15

DID THE “COLD WAR” END?

Andrew “Andy” Hoehn was a leading Pentagon strategist in the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Toward the end of his tenure in the Pentagon, he was responsible for reviewing and repositioning U.S. bases worldwide. When we met, Hoehn was a senior vice president at the RAND Corporation, the powerful government-funded think tank a short walk from the Pentagon in northern Virginia. A squeeze ball in the shape of planet Earth sat next to his computer. Hoehn said that, despite what one might have expected after the end of the “Cold War,” there wasn’t a major change in the global base collection. “We shrank in place. But we really didn’t reposition,” he said. There was “a lot of hedging at that moment.”1

The end of the “Cold War” meant significant reductions in the size of U.S. military deployments worldwide, but the underlying base structure changed little. Beginning in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the world changed radically. Globally, hundreds of foreign bases belonging to several nations closed and tens of thousands of foreign troops returned home. Soviet troops began leaving Eastern Europe. The dissolution of the United States’ only imperial competitor led to the end of many of the world’s civil wars, including those in Afghanistan and Central America. By 1995 Russia removed former Soviet forces from the former East Germany. Britain and the other occupying nations withdrew many, but not all, of their forces from the reunified Germany. In the first half of the 1990s, the U.S. government returned or closed around 60 percent of its foreign bases worldwide and brought almost three hundred thousand troops back to the United States. Hundreds of domestic bases also closed.2 Between 1991 and 1995 the U.S. military returned tens of thousands of acres of land to the German government alone.³

But U.S. base and troop reductions stopped. In Germany hundreds of bases and around fifty thousand U.S. troops remained despite the disappearance of the Eastern Bloc. Worldwide the U.S. military continued to deploy over two hundred thousand troops outside the fifty states and Washington, DC. Total forces declined from just over 2 million in 1990 to no lower than 1.38 million in the decade that followed.⁴ The U.S. Congress and Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton presided over large cuts to military spending. Still, U.S. military spending remained prodigious relative to the rest of the federal budget and the rest of the world. In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, the U.S. military represented 26 percent of federal spending. By 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected, military spending was 21 percent of the federal budget. By 2000, Clinton’s last year in office, military spending had declined to 16 percent.⁵ (These percentages were significantly higher each year if you include spending on nuclear weapons and veterans, the CIA, and military expenditures by other government agencies.) After the reductions, the United States still had nearly 1.5 million troops under arms and more than seven hundred bases abroad, plus thousands of additional installations in the fifty states and Washington, DC. The number of troops in China’s military exceeded the U.S. total, but, by every other indicator, the U.S. military operated on a scale and with a war-making capacity far beyond all other nations.⁶

Despite the disappearance of the Soviet Empire, writes historian Joshua Freeman, “the American military empire remained gigantic.” U.S. leaders continued to act “on a set of assumptions about the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world that did not radically differ from prior administrations and still owed a great deal to the Cold War.”⁷ The “givens” of post–World War II foreign policy, including the forward strategy, remained unquestioned.

I asked Hoehn why he thought there was, relatively speaking, little change after the end of the “Cold War.” “There’s this funny phenomenon called habit, and a lot of this was habitual. And,” Hoehn added,

there were important voices in the American community that didn’t want to leave. It was comfortable. . . . It was comfortable for a young soldier or airman to move to Europe. Culturally, it was a fairly easy transition. There wasn’t a lot of tension in that relationship. In fact, there were a lot of benefits, in terms of living abroad: comfortable life, nice facilities—it was exciting. There were a lot of reasons of habit that led us to that and why people didn’t necessarily want to change. Habit. I think it was habit.

The habit and comfort of U.S. military personnel were part of why the overseas basing structure and military spending levels remained relatively unchanged. But some of the habit ran deeper. Some of the habit lay in the deeply held belief that bases abroad advance the economic interests of U.S. corporations and investors. In 1997 and 1998 Clinton administration Pentagon Secretary William S. Cohen talked frequently about the military’s post–“Cold War” mission. The strategy, said Cohen, was “to shape the environment” and “events that will affect our livelihood and our security.”8

“How do we do that?” Cohen asked. “We have to be forward deployed.” He left no room for debate: “We’re going to keep 100,000 people in the Asia Pacific region, so that’s off the table; and we’re going to keep 100,000 people in Europe [so] that’s off the table. We have to be forward deployed . . . to shape people’s opinions about us in ways that are favorable to us.” In using the collective “us,” Cohen made the long-standing conflation of U.S. corporate and elite interests with the interests of all U.S. citizens. Forward deployment, Cohen and other elites believed, was essential to advancing U.S. business interests overseas.

