a When discussing American Indian/Native American/indigenous nations and peoples, I try to use the name(s) and spelling(s) most commonly used by the group itself, historically and today.
1. Noweasels, “IGTNT: Remember Them,” Daily Kos, June 27, 2010, www.dailykos.com/story/2010/06/27/879698/-IGTNT-Remember-them#. Details about Madden and his family come from interviews and phone conversations with Peggy Madden Davitt, Mike Davitt, and other family and friends of Russell Madden, Newport, KY, from 2012 to 2015.
2. Dan Blottenberger, “Soldier Killed in Afghanistan Remembered at Schweinfurt Ceremony,” Stars and Stripes, June 30, 2010, www.stripes.com/news/europe/germany/soldier-killed-in-afghanistan-remembered-at-schweinfurt-ceremony-1.109317; Scott Wartman, “Bellevue Buries a Fallen Son,” Kentucky Enquirer, July 9, 2010, A1; “Remembering Russell Madden,” Facebook, accessed February 18, 2020, www.facebook.com/pages/Remembering-Russell-Madden/124071937634665?ref=search.
3. These details come from Russell Madden’s official U.S. Army autopsy report.
4. The countries are Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Uganda, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, the Central African Republic, Syria, Kenya, Cameroon, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia. Stephanie Savell and 5W Infographics, “This Map Shows Where in the World the U.S. Military Is Combatting Terrorism,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 2019, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/map-shows-places-world-where-us-military-operates-180970997/.
5. Nick Turse, “The U.S. Military Is Winning. No, Really, It Is!,” TomDispatch, September 4, 2018, www.tomdispatch.com/post/176463/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_victory_in_our_time; Andrew J. Bacevich, “Prisoners of War: Bob Woodward and All the President’s Men (2010 Edition),” TomDispatch, September 26, 2010, www.tomdispatch.com/post/175300/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich,_the_washington_gossip_machine__/.
6. Aspen Institute, “Central Command: At the Center of the Action,” Aspen Security Forum 2016, July 28, 2016, https://aspensecurityforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/central-command-at-the-center-of-the-action.pdf.
7. Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018). My list corrects for omissions, including wars with Native American nations, warfare in Canada in 1812–14, some Latin American invasions, recent combat in Africa, and the Greek civil war, when US officials were arming and directing the operations of Greek forces. I exclude evacuations, embassy deployments, humanitarian activities not involving combat, and deployments supporting military operations in third countries. The years without a war or invasion are 1796, 1797, 1897, 1935–40, 1977, and 1979. I date the U.S. war in Vietnam to the withdrawal of French military forces in 1955; without this early start date, one could count a total of fifteen years in U.S. history without war or military invasion by including 1957 and 1959–61. On the other hand, some would say there have been no years or almost no years without a military confrontation. Thank you to Monica Toft, Sidita Kushi, and Anna Ronnell for welcoming me at Tufts University’s Center for Strategic Studies and for generously sharing and comparing data from your important Military Intervention Project.
8. Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 28.
9. Peter Carlson, “Raiding the Icebox: Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada,” Washington Post, December 30, 2005, C1.
10. “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” Congressional Research Service, September 24, 2019, 1–3, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf; “Revolutionary War Facts,” American Revolutionary War, 1775 to 1783, accessed February 16, 2020, https://revolutionarywar.us/facts/. For a list of sources, see Matthew White, “Statistics of Wars, Oppressions and Atrocities of the Eighteenth Century (the 1700s),” Necrometrics, accessed February 16, 2020, https://necrometrics.com/wars18c.htm. Although they are often left out of U.S. death statistics for World War II (typically listed at around 405,000), more than 1.1 million Filipino soldiers and civilians died in the war when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony. See Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 212.
11. “US and Allied Killed and Wounded,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, January 2020, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military; Neta C. Crawford and Catherine Lutz, “Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars: Direct War Deaths in Major War Zones, Afghanistan and Pakistan (October 2001–October 2019); Iraq (March 2003–October 2019); Syria (September 2014–October 2019); Yemen (October 2002–October 2019); and Other,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, November 13, 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/Direct%20War%20Deaths%20COW%20Estimate%20November%2013%202019%20FINAL.pdf.
12. “US and Allied Killed.”
13. Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: Harper, 2018), 8; Will Dunham, “Deaths in Vietnam, Other Wars Undercounted: Study,” Reuters, June 19, 2008, www.reuters.com/article/us-war-deaths/deaths-in-vietnam-other-wars-undercounted-study-idUSN1928547620080619.
14. Crawford and Lutz, “Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars.”
15. I expect to publish more precise estimates of deaths and displacement before this book is published. I will post links at https://davidvine.net. According to the Geneva Declaration’s study of recent wars, there will be at least three and as many as fifteen “indirect deaths” for every direct combat death. This means the total human death toll in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen could range between 3 million and 12.8 million. The study suggests that a ratio of four to one is a reasonable average estimate. See Geneva Declaration, Global Burden of Armed Violence (Geneva: Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2008), 31–32.
16. Neta C. Crawford, “War-Related Death, Injury, and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2014,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, May 22, 2015, 7, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2015/War%20Related%20Casualties%20Afghanistan%20and%20Pakistan%202001-2014%20FIN.pdf; Crawford, “Civilian Death and Injury in Iraq, 2003–2011,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, September 2011, 10, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2011/Civilian%20Death%20and%20Injury%20in%20Iraq%2C%202003-2011.pdf; Scott Harding and Kathryn Libal, “War and the Public Health Disaster in Iraq,” in The War Machine and Global Health: A Critical Medical Anthropological Examination of the Human Costs of Armed Conflict and the International Violence Industry, ed. Merrill Singer and G. Derrick Hodge (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2010), 59–88; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018 (New York: United Nations, 2018).
17. The total includes money already spent on the wars and money that will be owed in the future, including veterans’ health care costs and interest payments on the borrowed money that has funded the wars. Neta C. Crawford, “United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of the Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion Spent and Obligated,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, November 13, 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/US%20Budgetary%20Costs%20of%20Wars%20November%202019.pdf.
18. Trade-offs were calculated using fiscal year 2018 spending data. See “Trade-Offs: Your Money, Your Choices,” National Priorities Project, last modified April 2019, www.nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/trade-offs/?state=00&program=32.
1. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 70.
2. Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: Harper, 2018), 8, 2.
3. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014), 3–8.
a Debates about such definitions are contentious. I define imperialism generally as the practice by one country, state, or people of forcibly imposing and maintaining hierarchical relationships of formal or informal rule, domination, or control over a significant part of the life of other groups of people such that the stronger shapes, or has the ability to shape, significant aspects of the political, economic, social, or cultural life of the weaker. Empire is then the designation reserved for states and other entities practicing imperialism. Colonialism is a specific form of imperialism in which citizens of an empire settle in conquered territory.
b Others identify three, four, or more periods. Periodization is always somewhat arbitrary, and the dividing lines between periods are almost always blurrier than they are presented.
1. What one counts as a “base” is complicated. The estimate of 800 derives from the Pentagon’s count of “base sites” in its annual Base Structure Report. See Base Structure Report: Fiscal Year 2018 Baseline; A Summary of the Real Property Inventory Data (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2018). There are obvious omissions and errors in the report, so I have created my own list, which I have updated and made public since 2014; see 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; for a discussion, see notes introducing the list and David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 342n5. The military has so many bases, it doesn’t know the true total. It is telling—but not a good sign—that when a recent U.S. Army–funded study evaluated the effects of U.S. bases on conflict globally, the study relied on my list of bases rather than the Pentagon’s. Angela O’Mahony et al., U.S. Presence and Incidence of Conflict (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).
The Pentagon’s term base site means, in some cases, that an installation generally referred to as a single base, such as Aviano Air Base in Italy, actually consists of multiple base sites—in Aviano’s case, at least eight. Counting each base site makes sense because sites with the same name are often in geographically disparate locations. Aviano’s eight sites are in different parts of the town. Generally, too, each base site reflects distinct congressional appropriations of taxpayer funds. I include bases in U.S. colonies (territories) in my count of extraterritorial bases because these places lack full democratic incorporation into the United States. The Pentagon also considers these locations “overseas.” (Like other scholars, I generally use the terms extraterritorial bases, foreign bases, bases abroad, and overseas bases synonymously.) Washington, DC, lacks full democratic rights, but, given that it is the nation’s capital and is not overseas, I consider DC bases domestic. I explain in my list’s introductory notes that while the list (and the maps in this book) conservatively indicate a current total of 752 base sites abroad, around 800 is a safe estimate given Pentagon reporting errors. There may be considerably more. For additional discussion, see the “Introduction and Notes” sheet in Vine, “Lists of U.S. Military Bases.”
