.²³

Navy and Pentagon officials told Congress that the base would be an “austere communications facility.” They knew this was what Congress members wanted to hear. Facing concerns about military spending during the war in Vietnam, the Navy’s Office of Communications and Cryptology admitted, “The communications requirements cited as justification [for funding] are fiction.”²⁴ The Navy was really asking for the nucleus of a base that could be expanded rapidly with already planned future budget requests.²⁵

The Strategic Island Concept revolved around a realization that despite overseas bases’ advantages, they involve significant risks. Especially in the decolonization era, bases abroad faced the risks of local protest, operational restrictions, rent demands by host governments, and eviction from strategic locations where large sums had been invested.²⁶ With the Chagossians deported, military planners were thrilled at the idea of a base with no civilian population within almost five hundred miles. Given the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom, the U.S. military would have near carte blanche (pun intended, given the racism underlying the U.S.-U.K. plan). With any British role reduced to a few token functionaries and the right to be consulted before major U.S. deployment shifts, Diego Garcia definitively became a U.S. base and practically became U.S. sovereign territory (the island is, along with Gibraltar, the only place in the United Kingdom where cars drive on the right side of the road). With the British doing the dirty work of the expulsion for just $14 million, the United States would also have the legal and political alibi that Great Britain was the sovereign and thus responsible for the local population. U.S. officials saw Diego Garcia as almost the perfect base. With near free rein over an idyllic and strategically located atoll, it’s no wonder the Navy calls Diego Garcia “Fantasy Island.”27

The history of Diego Garcia shows that much of the “national security bureaucracy” adopted Barber’s Strategic Island Concept as an important strategic framework. At the request of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Navy made plans for scores of strategic island bases around the globe. Ultimately, the costs of the wars in Southeast Asia meant that Diego Garcia was the only major base formally created under Barber’s concept. Still, the strategy became an important argument for the retention and expansion of major preexisting island bases, including those in Guam, Micronesia, Ascension, Bahrain, the Azores, Okinawa, and Japan’s Ogasawara Islands.

The U.S. government finally returned Okinawa and Ogasawara to formal Japanese sovereignty in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The United States used this as an opportunity to move even more bases to Okinawa after the prefecture’s 1972 “reversion” to Japan. Although Okinawa makes up just 0.6 percent of Japan’s land area, it is now home to around 75 percent of all the military installations in Japan used exclusively by U.S. forces—more than thirty bases altogether. U.S. bases take up almost 20 percent of the main Okinawa island today, in addition to expansive sea and airspace for training. Many Okinawans feel occupation never ended.²⁸

After the Philippines’ independence and Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood, the remaining U.S. colonies were also “Fantasy Islands” for the military. The U.S. government maintained Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Wake, Midway, and Johnston Islands, as well as smaller uninhabited islands under its control. U.S. officials may have called them “territories,” but these islands remained in a colonial relationship with the rest of the United States. Guantánamo Bay and the Panama Canal Zone also remained de facto colonies.

Map 18. Islands of Imperialism.

While U.S. leaders have generally favored indirect imperial control since World War II, islands have been a prominent exception because of their ability to host some of the most significant U.S. bases abroad. The Strategic Island Concept formalized this strategy. Oceans not to scale. Source: R. Johnson to Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy Archives, 2–3.

The colonies show how the U.S. Empire has relied on the perpetuation of colonial relationships under new guises and with new vocabulary. From the perspective of the military and the rest of the government, maintaining a colonial relationship with the “territories” offers unmatched military autonomy. In recent years Maj. Gen. Dennis Larsen told a reporter at Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base that the military need not worry about local protest, operational restrictions, or the fear of eviction, as it must at bases in other sovereign countries. “This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific,” Larsen said. “Guam is a U.S. territory. We can do what we want here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out.”29

The military also has more freedom than it does in the fifty U.S. states because the colonies have few democratic rights, including no voting representation in Congress and no presidential vote. With voting members of Congress, governors, and the full weight of U.S. law, states have power the colonies don’t have to monitor and restrict military operations. “If California says they want to do this or that,” one blunt Air Force officer explained, “it is like my wife saying that she wants to move here or there: I’ll have to respect her wish and at least discuss it with her. If Guam says they want to do this or that, it is as if this cup here,” he said, pointing to his coffee mug, “expresses a wish: the answer will be, you belong to me, and I can do with you as best I please.” The officer explained, “They are a possession, and not an equal partner.”³⁰

The fantasy-like ability to have near-total control and operational freedom in the U.S. colonies and in a few other places held by close U.S. allies helped accelerate a shift of bases from locations near crowded population centers to isolated locations insulated from any potentially antagonistic locals. (More than half a century later, this model can be seen in today’s “lily pad” basing strategy, creating isolated bases protected from protest.)³¹ Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept were part of the continued development of a new, more discreet form of empire, relying increasingly on isolated, often island bases to exert power.

Beyond bases on islands, all foreign bases have become islands of imperialism in the post–World War II era. No matter where they’re located, bases abroad are islands of extraterritorial rule, enclaves of exceptionality, “specks of semi-sovereignty.”32 Even in largely democratic countries, U.S. officials have used bases as levers of power and sources of control over hosts. Increasingly, U.S. leaders have used bases and troops abroad “to influence and limit the political, diplomatic, and economic initiatives of host nations,” explains Joseph Gerson.³³

The Philippines—perhaps the most prominent example of the United States publicly forsaking empire after World War II—illustrates how U.S. leaders used bases, combined with other political, economic, and military tools, to keep nations in various kinds of colonial relationships with the United States. U.S. officials used military, economic, and political assistance to extract not only base access from the Philippines government but also favorable terms of trade, and exert ongoing political influence.³⁴ The Bell Trade Act of 1946, for example, “required that the newly ‘independent’ Philippines grant the United States preferential tariffs and Americans ‘parity rights’ in the exploitation of Philippine natural resources.”³⁵ U.S. leaders “heralded Philippine independence as a sign of [the United States’] benevolent, anti-imperial credentials,” writes historian Gretchen Heefner, while they “essentially tied the islands to the United States as a quasi-military colony.”³⁶ Much like Cuba after 1898, the Philippines remained (and remains to a great extent) politically, economically, and militarily dependent on the United States.

U.S. officials in the decolonization era thus never abandoned traditional forms of imperial and colonial rule. There were significant changes in empire, such as the degree to which negotiation and political-economic forms of imperialism became important features of the U.S. Empire after World War II. Nonetheless, the treatment assigned to the exiled Chagossians and to other similarly vulnerable peoples shows how maintaining colonies and what can only be described as the colonial treatment of the colonized have remained fundamental parts of the U.S. Empire and its expanding global base network. For the Chagossians and others, the effects have often been catastrophic. Few, however, have accepted their fates passively. Many, including the Chagossians, are resisting to this day.