At the same time, some of the habit stemmed from decades of habitually huge military spending. After World War II, military spending became, as Catherine Lutz explains, the country’s “largest public works project.”⁹ Whereas other wealthy nations created welfare states after the war to provide an array of health care, education, and other services to their citizens, U.S. leaders created a “permanent war economy,” or, as some have called it, a “warfare state.”¹⁰

Map 22. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1990–2000.

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. Some bases were occupied for only part of this period. Approximately 60 percent of bases abroad closed after the end of the “Cold War.” Oceans not to scale. Key sources: Base Structure Report: Fiscal Year 2001 Baseline (A Summary of DoD’s Real Property Inventory) (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2001); Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007); Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018); David Vine, “Lists of U.S. Military Bases Abroad, 1776–2020,” American University Digital Research Archive, April 27, 2020, https://doi.org/10.17606/bbxc-4368.

During World War II the U.S. government turned on a faucet of military spending unlike any the world had ever seen. Spending dropped after the war, but shutting off the faucet was difficult. When the government turned the faucet up higher during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, shutting it off became harder still. By this point years of funding a Military Industrial Congressional Complex had become ingrained in the economic and political life of the country. It had also become ingrained in the thinking of the country’s people. Most significant, it had become ingrained in the thinking of members of Congress, military leaders, military contractors and their lobbyists, foreign policy pundits, and others who disproportionately influenced military spending and policy.

“The American military system had become its own reason for being,” writes Freeman. “The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned about remained an important influence on government policy and spending priorities. Having been in place for a half century or more, the defense industries, intelligence agencies, secret weapons systems, massive army, widespread overseas deployment of military personnel, web of military alliances, and economic burden of maintaining global military superiority were taken for granted by most Americans and [were] rarely the subject of serious debate. The majority of the population had never known a time when the United States was not mobilized for war.”11 The U.S. Empire rolled on, unchecked. Before the end of the 1990s, the military would start building new bases. The imperial expansion would be even larger in the years that followed.

Central America was one of the regions where U.S. troops remained, despite the end of the region’s civil wars. Many inside and outside the government agreed that there was little reason to keep the main base in Honduras, Soto Cano, open. Among those calling for the base’s closure were members of Congress, the Government Accounting Office (GAO), and many U.S. military and diplomatic officials. The GAO found that, beyond being unnecessary, Soto Cano’s continued existence was counterproductive to U.S. policy. The GAO recommended closing the base.¹² A study supported by the military’s National Defense University agreed. It concluded that the base “does not have a significant impact on regional stability, is potentially a political problem between [the] US and Honduran governments, and unnecessarily costs the US taxpayer millions of dollars.”13

Soto Cano didn’t close. Overall U.S. military spending in Honduras declined significantly, but military activities and “exercises were continuing through sheer bureaucratic inertia,” one former Army and Foreign Service officer explains. “Even though the original rationale for the base was disappearing, no one seemed to be considering packing up and going home.”¹⁴ The seeming permanence of the “temporary” base wasn’t just the result of the bureaucratic inertia identified by the Senate investigation two decades prior. High-ranking military officials made concerted efforts to create new missions and justifications for the supposedly temporary base and for the military’s entire Southern Command. Without the “Cold War,” the combatant command responsible for patrolling Latin America had found itself marginalized and with little to do. Southcom (in military lingo) discovered its salvation in disaster and drugs.¹⁵

The first opportunity came in 1998 in response to damage caused by a major hurricane in, of all places, Nicaragua. The command coordinated a $30 million relief effort for its former enemy and used the opportunity to expand its operations in the region. The following year the command used the closing of bases in Panama as a pretext to set up four new U.S. air bases in Ecuador, El Salvador, and the Dutch colonies of Aruba and Curaçao. The “war on drugs” provided an even more successful public rationale for broadening U.S. military activities in Latin America. By the end of the 1990s, Southcom saw its budget expand more than any of the other regional commands.¹⁶