2. “Reversing the Roles, Revealing the Empire: Ecuador,” Nygaard Notes, January 2, 2010, www.nygaardnotes.org/archive/issues/nn0445.html.
3. Editors, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire,” Monthly Review, March 1, 2002, www.monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm.
4. The U.S. Army study recommended interpreting its results “cautiously,” emphasizing that its conclusions reflect “average associations.” In addition to the previously noted finding, the study states that “on average, U.S. troop presence was associated with a higher likelihood of low-intensity interstate conflict (e.g., displays of military force and threats to use military force) but a lower likelihood of interstate war. . . . Nearby U.S. troop presence was associated with allies initiating fewer interstate disputes of all kinds. Conversely, a large nearby U.S. troop presence was associated with potential U.S. adversaries initiating more low- and high-intensity conflicts” (O’Mahony et al., U.S. Presence and Incidence, x–xi).
5. Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 22.
6. My deep thanks go to Catherine Lutz for her help in exploring these dynamics.
7. Quoted in Standing Army, directed by Thomas Fazi and Enrico Parenti (Rome: Effendemfilm and Takae Films, 2010).
8. For a discussion, including of the literature on deterrence, see Vine, Base Nation, chap. 17.
9. See, for example, George Washington, speech to officers at Newburgh, March 15, 1753, in Rediscovering George Washington, directed by Michael Pack (Chevy Chase, MD: Manifold Productions, 2002); and Daniel Webster Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 703. Paul Kramer rightly cautions against analyses that depend on isolated quotations from the Founding Fathers. See “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 5 (2018): 919.
10. Paul Kennedy, quoted in Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), xv.
11. Carole McGranahan and John Collins, “Introduction: Ethnography and U.S. Empire,” in Ethnographies of Empire, ed. Carole McGranahan and John Collins (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 1.
12. Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 26.
13. G. John Ikenberry, “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 144. For examples, see Michael Ignatieff, “American Empire: The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/the-american-empire-the-burden.html; and Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
14. This comparison builds on David Vine, “War and Forced Migration in the Indian Ocean: The U.S. Military Base at Diego Garcia,” International Migration 42, no. 3 (2004): 111–43.
15. See, for example, Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan, 2004); Chalmers Johnson, “America’s Empire of Bases,” TomDispatch, January 15, 2004, www.tomdispatch.com/post/1181/chalmers_johnson_on_garrisoning_the_planet; and Editors, “U.S. Military Bases.”
16. Stephanie Savell and 5W Infographics, “This Map Shows Where in the World the U.S. Military Is Combatting Terrorism,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 2019, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/map-shows-places-world-where-us-military-operates-180970997/. I add Pakistan, because of drone strikes, to the countries on Savell’s map: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Niger, Kenya, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Mali, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia.
17. Greg Jaffe, “For Trump and His Generals, ‘Victory’ Has Different Meanings,” Washington Post, April 5, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/for-trump-and-his-generals-victory-has-different-meanings/2018/04/05/8d74eab0-381d-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html?utm_term=.f6371a958f99.
18. Mike Holmes, “2018 WEPTAC Conference Keynote Speaker: General Mike Holmes,” Air Combat Command, February 13, 2018, www.acc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1440031/2018-weptac-conference-keynote-speaker-general-mike-holmes/.
19. See, for example, Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), xvii.
20. Smith, American Empire; Johnson, Sorrows of Empire; Johnson, “America’s Empire of Bases”; Editors, “U.S. Military Bases.”
a To distinguish Guantánamo Bay and the nearby Cuban city of Guantánamo from Guantanamo Bay the military base (which discarded the accent mark), I typically refer to the base as “Gitmo.” This is its commonly used military nickname and the pronunciation of the base acronym, GTMO.
b When I returned two years later, a TSA screening was required before boarding.
c Fred Ortiz is a pseudonym.
d Numerous sources make the case that Cheney was the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, frequently overshadowing the power of Bush, especially on matters of war. As such, I generally refer to the 2001–9 administration as the Bush/Cheney administration.
1. BREMCOR is a joint venture between two large contractors, Burns and Roe and EMCOR. Jana K. Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 228n90.
2. Larry Rohter, “Havana Journal: Remember the Maine? Cubans See an American Plot Continuing to This Day,” New York Times, February 14, 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/02/14/world/havana-journal-remember-maine-cubans-see-american-plot-continuing-this-day.html?pagewanted=all.
3. Quoted in Lipman, Guantánamo, 21. See also Stephen I. M. Schwab, Guantánamo, USA: The Untold Story of America’s Cuban Outpost (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 36–60.
4. Theodore Roosevelt to John Hay, May 12, 1903, microfilm reel 416, Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
5. Lipman, Guantánamo, 23–24; Schwab, Guantánamo, USA.
6. Lipman, Guantánamo, 27–28.
7. Marion Emerson Murphy, The History of Guantanamo Bay, 1494–1964, U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, January 5, 1953, https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/lps17563/gtmohistorymurphy.htm, 2.
8. “Facts about the Transfer of Guantanamo Detainees,” Human Rights First, October 10, 2018, www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/facts-about-transfer-guantanamo-detainees.
9. See Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
10. Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantánamo Bay?,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 832.
11. Timothy Harrison, “The Lighthouse at Guantanamo Bay,” Lighthouse Digest, March 2006, www.lighthousedigest.com/Digest/StoryPage.cfm?StoryKey=2426.
12. Dean C. Bartley, “Diary of Dean C. Bartley,” n.d., Guantanamo Bay Lighthouse Museum, Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.
13. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014), 4.
14. John J. Barry, The Life of Christopher Columbus: From Authentic Spanish and Italian Documents (Boston: Donohue, 1870), 292.
15. Washington Irving, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus and the Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (New York: Crowell, [1892?]), 136–46.
16. Frances Maclean, “The Lost Fort of Columbus,” Smithsonian, January 2008, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-lost-fort-of-columbus-8026921/.
17. Translation mine. Jorge Ulloa Hung and Till F. Sonnemann, “Exploraciones arqueológicas en la Fortaleza de Santo Tomás de Jánico: Nuevos aportes a su comprensión histórica” [Archaeological explorations in the Fortress of Santo Tomás of Jánico: New contributions to its historical understanding], Ciencia y Sociedad 42, no. 3 (2017): 24.
18. Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 153.
19. Gillem, America Town, 3; Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007); Harkavy, Bases Abroad: The Global Foreign Military Presence (Oxford: Oxford University Press/SIPRI, 1989).
20. Gillem, America Town, 24.
21. Martin H. Brice, Stronghold: A History of Military Architecture (New York: Shocken Books, 1985), 13–45.
22. Brice, Stronghold, 48–55, 13–14.
23. “Pevensey Castle,” English Heritage, accessed February 16, 2020, www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/pevensey-castle/.
24. Brice, Stronghold, 48–55, 13–14.
25. Marc Morris, “Castles of the Conqueror,” History Extra, August 11, 2012, www.historyextra.com/period/norman/castles-of-the-conqueror/.
26. Brice, Stronghold, 74–75.
27. Harkavy, Strategic Basing, 2.
28. Harkavy, Strategic Basing, 15.
29. Donald L. Berlin, “The ‘Great Base Race’ in the Indian Ocean Littoral: Conflict Prevention or Stimulation?,” Contemporary South Asia 12, no. 3 (2004): 239.
30. Harkavy, Strategic Basing, 44–46, app. 2.
31. Kaplan, “Where Is Guantánamo Bay?,” 831–58.
32. Harkavy, Strategic Basing, 15.
33. “Exploring ‘the Buried Truth,’ ” Jamestown Rediscovery, accessed February 16, 2020, https://historicjamestowne.org/visit/plan-your-visit/fort-site/. For lists of bases cataloged by basing power, see Harkavy, Strategic Basing.
34. Carla M. Sinopoli, “Archaeology of Empires,” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 169.
35. Harkavy, Strategic Basing, 24.
36. Robert Scott, Limuria: The Lesser Dependencies of Mauritius (1961; repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), 68.
37. Vytautas B. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia: Creation of the Indian Ocean Base (San Jose, CA: Writer’s Showcase, 2001), 84.
38. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (1982; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 5.
39. Harkavy, Strategic Basing, 2.
40. Robert B. Roberts, Encyclopedia of Historic Forts: The Military, Pioneer, and Trading Posts of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1988), xii, 403–4; Harkavy, Strategic Basing, 1–3.
41. Benjamin Johnson, “Fort Independence,” Object of the Month, Massachusetts Historical Society, June 2005, www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/objects/fort-independence-2005-06-01.
1. Noel Rae, People’s War: Original Voices of the American Revolution (Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2012), 71.
2. “Quartering Act (Amendment to Mutiny Act),” in Founding Political Warfare Documents of the United States, ed. J. Michael Waller (n.p.: Crossbow, 2009), 72.
3. Rae, People’s War, 73.
4. Oliver Morton Dickerson, ed., Boston under Military Rule, 1768–1769, as Revealed in a Journal of the Times (Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1936), 15, 42, 53.
5. Dickerson, Boston under Military Rule, 114. There is no way to verify this anonymous account.
6. Patrick Henry, “Debate in Virginia Ratifying Convention,” June 16, 1788, The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 5, amendment 3, doc. 8, University of Chicago Press, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendIIIs8.html.
7. Robert B. Roberts, Encyclopedia of Historic Forts: The Military, Pioneer, and Trading Posts of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1988), xii, 403–4; Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007), 1–3.
8. “Revolutionary War Facts,” American Revolutionary War, 1775 to 1783, accessed February 16, 2020, https://revolutionarywar.us/facts/. For a list of sources, see Matthew White, “Statistics of Wars, Oppressions and Atrocities of the Eighteenth Century (the 1700s),” Necrometrics, accessed February 16, 2020, https://necrometrics.com/wars18c.htm.
1. Data retrieved from U.S. Geological Survey, “Domestic Names,” U.S. Board on Geographic Names, accessed February 16, 2020, www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/board-on-geographic-names/domestic-names.
2. U.S. Geological Survey, “Domestic Names.”
3. Catherine Lutz, “US Military Bases on Guam in Global Perspective,” Asia-Pacific Journal 8, no. 30 (2010): https://apjjf.org/-Catherine-Lutz/3389/article.html.
4. The following works are still essential: James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1990); Joseph Gerson, “The Sun Never Sets,” in The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases, ed. Joseph Gerson and Bruce Birchard (Boston: South End, 1991), 3–34; Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007); and C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Cf. Catherine Lutz, “Introduction: Bases, Empire, and Global Response,” in Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts, ed. Catherine Lutz (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1–44; and Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
5. Anni P. Baker, American Soldiers Overseas: The Global Military Presence (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 4.
6. Richard W. Stewart, ed., American Military History, vol. 1, The United States Army and the Forging of a Nation, 1775–1917, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005), 53; John Hancock, “To George Washington from John Hancock, 28 June 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed February 16, 2020, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0020.
7. Stewart, American Military History, 1:53–55.
8. John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4.
9. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014), 58, 64–65.
10. William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago: Dee, 1996), ix; Richard W. Van Alstyne, The Rising U.S. Empire (New York: Norton Library, 1960), 8. See also Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), viii, 5–6.
11. John Murray (Lord Dunmore), quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 71–72; see also pages 70–72.
12. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 71.
13. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 72–73.
14. Grenier, First Way of War, 161.
15. Grenier, First Way of War, 161, 11.
16. See, for example, Grenier, First Way of War, 159–62; and Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 71–77.
17. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 75–76; Grenier, First Way of War, ix, 5.
18. Grenier, First Way of War, 21.
19. George Washington, “From George Washington to Major General John Sullivan, 31 May 1779,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed February 16, 2020, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0661.
20. Quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 77.
21. Grenier, First Way of War, 11–12.
22. “Fort Harmar,” Ohio History Central, accessed February 16, 2020, https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Fort_Harmar.
23. Stewart, American Military History, 1:116.
24. Emphasis in original. George Washington, “Washington’s Sentiments on a Peace Establishment, 1 May 1783,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed February 16, 2020, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-11202.
25. Stewart, American Military History, 1:113–16.
26. This was especially the case following Congress’s passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which created a path for U.S. territories to become states.
27. Francis Paul Prucha, A Guide to the Military Posts of the United States, 1789–1895 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964), 2–7.
28. Grenier, First Way of War, 193–95; Stewart, American Military History, 1:113–17.
29. R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington: Indian a University Press, 1998), 107.
30. Grenier, First Way of War, 194–96.
31. Grenier, First Way of War, 198.
32. Stewart, American Military History, 1:117–18.
33. Stewart, American Military History, 1:118–19.
34. Hurt, Ohio Frontier, 135–36.
35. Quoted in Grenier, First Way of War, 202; see also pages 200–202.
36. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 80.
37. Stewart, American Military History, 1:119–20.
38. Stacie L. Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012), 16, 16n3; Stewart, American Military History, 1:121.
39. Horsman, Expansion, 141, 157; Gillem, America Town, 18–19.
40. Stewart, American Military History, 1:121.
41. David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807–1840 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 215.
42. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996).
43. Thomas Jefferson, “President Thomas Jefferson’s Confidential Message concerning Relations with the Indians,” January 18, 1803, President’s Messages from the Seventh Congress, Presidential Messages, 1791–1861, RG 233, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, www.docsteach.org/documents/document/jefferson-confidential-message-relations-indians.
44. Stewart, American Military History, 1:126.
45. Stewart, American Military History, 1:124–26.
46. Emphasis mine. Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson’s Confidential Message.”
47. Wishart, Fur Trade, 207–8, 18.
48. Stewart, American Military History, 1:124.
49. Wishart, Fur Trade, 207–8, 19, 22.
50. David Bernstein, “ ‘We Are Not Now as We Once Were’: Iowa Indians’ Political and Economic Adaptations during U.S. Incorporation,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 4 (2007): 614, 608, 629n9; Brooke L. Blower, “Nation of Outposts: Forts, Factories, Bases, and the Making of American Power,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 3 (2017): 447.
51. Bernstein, “ ‘We Are Not Now,’ ” 614.
52. Wishart, Fur Trade, 213–14.
53. Wishart, Fur Trade, 212, 213, 116–17.
54. Wishart, Fur Trade, 210–11, 214.
55. Stewart, American Military History, 1:126–27.
1. J. C. A. Stagg, The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.
2. Stephen J. Rauch, The Campaign of 1812: The U.S. Army Campaigns of the War of 1812 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2013), 9, 18, 21, 45–46, 56.
3. Daniel Webster Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 66.
4. Stagg, War of 1812, 4; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 80.
5. Michael Beschloss, Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times (New York: Crown, 2018), 3–4.
6. Beschloss, Presidents of War, 5.
7. Carl Benn, “Aboriginal Peoples and Their Multiple Wars of 1812,” in The Routledge Handbook of the War of 1812, ed. Donald R. Hickey and Conni D. Clark (London: Routledge, 2015), 132–33. See also Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014); and John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
8. Benn, “Aboriginal Peoples,” 132–33.
9. Grenier, First Way of War, 213, 225; Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 141, 157.
10. Quoted in Richard W. Stewart, ed., American Military History, vol. 1, The United States Army and the Forging of a Nation, 1775–1917, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005), 144.
11. William C. Davis, “The History of the Short-Lived Independent Republic of Florida,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 2013, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-the-short-lived-independent-republic-of-florida-28056078/.
12. “Commission Planning for West Florida Republic Bicentennial,” press release, Southeastern Louisiana University, July 6, 2009, www.southeastern.edu/news_media/news_releases/2009/july/west_fla.html.
13. “About the Fort,” Fort of Colonial Mobile, accessed February 16, 2020, http://colonialmobile.com/about-the-fort/.
14. Steven J. Peach, “Creeks Organize to Resist White Expansion,” National Park Service, accessed February 16, 2020, www.nps.gov/articles/creek-organize-to-resist-white-expansion.htm?utm_source=article&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=experience_more; Greg O’Brien, “August 1813: The Attack on Fort Mims Prompts Choctaw Involvement,” National Park Service, last modified August 14, 2017, www.nps.gov/articles/august-1813-fort-mims.htm; Stewart, American Military History, 1:144–46.
15. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 71; Perkins, quoted in Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 71.
16. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 70.
17. William McKee Evans, Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 71.
18. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 76–77.
19. James E. Cherry, “Andrew Jackson: The Good, the Bad, the Ethnic Cleansing,” Jackson Sun, March 22, 2017, www.jacksonsun.com/story/opinion/2017/03/22/andrew-jackson-good-bad-ethnic-cleansing/99409468/. (The Jackson Sun appears to have changed the title of this article since its original publication to remove the words “the Ethnic Cleansing.” The URL still reflects the original title.)
20. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 99–103; Stewart, American Military History, 1:161–63; Daniel Feller, “Andrew Jackson: Life before the Presidency,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, accessed February 12, 2020, https://millercenter.org/president/jackson/life-before-the-presidency.
21. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 98–111.
22. See, for example, Cherry, “Andrew Jackson”; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975; repr., New York: Routledge, 2017); Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 74–111; and Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 96–97.
23. Rogin, Fathers and Children.
24. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 74–111.
25. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 96–97.
26. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 77–78. Pirates are generally private nonstate actors seeking profits on the high seas.
27. “The XYZ Affair and the Quasi-War with France, 1798–1800,” Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, accessed February 16, 2020, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/xyz.
28. Andrew Krepinevich and Robert O. Work, New US Global Defense Posture for the Transoceanic Era (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2007), 41–42.