Early in the new century, the U.S. military again would be building bases and expanding its presence in Honduras, for the first time since the end of Central America’s civil wars. Shortly after the start of the George W. Bush/Richard Cheney administration, the U.S. government began spending tens of millions to upgrade Soto Cano, to build or expand at least five small bases along Honduras’s violent northern coast, and to fund the Honduran armed forces and national police.¹⁷ In 2009 Soto Cano was the refueling point when the Honduran military launched a coup, kidnapping President Manuel Zelaya and sending him into exile. By 2012 the Pentagon would spend a record $67.4 million on military contracts in Honduras and authorize a remarkable $1.3 billion in military electronics exports to the country, among other spending.18 The Pentagon and State Department describe these developments and the U.S. military presence in Honduras as promoting Honduran, U.S., and regional security through counternarcotics, disaster relief, and humanitarian missions. There’s little evidence of success.¹⁹

If it had been entirely up to many locals, U.S. troops, U.S. bases, and other foreign troops would have gone home. U.S. installations remained controversial in most of the world through the end of the “Cold War.” Protests in Okinawa continued amid ongoing crimes and accidents involving military personnel. In Turkey U.S. bases were the source of intense national controversy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, prompting protests drawing thousands, strikes by base employees, extremist bombings and kidnappings, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from all but two bases in 1975.²⁰ Elsewhere in these turbulent decades, the U.S. military was forced to vacate bases in countries including Trinidad and Tobago, Libya, Taiwan, Ethiopia, Morocco, and France.²¹

During the 1980s the deployment of U.S. nuclear-tipped cruise missiles in Europe gave birth to a large and vibrant antinuclear movement. A Women’s Peace Camp grew at the U.S. base in Greenham Common, England. Starting in 1981 and continuing for two decades, women regularly blocked the base’s gates, slowed military operations, and cut through the fence line to interrupt military exercises. Tens of thousands of women, supported by men, participated in protests.²² In Madrid, Rota, and Zaragoza, Spain, movements helped push the national government to negotiate for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Zaragoza and Madrid’s Torrejón suburb.²³ The removal of Soviet bases and troops from Afghanistan, Mongolia, the former East Germany, and Eastern Europe inspired yet more activists to call for the closure of U.S. bases in their countries.²⁴

Within a few months of the official dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, an antibase movement in the Philippines forced the former colonial ruler to leave the country and the two largest U.S. bases overseas, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. The country’s new constitution banned foreign military bases. By decade’s end the military would be forced to vacate its bases in the Panama Canal Zone, as part of the termination of the canal treaty. First, however, U.S. forces would launch an invasion of their host.

Just over a month after residents of East and West Germany were allowed to cross the wall that had divided their city for almost thirty years, around 26,000 U.S. troops invaded Panama from bases in the Canal Zone and the United States. The U.S. invasion quickly forced the small Panama Defense Force to surrender and captured Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. U.S. leaders accused Noriega of involvement in drug trafficking, among other sins. Not long before, Noriega was working for the CIA to support the Contras and target Salvadoran leftist guerillas. The fighting caused the deaths of more than 300 Panamanian forces and more than 200 unarmed civilians, wounding thousands more. U.S. forces suffered 26 deaths and 325 wounded.25

Within a year U.S. forces were again deploying, this time to the Middle East. U.S. soldiers were the first to arrive in Saudi Arabia six days after Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army invaded and overwhelmed Kuwait. Seven days later prepositioning ships, usually anchored in Diego Garcia’s lagoon, arrived in Saudi Arabia to outfit fifteen thousand marines flown to the country from California. The prepositioning ships brought 123 M-60 battle tanks, 425 heavy weapons, 124 fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, and enough fuel, ammunition, water, food, and other supplies to support the marines for thirty days. Another brigade of fifteen thousand marines soon met up with weaponry and supplies stored in prepositioning ships deploying from Guam.²⁶ In total, hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied troops arrived in Saudi Arabia from bases in Turkey, Qatar, Diego Garcia, Germany, the United States, and beyond. The 1991 war against Iraqi autocrat and former U.S. ally Hussein lasted forty-two days. More than 20,000 Iraqi troops lost their lives, with more than 50,000 wounded or captured. Thousands of Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians died. U.S. troops and their allies suffered 247 battle deaths.²⁷