29. Krepinevich and Work, New US Global Defense, 41–42.
30. Stacie L. Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012), 17–18.
31. William Francis Lynch, “Narrative of the United States’ Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea,” 1849, Wikisource, last modified January 17, 2018, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Narrative_Of_The_United_States_Expedition_To_The_River_Jordan_And_The_Dead_Sea.
32. Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin, 2017), 238.
33. James Monroe, “Monroe Doctrine (1823),” Our Documents, December 2, 1823, www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=23. See also Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 113–16.
34. John Q. Adams, “She Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy,” American Conservative, July 4, 2013, www.theamericanconservative.com/repository/she-goes-not-abroad-in-search-of-monsters-to-destroy/.
35. Adams, “She Goes Not Abroad.”
a For grim context, the sixty-six-mile, more deadly sounding Bataan Death March during World War II probably killed 5–15 percent of the estimated seventy-five thousand Filipinos and U.S. soldiers forced to march by the Japanese military. Some estimates approach 25 percent. See “About Bataan,” Bataan Memorial Death March, accessed February 13, 2020, https://bataanmarch.com/about-bataan/.
1. Kelvin D. Crow, Fort Leavenworth: Three Centuries of Service (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Command History Office Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, n.d.), 2.
2. Richard W. Stewart, ed., American Military History, vol. 1, The United States Army and the Forging of a Nation, 1775–1917, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005), 166.
3. Alison K. Hoagland, Architecture in the West: Forts Laramie, Bridger, and D. A. Russell, 1849–1912 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 6, ix, 3.
4. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 7.
5. Francis Paul Prucha, A Guide to the Military Posts of the United States, 1789–1895 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964), 10–11; Anni P. Baker, American Soldiers Overseas: The Global Military Presence (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 5.
6. Alan Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph Jones, Race: Are We So Different? (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 197.
7. Prucha, Guide to the Military Posts, 10–11.
8. Peleg Sprague, speech to the U.S. Senate, April 16–17, 1830, in Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians, Delivered in the Congress of the United States, April and May, 1830, ed. Jeremiah Evarts (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830).
9. Andrew Jackson, Second Annual Address to Congress, December 6, 1830, quoted in “A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875,” Library of Congress, accessed February 16, 2020, https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llrd&fileName=010/llrd010.db&recNum=438.
10. Quoted in Goodman, Moses, and Jones, Race, 198.
11. Stewart, American Military History, 1:168–72.
12. Stewart, American Military History, 1:172.
13. Stewart, American Military History, 1:173.
14. Crow, Fort Leavenworth, 22, 28.
15. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, 1970), 7; Prucha, Guide to the Military Posts, 32–34.
16. Stewart, American Military History, 1:173.
17. Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin, 2017), 115–16.
18. Stewart, American Military History, 1:177–78; Hahn, Nation without Borders, 130.
19. Stewart, American Military History, 1:174, 180, 186–87.
20. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 708, 702.
21. Quoted in Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 703.
22. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 704–5.
23. Quoted in Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 704.
24. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 56.
25. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Fifty Years in Camp and Field: Diary of Major-General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, U.S.A., ed. William Augustus Croffut (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 212–13.
26. Quoted in Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012), vii.
27. “The Annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 1845–1848,” Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, accessed February 16, 2020, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/texas-annexation.
28. Hahn, Nation without Borders, 132.
29. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 98; Adrian G. Traas, From the Golden Gate to Mexico City: The U.S. Army Topographical Engineers in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Washington, DC: United States Army, 1993), 63–66.
30. Stephen A. Carney, “The Occupation of Mexico: May 1846–July 1848,” U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2005, https://history.army.mil/html/books/073/73-3/CMH_Pub_73-3.pdf, 12–13.
31. Quoted in Enrique Krauze, “The April Invasion of Veracruz,” New York Times, April 20, 2014.
32. Hahn, Nation without Borders, 132, 136.
33. “On St. Patrick’s Day, Mexico Remembers the Irishmen Who Fought for Mexico against the US,” World, PRI, March 17, 2015, www.pri.org/stories/2015-03-17/st-patrick-s-day-mexico-remembers-irishmen-who-fought-mexico-against-us.
34. Carney, “Occupation of Mexico,” 35–36.
35. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 802–4.
36. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 16.
37. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 17, 9.
38. Quoted in Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 21.
39. Baker, American Soldiers, 5.
40. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 16–17.
41. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 17.
42. Prucha, Guide to the Military Posts, 14–18, 23, 28.
43. John Pope to Col. R. M. Sawyer, August 1, 1865, United States Congressional Serial Set, no. 3437 (1896): 1150–51.
44. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (New York: Harper’s and Sons, 1881), 76–79.
45. H. Jackson, Century of Dishonor, 76–79.
46. “Freedom: A History of US,” webisode, PBS, 2002, www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment7_p.html.
47. “Civil War Defenses of Washington,” National Park Service, accessed February 16, 2020, www.nps.gov/cwdw/index.htm.
48. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 136.
49. Quoted in Tony Horwitz, “The Horrific Sand Creek Massacre Will Be Forgotten No More,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2014, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/horrific-sand-creek-massacre-will-be-forgotten-no-more-180953403/.
50. Horwitz, “Horrific Sand Creek Massacre”; Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 137–38.
51. Horwitz, “Horrific Sand Creek Massacre”; Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 137–38.
52. Horwitz, “Horrific Sand Creek Massacre”; Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 137–38.
53. Jon Wiener, “Largest Mass Execution in US History: 150 Years Ago Today,” Nation, December 26, 2012, www.thenation.com/article/largest-mass-execution-us-history-150-years-ago-today/.
54. Wiener, “Largest Mass Execution.”
55. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 139, 144.
56. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 144–53.
57. The number is 943, according to Col. R. Ernest Dupuy; see Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire: From the Revolution to Vietnam; A History of U.S. Imperialism (1971; repr., London: Pluto, 2003), 7. Hoagland cites more than 1,200 between 1848 and 1890. See Architecture in the West, 6.
58. Pope to Sawyer, August 1, 1865, Congressional Serial Set, 1151–52. See also Stephen E. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (1996; repr., New York: Anchor Books, 2014).
59. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 810.
60. Quoted in Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat, 59.
61. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 810–11; Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat, 59; Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 129.
62. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 703.
63. House of Representatives, “Military Expedition against the Sioux Indians,” Executive Document no. 184, Congressional Serial Set (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1876), 3.
64. Crow, Fort Leavenworth, 22, 28; Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 149–50.
65. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 42–44.
66. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 203.
67. Prucha, Guide to the Military Posts, 23.
68. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 14.
69. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 7.
70. Robert M. Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
71. Prucha, Guide to the Military Posts, 34; Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier: 1860–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 92.
72. Hoagland Architecture in the West, xi.
73. Hoagland, Architecture in the West, 244.
74. David M. Delo, Peddlers and Post Traders: The Army Sutler on the Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 209, 211.
75. Stephen A. Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), 34.
76. “Fort Leavenworth Wayside Tour,” pamphlet, U.S. Army Fort Leavenworth, [2014?], accessed February 16, 2020, https://home.army.mil/leavenworth/application/files/2215/6985/9495/PAO_Wayside_Tour.pdf.
77. “This Land Is Ours,” Teaching Tolerance, Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d., accessed February 16, 2020, www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/texts/this-land-is-ours.
78. Guenter Lewy, “Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?,” Commentary, September 2004, republished by History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/7302.
79. Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 79.
a I put this racial terminology in quotation marks to emphasize that these are social ideas and categories rather than legitimate or valid scientific categories or biological realities.
1. “Spanish American War: ‘A Splendid Little War,’ ” Presidio of San Francisco, National Park Service, February 28, 2015, www.nps.gov/prsf/learn/historyculture/spanish-american-war-a-splendid-little-war.htm.
2. Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1965), chap. 26.
3. Thomas McCormick, “From Old Empire to New,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 73; see also 63–64.
4. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 64.
5. Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin, 2017), 117.
6. Brooke L. Blower, “Nation of Outposts: Forts, Factories, Bases, and the Making of American Power,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 3 (2017): 447–49.
7. Andrew Krepinevich and Robert O. Work, New US Global Defense Posture for the Transoceanic Era (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2007), 41–42.
8. Stacie L. Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012), 17–18; Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018); Blower, “Nation of Outposts,” 450.
9. Edward P. Crapol, John Tyler, the Accidental President (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 76–78. President John Tyler’s Secretary of the Navy Abel P. Upshur was a naval evangelist who ironically had never been to sea or left the United States.
10. Shahan Cheong, “Chinatown Reversed: The Shanghai International Settlement,” Throughout History (blog), October 15, 2011, www.throughouthistory.com/?p=1790.
11. Chris Ames, “Crossfire Couples: Marginality and Agency among Okinawan Women in Relationships with U.S. Military Men,” in Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, ed. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 199n5; Blower, “Nation of Outposts,” 451n37.
12. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 65.
13. Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, October 23, 1823, quoted in “What Thomas Jefferson Said about Annexing Cuba,” San Francisco Call, April 10, 1898, 28, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC18980410.2.132.26&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1.
14. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 65.
15. See, for example, William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago: Dee, 1996), 140–43; and McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 65–66.
16. Peter Carlson, “Raiding the Icebox: Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada,” Washington Post, December 30, 2005, C1.
17. Carolyn Hall and Héctor Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas of Central America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 184–85; Scott Martelle, William Walker’s Wars: How One Man’s Private American Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019); Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 68; Ron Soodalter, “William Walker: King of the 19th Century Filibusters,” History Net, March 2, 2010, www.historynet.com/william-walker-king-of-the-19th-century-filibusters.htm.
18. Weeks, Building the Continental Empire, 140–43; Hall and Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas, 184–85, 209.
19. Christina Duffy Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 782.
20. Burnett, “Edges of Empire,” 779–80, 788; A. M. Jackson to the Chief of Naval Operations, memorandum, December 7, 1964, folder 11000/1B, box 26, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives, Washington, DC, 2.
21. See Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 53–56; Burnett, “Edges of Empire,” 788.
22. Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 3 (2016): 385; Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 52–53.
23. Burnett, “Edges of Empire,” 779–803.
24. Burnett, “Edges of Empire,” 798.
25. Richard D. Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy: 1898–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 5.
26. Blower, “Nation of Outposts,” 451.
27. Fidel Tavárez, “ ‘The Moral Miasma of the Tropics’: American Imperialism and the Failed Annexation of the Dominican Republic, 1869–1871,” Nuevo Mundo/Mundos Nuevos, July 13, 2011, https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/61771?lang=en; Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 25–26, 101.
28. Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, 3rd ed. (1994; repr., Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 2006), 72–74, 418n43; Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 168–69.
29. Farmer, Uses of Haiti, 77–78.
30. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, 1962), 9, 24–25.
31. Alfred W. McCoy, “Gunboat Diplomacy and the Ghost of Captain Mahan, or How China and the U.S. Are Spawning a New Great Power Naval Rivalry,” TomDispatch, April 8, 2018, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176408/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_a_new_age_of_sea_power.
32. Quoted in Philip A. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 455.
33. Quoted in McCoy, “Gunboat Diplomacy.”
34. Quoted in McCoy, “Gunboat Diplomacy.”
35. Alfred Thayer Mahan, “The United States Looking Outward,” Atlantic, December 1890, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1890/12/the-united-states-looking-outward/306348/.
36. Mahan, “United States Looking Outward.”
37. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 491, 495.
38. Stephen A. Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), 86–87; Krepinevich and Work, New US Global Defense, 47–48; Hal M. Friedman, Creating an American Lake: United States Imperialism and Strategic Security in the Pacific Basin, 1945–1947 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 3.
39. Friedman, Creating an American Lake, 3; Kinzer, Overthrow, 33.
40. Richard W. Stewart, ed., American Military History, vol. 1, The United States Army and the Forging of a Nation, 1775–1917, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005), 349.
41. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Milking the Cow for All It’s Worth: Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Imperialist Resentment in Hawaiʻi,” in Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, ed. Carole McGranahan and John Collins (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 53.
42. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 493.
43. Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture, 27n6; Kinzer, Overthrow, 18–19.
44. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 495.
45. Hahn, Nation without Borders, 493.
46. Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 66–67; McCoy, “Gunboat Diplomacy.”
47. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 493.
48. Jana K. Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 23.
49. “El Hierro de la Casa,” Wikipedia, uploaded September 14, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enmienda_Platt.JPG.
50. Quoted in Jack McCallum, Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 187.
51. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 494.
52. Hahn, Nation without Borders, 491.
53. Jana K. Lipman, “Guantánamo and the Case of Kid Chicle: Private Contract Labor and the Development of the U.S. Military,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 453.
54. Stewart, American Military History, 1:360.
55. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 73.
56. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 495.
57. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 496.
58. Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 159–95.
59. Quoted in “The Philippine War: A Conflict of Conscience for African Americans,” Presidio of San Francisco, National Park Service, February 28, 2015, www.nps.gov/prsf/learn/historyculture/the-philippine-insurrectiothe-philippine-war-a-conflict-of-consciencen-a-war-of-controversy.htm.
60. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 496.
61. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 73.
62. Love, Race over Empire, 194–95.
63. Daniel Immerwahr, “Part 2: Empire State of Mind,” interview, On the Media, WNYC, April 5, 2019, www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-empire-state-mind-part-2.
64. Quoted in Hahn, Nation without Borders, 494.
65. Brian McAllister Linn, “The Impact of the Philippine Wars (1898–1913) on the U.S. Army,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 462.
66. Hahn, Nation without Borders, 495, 486.
67. Hahn, Nation without Borders, 485–89.
68. Death estimates vary widely. John M. Gates estimates between 128,000 and 360,000 total Filipino deaths; see “War-Related Deaths in the Philippines, 1898–1902,” Pacific Historical Review 53, no. 3 (1984): 367–78. The U.S. Department of State cites 200,000 civilians, more than 20,000 Filipino combatants, and more than 4,200 US troops; see “The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902,” Office of the Historian, accessed February 16, 2020, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/war.
69. Patricio Abinales, “The U.S. Army as an Occupying Force in Muslim Mindanao, 1899–1913,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 414–15. The quotations are from Russell Roth.
70. Joshua Gedacht, “ ‘Mohammedan Religion Made It Necessary to Fire’: Massacres on the American Imperial Frontier from South Dakota to the Southern Philippines,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 397.
71. Samuel Clemens, “Comments on the Moro Massacre,” March 12, 1906, History Is a Weapon, accessed January 6, 2020, www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/clemensmoromassacre.html.
72. Gedacht, “ ‘Mohammedan Religion,’ ” 408.
73. Gedacht, “ ‘Mohammedan Religion,’ ” 397–98.
74. Quoted in Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (1980): 830–31.
75. Krepinevich and Work, New US Global Defense, 49.
a With hesitancy I employ the name more widely used for legal and political purposes: Guam.
b In a 1936 treaty, the U.S. government renounced the right to intervene anywhere in Panama. In 1999, the year U.S. forces left bases in the Canal Zone, Panama gained full control over the canal.
1. LisaLinda Natividad and Gwyn Kirk, “Fortress Guam: Resistance to US Military Mega-Buildup,” Asia-Pacific Journal 19, no. 1 (2010): https://apjjf.org/-LisaLinda-Natividad/3356/article.html.
2. See, for example, William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, 1962); Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. La Feber, and Thomas J. McCormick, Creation of the U.S. Empire, 2 vols. (Chicago: Rand McNally College, 1976); and Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
3. See Christina Duffy Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 779–803.
4. Thomas McCormick, “From Old Empire to New,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 77.
5. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 77–78.
6. Andrew Krepinevich and Robert O. Work, New US Global Defense Posture for the Transoceanic Era (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2007), 50.
7. Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 49.
8. Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin, 2017), 499.
9. John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 27.
10. John Lindsay-Poland, note to author, January 24, 2019. See also Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle.
11. Carolyn Hall and Héctor Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas of Central America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 228; Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle, 27.
12. C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140.
13. Hahn, Nation without Borders, 498.
14. Theodore Roosevelt, “Roosevelt Corollary,” State of the Union Address to Congress, Modern Latin America, web supplement for 8th ed., December 6, 1904, https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-14-the-united-states-and-latin-america/primary-documents-w-accompanying-discussion-questions/document-33-roosevelt-corollary-1904/.
15. Roosevelt, “Roosevelt Corollary.”
16. Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, vol. 1, To 1877, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 767; Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle, 16–17; Hall and Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas, 209.
17. Hall and Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas, 228.
18. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 3, 20.
19. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 71.
20. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 75–76.
21. Brinkley, American History, 767; Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle, 16–17; Hall and Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas, 209.
22. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 75–77.
23. Smedley Butler, “America’s Armed Forces: ‘In Time of Peace’; The Army,” Common Sense 4, no. 11 (1935): 8–12.
24. Stephen A. Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), 321.
25. Butler, “America’s Armed Forces,” 8–9.
26. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: Norton, 1983), 42–46; Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 19.
27. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 42–46. See also Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (New York: Verso, 2012).
28. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 9.
29. McCormick, “Old Empire to New,” 75.
30. Ian Tyrrell, “Empire in American History,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 551; Alfred W. McCoy, Francisco A. Scarano, and Courtney Johnson, “On the Tropic of Cancer: Transitions and Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 30–31.
31. Quoted in Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 121.
32. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 15–16.
33. McCoy, Scarano, and Johnson, “Tropic of Cancer,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 31; Tyrrell, “Empire in American History,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 551–53.