Before the decade ended, U.S. forces would fight again, in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. During interventions led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the former Yugoslavia, the Pentagon built up a significant base infrastructure. The largest, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, covered 955 acres. It included two gyms, two movie theaters, extensive dining and entertainment facilities, coffee bars, and a PX for shopping. By contrast, military personnel from other NATO countries lived in existing apartments and factories.28 To a degree far exceeding those of past conflicts, the military used private contractors to build, supply, and maintain U.S. forces. Contractor Brown and Root, above all, built Camp Bondsteel and thirty-three other bases for the Pentagon. Brown and Root (later known as KBR) was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company headed by former Pentagon secretary and future vice president Dick Cheney. In total, during operations in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the Balkans, Brown and Root received more than $2 billion in base support and logistics contracts for construction and maintenance, food services, waste removal, water production, transportation services, and more.²⁹

Map 23. Protests and Evictions at U.S. Bases Abroad, 1950–2020.

Local social movements and national governments have forced the closure or blocked the creation of bases worldwide. Antibase protests represent particularly large and prominent contemporary examples. Oceans not to scale. Key sources: Cooley, Base Politics; Catherine Lutz, ed., Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Stacie L. Pettyjohn and Jennifer Kavanagh, Access Granted: Political Challenges to the U.S. Overseas Military Presence, 1945–2014 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016); David Vine, “Social Movements Related to U.S. Foreign Military Bases Crowdsourced List,” Google Sheet spreadsheet, accessed March 1, 2020, https://bit.ly/2CUMcUg.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. forces continued to patrol the skies of Iraq to enforce a “no-fly zone” preventing Iraqi aircraft from attacking Shiʿa and Kurds opposed to the Hussein regime. The no-fly zone coupled with sanctions imposed on the country effectively maintained a state of war. By 2020 the U.S. military had been bombing Iraq for twenty-nine consecutive years.³⁰ Throughout the region the military dramatically expanded its presence. Thousands of troops and an expanded base infrastructure remained in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Elsewhere in the Gulf, the military expanded its naval presence at a former British base in Bahrain, which became the headquarters for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The Air Force built major installations in Qatar. Other U.S. installations expanded in the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

The buildup in Saudi Arabia caused particular ire. In 1996 militants bombed Khobar Towers, an Air Force housing complex near the first prominent U.S. base in the country, Dhahran, built with the help of Mohammed bin Laden’s construction firm. Nineteen Air Force personnel died and hundreds more were wounded in the bombing. Attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa and on the USS Cole in Yemen followed. Investigators linked the four attacks to Mohammed bin Laden’s son Osama and al-Qaeda.

The maintenance of U.S. bases and troops in the Muslim Holy Land proved to be a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. Saudi-born Bin Laden repeatedly railed against the presence of non-Muslim U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. He called their presence “the greatest of these aggressions incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet.”31 Subsequent research has suggested that U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East have been a “major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization,” at least since a suicide bombing killed 241 U.S. marines in Lebanon in 1983. Other research indicates a strong correlation between a U.S. basing presence and al-Qaeda recruitment.³²

When al-Qaeda operatives downed four airliners and destroyed the World Trade Center towers and part of the Pentagon, killing around three thousand, the U.S. government could have responded in many ways. The Bush/Cheney administration, supported by Congress, could have pursued the perpetrators of the attacks as criminals and responded with criminal-justice and intelligence tools. The U.S. government responded this way to other terrorist attacks, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Other governments had done much the same. Research shows that responses to terrorist acts based in policing and intelligence gathering are more successful than war-based approaches. Surveying cases globally, Matthew Evangelista finds that approaches treating terrorist acts as crimes rather than war “are likely to be more successful, because they avoid the backlash that can breed further terrorism.”³³

The Bush/Cheney administration chose war. The administration went further to declare a “global war on terrorism.” Bush described the war as a “crusade,” inflaming radicals and angering many in the Islamic world. The administration launched an invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and quickly began planning another war in Iraq. The people and governments of both countries had no involvement in al-Qaeda’s attacks (which were carried out by Saudis and Egyptians). The only connection was that the Taliban government had allowed al-Qaeda to maintain training bases in remote parts of Afghanistan.