34. Ann Laura Stoler, “Refractions Off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times,” with David Bond, Radical History Review 95 (2006): 95.
35. Richard W. Stewart, ed., American Military History, vol. 2, The United States Army in a Global Era, 1917–2008, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2010), 57–58.
36. Stewart, American Military History, 2:58.
37. Hal M. Friedman, Creating an American Lake: United States Imperialism and Strategic Security in the Pacific Basin, 1945–1947 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 3.
38. Paul Kramer, “A Useful Corner of the World: Guantánamo,” New Yorker, July 31, 2013, www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/07/a-useful-corner-of-the-world-a-history-of-guantanamo-base.html#slide_ss_0=1.
39. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 203–12; “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II,” National World War II Museum, accessed February 16, 2020, www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war.
1. Quoted in “The Big Deal,” Time, September 16, 1940, 11.
2. Francis Brown, “For America the Horizon Widens,” New York Times, September 15, 1940, 19, 21.
3. Hanson W. Baldwin, “Our Deal with Britain Affects a World’s Strategical Picture,” New York Times, September 8, 1940, 77.
4. “Big Deal,” 11; Brown, “For America,” 109.
5. Quoted in C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), See also States Bureau of Yards and Docks, Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II: History of the Bureau of Yards and Docks and the Civil Engineer Corps, 1940–1946, vol. 2, pt. 3, The Advance Bases (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947).
6. Technically, bases in two of the colonies were gifts, while the others were exchanged for the destroyers. In practice it was a single deal with a single agreement.
7. Steven High, Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.
8. “Big Deal,” 11.
9. Baldwin, “Our Deal with Britain,” 77.
10. Brown, “For America,” 3.
11. Robert E. Harkavy, Great Power Competition for Overseas Bases: The Geopolitics of Access Diplomacy (New York: Pergamon, 1982), 66.
12. James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1990), 9.
13. Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts: U.S. Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2000), 358–59.
14. High, Base Colonies, 1, 7.
15. Newspaper and colonial officer, quoted in High, Base Colonies, 8, 10.
16. Quoted in Jorge Rodríguez Beruff, “From Winship to Leahy: Crisis, War, and Transition in Puerto Rico,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 435.
17. Charlie Whitham, “On Dealing with Gangsters: The Limits of British ‘Generosity’ in the Leasing of Bases to the United States, 1940–1941,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 7, no. 3 (1996): 592–93; High, Base Colonies, 21.
18. High, Base Colonies, 20.
19. Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–45 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 39–41.
20. Sherry, Preparing, 31–32.
21. High, Base Colonies, 20.
22. Beruff, “From Winship to Leahy,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 436, 438.
23. Quoted in High, Base Colonies, 41.
24. Elliott V. Converse III, Circling the Earth: United States Plans for a Postwar Overseas Military Base System, 1942–1948 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2005), xv.
25. Stacie L. Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012), 45–46.
26. James M. Lindsay, “Remembering the Destroyers-for-Bases Deal,” Global Public Square (blog), CNN, September 2, 2011, http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/02/destroyers-for-bases-fdr-churchill/.
27. High, Base Colonies, 23; Cordell Hull, “The Memoirs of Cordell Hull,” New York Times, February 16, 1948, 23; Lindsay, citing Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith, states that a “group of prominent Americans” interested in aiding Britain, including Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, first floated the idea at a New York country club in July (“Destroyers-for-Bases Deal”).
28. Quoted in Lindsay, “Destroyers-for-Bases Deal.”
29. Franklin D. Roosevelt, memorandum, August 2, 1940, in Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1940: The British Commonwealth, the Soviet Union, the Near East and Africa, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1958), doc. 51.
30. High, Base Colonies, 23–24.
31. “Our New Bases,” editorial, New York Times, September 5, 1940.
32. Quoted in Lindsay, “Destroyers-for-Bases Deal.”
33. Quoted in High, Base Colonies, 27.
34. Whitham, “On Dealing with Gangsters,” 596.
35. Lindsay, “Destroyers-for-Bases Deal.”
36. George A. Brownell to the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, “Airfields in Foreign Countries,” memorandum, February 13, 1945, Office of the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, Plans, Policies and Agreements, 1943–47, A1 219/390/10/8/3m, boxes 199–200, RG 107, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, 3; High, Base Colonies, 10; Conn, Engelman, and Fairchild, Guarding the United States, 383.
37. Conn, Engelman, and Fairchild, Guarding the United States, 381, 376–78.
38. High, Base Colonies, 34.
39. “Lend-Lease and Military Aid to the Allies in the Early Years of World War II,” Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, accessed February 16, 2020, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/lend-lease.
40. High, Base Colonies, 34.
41. Previously, the East Coast had been relatively poorly defended, especially compared to the West Coast. Other than some coastal defenses and bases in Guantánamo Bay, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the United States had quietly depended on the British navy’s control of the Atlantic. High, Base Colonies, 18–19.
42. Hanson W. Baldwin, “U.S. Seen as Gainer in Destroyer Deal,” New York Times, September 4, 1940, 14.
43. Alfred W. McCoy, “Gunboat Diplomacy and the Ghost of Captain Mahan, or How China and the U.S. Are Spawning a New Great Power Naval Rivalry,” TomDispatch, April 8, 2018, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176408/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_a_new_age_of_sea_power.
44. Quoted in McCoy, “Gunboat Diplomacy.”
45. Baldwin, “Our Deal with Britain,” 77.
46. Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893),” American Historical Association, accessed February 12, 2020, www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history.
47. Whitham, “On Dealing with Gangsters,” 620.
48. Brown, “For America,” 3.
1. Chalmers Johnson appears to have coined the phrase that provides the title for this chapter. “America’s Empire of Bases,” TomDispatch, January 15, 2004, www.tomdispatch.com/post/1181/chalmers_johnson_on_garrisoning_the_planet.
2. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996).
3. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
4. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, “Atlantic Charter,” August 14, 1941, Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp.
5. Quoted in Steven High, Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 10.
6. N. Smith, American Empire, 351.
7. Quoted in N. Smith, American Empire, 351, 360.
8. Michael Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin America and United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 183n123; John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 45; Andrew Krepinevich and Robert O. Work, New US Global Defense Posture for the Transoceanic Era (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2007), 66–69.
9. Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 82.
10. On Greenland, see Natalia Loukacheva, The Arctic Promise: Legal and Political Autonomy of Greenland and Nunavut (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 132; Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 224.
11. Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 217–18, 216–17.
12. Jeffery R. Macris, “The Persian Gulf Theater in World War II,” Journal of the Middle East and Africa 1 (2010): 100.
13. Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 284–86.
14. Hans W. Weigert, “U.S. Strategic Bases and Collective Security,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 2 (1947): 252.
15. David Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia: Discourses over Development in a Pacific Territory, 1944–1982 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1998), 24–26.
16. Around ninety thousand Japanese and twelve thousand U.S. military personnel were killed. Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 25–32, 47n60.
17. Weigert, “U.S. Strategic Bases,” 257.
18. James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1990), 9.
19. Weigert, “U.S. Strategic Bases,” 252.
20. High, Base Colonies, 9, 72.
21. Andrew Friedman, “US Empire, World War 2 and the Racialising of Labour,” Race and Class 58, no. 4 (2017): 27–29; Susan L. Carruthers, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 302.
22. A. Friedman, “US Empire,” 27.
23. A. Friedman, “US Empire,” 28–29.
24. Quoted in C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5–6.
25. Perry McCoy Smith, The Air Force Plans for Peace, 1943–45 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 45, 48.
26. Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–45 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 42–43.
27. Elliott V. Converse III, Circling the Earth: United States Plans for a Postwar Overseas Military Base System, 1942–1948 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2005), 1–10.
28. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 41.
29. Joint Staff Planners, “Over-all Examination of U.S. Requirements for Military Bases and Rights,” October 23, 1945, enclosure C, JCS 570/40 report, Central Decimal File, 1942–45, box 272, sec. 9, no. 217, RG 218, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter cited as NARA), Washington, DC.
30. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 56, 41; Sherry, Preparing, 54, 56.
31. Sherry, Preparing, 52–53.
32. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Statement of Problem,” app. A in “United States Military Requirements for Airbases, Facilities, and Operating Rights in Foreign Territories,” memorandum from Commanding General United States Army Air Forces, Secretary of War, Office of the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, Plans, Policies and Agreements 1943–47, A1 219/390/10/8/3, boxes 199–200, RG 107, NARA, 1.
33. Joint Staff Planners, “Over-all Examination,” 218.
34. Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “U.S. Requirements for Post-war Air Bases,” memorandum, November 23, 1943, and “HCJ,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Memorandum to Records, “U.S. Requirements for Post War Air Bases,” December 30, 1943, both in Central Decimal File 1942–45, “Air Routes across the Pacific and Air Facilities for International Police Force,” box 279, Records of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, RG 218, NARA; Converse, Circling the Earth, 34–36.
35. For the full list, see David Vine, “Table 1: ‘US Requirements for Post-war Air Bases’ according to the ‘Base Bible,’ ” Base Nation, www.basenation.us/basestables.html.
36. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “U.S. Requirements for Post-War Air Bases,” attachment, n.d., Secretary of War, Office of the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, Plans, Policies and Agreements, 1943–47, A1 219/390/10/8/3, boxes 199–200, RG 107, NARA; Joint Chiefs of Staff, “List of Air Bases in Foreign Territory Required by the United States,” app. A, annex B, n.d., Central Decimal File 1942–45, “Air Routes Across the Pacific and Air Facilities for International Police Force,” box 279, Records of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, RG 218, NARA, 15–19.
37. Roosevelt amended his instructions to the State Department three weeks after his first letter to reflect the enlarged scope of the plans. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Charles W. McCarthy, Alvin F. Richardson, and Raymond E. Cox, “Post-war Island Air Bases: Notes by the Secretaries,” enclosure, October 4, 1945, State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, SWNCC 38/20, Central Decimal File 1942–45, box 272, sec. 9, 217, RG 218, NARA, 65–68. See also Sherry, Preparing, 46–47.
38. For the full list, see David Vine, “Table 2: Island Locations Where the U.S. Navy Desired Bases or Rights to Build Bases,” Base Nation, www.basenation.us/basestables.html.
39. Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948,” in Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 128. The essay was originally published in 1984 in American Historical Review.
40. Quoted in Leffler, “American Conception,” 128–29.
41. N. Smith, American Empire, 409–10.
42. Converse, Circling the Earth, 39, 15.
43. P. Smith, Air Force Plans, 75.
44. P. Smith, Air Force Plans, 106, 82–83.
45. Quoted in Converse, Circling the Earth, 89. The second point appears in a copy of the memorandum from NARA. Location information is missing, but the copy is on file with the author. Other contemporaneous documents about the Dhahran base are at Secretary of the Army, Assistant Secretary of the Army, State Army-Navy-Air Coordinating Committee, entry 41, box 5, and entry 42, box 1, RG 335, NARA.
46. Macris, “Persian Gulf Theater,” 104–5.
47. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 80.
48. Quoted in Michael Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 35.
49. Charlie Whitham, “On Dealing with Gangsters: The Limits of British ‘Generosity’ in the Leasing of Bases to the United States, 1940–1941,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 7, no. 3 (1996): 620.
50. Journal article, quoted in High, Base Colonies, 22, 213n37.
51. Quoted in High, Base Colonies, 24.
52. Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts: U.S. Army in World War II (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2000), 354.
53. N. Smith, American Empire, 360.
54. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan, 2004).
55. N. Smith, American Empire, 361–62.
56. Almost as an afterthought, Truman said, “We will acquire them by arrangements consistent with the United Nations Charter.” Quoted in Editors, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire,” Monthly Review, March 1, 2002, www.monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm.
57. Sherry, Preparing, 233.
58. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 138–43.
59. Quoted in Converse, Circling the Earth, 199.
60. Quoted in Stone and Kuznick, Untold History, 201.
61. Melvyn P. Leffler, Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 190–91, 210.
62. N. Smith, American Empire, 349, 360.
63. Editors, “U.S. Military Bases.”
64. N. Smith, American Empire; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Empire (2000; repr., New York: Metropolitan, 2004); C. Johnson, “America’s Empire of Bases”; Editors, “U.S. Military Bases.”
65. Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 226.
66. Editors, “U.S. Military Bases.”
67. Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 343.
68. The worldwide total may be many millions higher, given uncertainty around the number of Chinese who perished. See “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II,” National World War II Museum, accessed February 16, 2020, www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war.
69. Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 226.
1. Amy Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Hans W. Weigert, “U.S. Strategic Bases and Collective Security,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 2 (1947): 259.
2. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 356.
3. Joshua Freeman, American Empire 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, (New York: Penguin, 2012), 51.
4. Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 356.
5. Quoted in John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 60.
6. Because of “interdepartmental misunderstandings” borne of policy disagreements and interagency competition, U.S. officials did not finalize their plans until the following year. Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948,” in Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 117–63.
7. Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–45 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 204.
8. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 56–58.
9. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 56.
10. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 58.
11. Natalia Loukacheva, The Arctic Promise: Legal and Political Autonomy of Greenland and Nunavut (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 132; Elliott V. Converse III, Circling the Earth: United States Plans for a Postwar Overseas Military Base System, 1942–1948 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2005), 210.
12. Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati, “Sure, Trump Can Buy Greenland. But Why Does He Think It’s Up to Denmark?,” Politico Magazine, August 23, 2019, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/23/donald-trump-greenland-purchase-sovereignty-denmark-227859.
13. Weigert, “U.S. Strategic Bases,” 258.
14. Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 47–48.
15. Quoted in Lutz, Homefront, 47–48.
16. Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 33, 30–44.
17. Lutz, Homefront, 86.
18. Quoted in Leffler, “American Conception,” 125.
19. George Stambuk, American Military Forces Abroad: Their Impact on the Western State System (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963), 13; Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 18.
20. Hal M. Friedman, Creating an American Lake: United States Imperialism and Strategic Security in the Pacific Basin, 1945–1947 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 1–2.
21. Quoted in Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky, and Walden Bello, American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific (Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books, 1986), 28.
22. Adm. Ernest King, quoted in Weigert, “U.S. Strategic Bases,” 256.
23. Hayes, Zarsky, and Bello, American Lake, 23–24.
24. Quoted in Donald F. McHenry, Micronesia: Trust Betrayed (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1975), 67, 66.
25. Stanley de Smith, quoted in Roy H. Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Mururoa (London: Tauris, 1997), 42.
26. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 118, 123, 135–40, 108–12.
27. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 78, 113.
28. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 77, 112–13; John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 165.
29. Weigert, “U.S. Strategic Bases,” 253–54, 252.
30. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 199–200, 139.
31. Freeman, American Empire, 51.
32. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Memorandum for the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee,” enclosure, June 4, 1946, SWNCC 38/35; Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Memorandum for the Under-secretary of War,” September 16, 1947, both in 490/9/2/4–6, entry 41, box 5, Security Classified, 1944–49, State Army-Navy-Air Coordinating Committee Numbered Papers, Assistant Secretary of the Army, RG 335, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
33. James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1990), 32.
34. Stambuk, American Military Forces Abroad, 9.
35. Leffler, “American Conception,” 127.
36. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 113; John D. Rickerson to the Secretary of State, “U.S. Military Requirements in Iceland,” memorandum, May 1, 1946, 490/9/2/4–6, entry 41, box 5, Security Classified, 1944–49, State Army-Navy-Air Coordinating Committee Numbered Papers, Assistant Secretary of the Army, RG 335, National Archives and Records Administration.
37. Leffler, “American Conception,” 127. Quotation in Gretchen Heefner, “Military Power: Overseas Bases,” in Cambridge History of America and the World, ed. David Engerman, Melani McAlister, and Max Paul Friedman, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
38. Leffler, “American Conception,” 127–28.
39. Gavin McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (London: Verso Books, 2007), 156; Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 201.
40. R. Smith, Nuclear Free and Independent, 42.
41. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 171.
42. George Kennan, “Report by the Policy Planning Staff,” February 24, 1948, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, General, vol. 1, The United Nations, pt. 2, PPS/23, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/d4.
43. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
44. Sherry, Preparing, 236–37.
45. Sherry, Preparing, 236–37.
46. Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 22–23.
47. Gaddis, We Now Know, 264.
48. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 90–91.
49. See, for example, Claude Ricketts to Chief of Naval Operations, “Study on Strategic Requirements for Guam,” memorandum, February 21, 1963, folder 11000/1, tab B, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives, Washington, DC.
50. Kent E. Calder, Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 239, 209.
51. Bacevich, Washington Rules, 22.
52. Quoted in Standing Army, directed by Thomas Fazi and Enrico Parenti (Rome: Effendemfilm and Takae Films, 2010).
53. Quoted in Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 114, 392.
a At times during the “Cold War,” there were more in the United Kingdom.
1. Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: Harper, 2018), 8.
2. Lt. Col. R. W. Lightfoot, “Military Rights Agreement regarding the Azores Islands,” memorandum, August 30, 1951, 190/69/6/1–2, box 39, NM-15 341, General Records Relating to Overseas Bases, RG 341, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
3. James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1990), 32.
4. Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky, and Walden Bello, American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific (Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books, 1986), 29–30, 45; Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 392.
5. Joshua Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Penguin, 2012), 87.
6. Gretchen Heefner, “Military Power: Overseas Bases,” in Cambridge History of America and the World, ed. David Engerman, Melani McAlister, and Max Paul Friedman, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 480, 490–91; Freeman, American Empire, 87.