U.S. and allied forces invaded Afghanistan from bases in Diego Garcia, Oman, Pakistan, and other parts of central Asia, as well as with special operations and CIA teams on the ground, long-distance bombers flying from the United States, and jets based on five aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. By November 2001 the U.S. military was establishing major bases in Afghanistan and occupying Afghan and former Soviet bases. With the help of allied Afghan forces, the U.S. government soon completed the removal of the Taliban from power.34

The invasion and fighting that overthrew the Taliban government inflicted new damage on a country that already had been torn apart by more than twenty years of near-continuous war. The new war left roads pockmarked, bridges destroyed, and the land scattered with unexploded ordnance in a country with more landmines per square mile than any other in the world.³⁵ Civilian casualties were widespread. In one of the worst incidents, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers repeatedly bombed a wedding party (possibly as a result of bad intelligence). According to a British media report, the attacks “vapourised” five buildings as well as rescuers who arrived to dig through the rubble an hour after the first bombs hit. The bombing killed 110 people at the wedding, leaving only 2 survivors.³⁶ A reporter for London’s Guardian newspaper found forty-foot craters, scraps of human flesh, and “bloodied children’s shoes and skirts, bloodied school books, the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair, butter toffees in red wrappers, wedding decorations.”³⁷

In a small, brightly lit hospital in northern Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, the metallic clanking of gurneys rang out as doctors and nurses wheeled in the wounded from another attack early in the war. The high-pitched screams and heaving wails of children filled the room. In one corner a man sat against the surgical center’s stark white wall, cradling a child in his arms. Thick white bandages were wrapped around the whole of the child’s head. His face was marked with dark shrapnel wounds. “It was an aircraft,” the man said. “They’ve hit the people. The people.”³⁸

Doctors were scrubbing their hands and arms at sinks and tying green surgical masks on their faces. “Give me just a small dressing,” said one doctor. The doctor laid his hand carefully on the chest of a boy no more than six years old. Staff wiped soot and debris from the face and hair of another crying child, bearing a bandaged head and an intravenous line. A woman sat with an improvised white head covering balanced tenuously on her tangled hair, holding up an exposed arm pocked with shrapnel marks. Several staff members held another scared child on his side as they shaved his head to expose a shrapnel wound for treatment.

“Was it a rocket?” someone asked a man lying on a gurney. On his thin, bare chest, staff had penned the number 2.

“Bomb,” he replied, before saying quickly, “Air force, air force, air force. The American air force. . . . My mother died,” he said, slowly now. The cries of children and adults and the rapid chatter of hospital staff filled the room. “Alikhan’s mother died. . . . My father died. . . . My brother . . . ,” he said, as he looked toward the ceiling, his eyes filling with tears.39

For members of the Bush/Cheney administration and their supporters in the Republican and Democratic Parties, the media, and other segments of the United States, the choice to go to war was a relatively easy one. The choice was an easy one in part because the United States had been building a permanent infrastructure of bases in the Greater Middle East for more than half a century. The buildup of U.S. bases in the Greater Middle East began in World War II and the early days of the “Cold War,” continued with the development of Diego Garcia, accelerated dramatically following President Jimmy Carter’s enunciation of the Carter Doctrine, and expanded significantly after the “Cold War” ended.

A Congressional Research Service report presciently pointed out in 1979 that “essentially, Diego Garcia makes periodic military operations in the . . . Arabian Sea more convenient.”⁴⁰ This was just one base. By 2001, the existence of an entire network of U.S. bases in the Middle East, coupled with bases in Europe and East Asia, made it look easy to wage war far from home. Prominent neoconservative and Pentagon adviser Ken Adelman infamously predicted in 2002 that “demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”⁴¹ In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush/Cheney administration proved profoundly unprepared for what followed the initial invasions. Two subsequent administrations, led by presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, have fared little better. The outcome of these wars for the Greater Middle East, for the United States, and for the world has been so catastrophic that there’s no way to describe the horror of the situation.