7. Walter Trohan, “U.S. Strategy Tied to World Air Superiority,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 14, 1955, 6.
8. Blaker, United States Overseas, 32.
9. Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 52–53.
10. Amy Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6.
11. Col. L. C. Coddington, “(Top Secret) Proposed Agreement with Portugal for U.S. Military Operating Rights in the Azores Islands,” Record and Routing Sheet, August 17, 1951, 190/69/6/1–2, box 39, NM-15 341, General Records Relating to Overseas Bases, RG 341, National Archives and Records Administration.
12. Joseph Gerson, “The Sun Never Sets,” in The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases, ed. Joseph Gerson and Bruce Birchard (Boston: South End, 1991), 16–17.
13. António José Telo, “Foreign Bases and Strategies in Contemporary Portugal,” in Military Bases: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Luís Rodrigues and Sergiy Glebov (Amsterdam: IOS, 2009), 155; Luís Nuno Rodrigues, “Azores or Angola? Military Bases and Self-Determination during the Kennedy Administration,” in Rodrigues and Glebov, Military Bases, 69.
14. Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon, “ ‘The Empire Will Compensate You’: The Structural Dynamics of the U.S. Overseas Basing Network,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 4 (2013): 1034–50.
15. Thanks to Stacy Pettyjohn and Andrew Yeo for their help in my thinking here. See also Cooley and Nexon, “ ‘Empire Will Compensate,’ ” 1034–50; and Holmes, Social Unrest.
16. Cited in Holmes, Social Unrest, 6.
17. Telo, “Foreign Bases and Strategies,” in Rodrigues and Glebov, Military Bases, 155.
18. Heefner, “Military Power,” in Engerman, McAlister, and Friedman, Cambridge History of America.
19. Quoted in Rodrigues, “Azores or Angola?,” 76.
20. Daniel J. Nelson, A History of U.S. Military Forces in Germany (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987), 76–79.
21. “Off the Offset Era,” editorial, New York Times, July 24, 1976, 22, www.nytimes.com/1976/07/24/archives/off-the-offset-era.html.
22. Alexander Cooley, Base Politics: Democratic Change and the US Military Overseas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 208–9.
23. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: Norton, 1983), 44–45.
24. Carole McGranahan, “Empire Out-of-Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization,” in Imperial Formations, ed. Anna Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: SAR, 2007), 180.
25. On cultural and scholarly funding to institutions such as the American Academy in Rome and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as to jazz musicians, artists, and novelists, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999; repr., New York: New Press, 2013).
26. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 490–91.
27. McCoy, In the Shadows, 55.
28. McCoy, In the Shadows, 55.
29. John Lukacs, “American Nationalism,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2012, 57.
30. McCoy, In the Shadows, 55.
31. McCoy, In the Shadows, 55.
32. Cooley, Base Politics, 195–99, 199n88; C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 33. A subsequent treaty was signed in 1995 that adds to but does not invalidate the Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement.
33. “United States Army Africa (ASARAF); Southern European Task Force (SETAF),” GlobalSecurity.org, accessed February 17, 2020, www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/setaf.htm.
34. Disarmiamoli!’s list counted 109 bases after the end of the “Cold War.” “Basi USA-NATO ITALIA,” Disarmiamoli!, accessed July 9, 2018, www.disarmiamoli.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=69 (page discontinued).
35. Carla Monteleone, “Impact and Perspectives of American Bases in Italy,” in Rodrigues and Glebov, Military Bases, 136.
36. Eric Schewe, paper presented in Local Meanings panel, U.S. Bases and the Construction of Hegemony symposium (Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, Temple University, Philadelphia, October 10, 2015).
37. In practice, after a crime, power dynamics, diplomatic politics, and on-the-ground maneuvering by military, embassy, and local officials can determine what happens no matter what a SOFA says.
38. My thanks to Joseph Gerson for pointing this out and for all the expertise he has generously shared.
39. John Willoughby, Remaking the Conquering Heroes: The Postwar American Occupation of Germany (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 150.
40. Maria H. Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 27. The following sections of this chapter owe a great debt to Maria Höhn and her important work.
41. Willoughby, Remaking, 25–28.
42. Quoted in Willoughby, Remaking, 138–39.
43. Willoughby, Remaking, 138–39, 46–49, 137, 140–41.
44. Quoted in Willoughby, Remaking, 118.
45. Anni Baker, Life in the U.S. Armed Forces: (Not) Just Another Job (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008), 119–20; Willoughby, Remaking.
46. Willoughby, Remaking, 118–21; Donna Alvah, “U.S. Military Families Abroad in the Post–Cold War Era and the ‘New Global Posture,’ ” in Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, ed. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 154; Anni P. Baker, American Soldiers Overseas: The Global Military Presence (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 53; Baker, U.S. Armed Forces 120.
47. Nelson, History of U.S. Military, 40–45, 81; Tim Kane, “Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950–2005,” Heritage Foundation, May 24, 2006, www.heritage.org/defense/report/global-us-troop-deployment-1950-2005.
48. Baker, U.S. Armed Forces, 118–19; Baker, American Soldiers, 15.
49. Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, 39–41.
50. See, for example, Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 92–93; Felia Allum, Camorristi, Politicians, and Businessmen: The Transformation of Organized Crime in Post-war Naples (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2006), 99–100.
51. Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, 8, 19, 33–34, 40–44, 52.
52. Baker, American Soldiers, 54.
53. See, for example, Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins; Baker, American Soldiers; and Willoughby, Remaking.
54. Willoughby, Remaking, 150; Nelson, History of U.S. Military, 55–56.
55. Holmes, Social Unrest, 11; Gerson, “Sun Never Sets,” in Gerson and Birchard, Sun Never Sets, 16–17.
56. Holmes, Social Unrest, 6.
57. Kent E. Calder, Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 9. Parts of this chapter derive from David Vine, “No Bases? How Social Movements against U.S. Military Bases Abroad Are Challenging Militarization and Militarism,” in “Cultures of Militarism,” ed. Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, supplemental issue, Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (2019): S158–72.
58. See, for example, Gillem, America Town; Catherine Lutz, ed., Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts (New York: New York University Press, 2009); and David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan, 2015).
59. Jana K. Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 23–24; Stephen I. M. Schwab, Guantánamo, USA: The Untold Story of America’s Cuban Outpost (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).
60. Cooley, Base Politics, 147.
61. U.S. officials decided the expansion was “more trouble than it was worth.” After two decades of protest, the U.S. Air Force moved to nearby Yokota Air Base and transferred Tachikawa to the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Dustin Wright, “From Tokyo to Wounded Knee: Two Afterlives of the Sunagawa Struggle,” Sixties 10, no. 2 (2017): 136–37.
62. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 356.
63. Cooley, Base Politics, 159–68; Rodrigues, “Azores or Angola?,” 70.
64. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision Making on Vietnam, ed. Senator Gravel (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 53–75. This edition is available at www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent5.htm. All three editions are at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB359/index.htm.
65. Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 66.
66. Freeman, American Empire, 227.
67. United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad: Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations, 91st Cong., vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 2417.
68. Freeman, American Empire, 227–28; Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray, and Emmanuela Gakidou, “Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: Analysis of Data from the World Health Survey Programme,” British Medical Journal 336 (2008): www.bmj.com/content/336/7659/1482.full.
1. Horacio Rivero to Chief of Naval Operations, “Long Range Requirements for the Southern Oceans,” enclosure to memorandum, May 21, 1960, folder 5710, box 8, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives, Washington, DC, 2. Rivero credited Barber with doing most of the writing for the Long Range Objectives Group, which produced this document. Parts of this chapter stem from David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
2. Rivero, “Long Range Requirements”; Stuart B. Barber to Paul B. Ryan, April 26, 1982, private collection, 3. My thanks to Richard Barber for his help with details about his father’s life and for providing this and other invaluable documents.
3. Barber to Ryan, April 26, 1982.
4. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 342–43.
5. Robert Scott, Limuria: The Lesser Dependencies of Mauritius (1961; repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), 68, 42–43, 48–50; Vijayalakshmi Teelock, Mauritian History: From Its Beginnings to Modern Times (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 2000), 16–17.
6. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Milking the Cow for All It’s Worth: Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Imperialist Resentment in Hawaiʻi,” in Ethnographies of Empire, ed. Carole McGranahan and John Collins (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 54.
7. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 201; Roy H. Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Mururoa (London: Tauris, 1997), 42.
8. Quoted in Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 360.
9. C. Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 50–53, 200; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Empire (2000; repr., New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 11; Kensei Yoshida, Democracy Betrayed: Okinawa under U.S. Occupation (Bellingham, WA: Western Washington University, [2001?]); Kozy K. Amemiya, “The Bolivian Connection: U.S. Bases and Okinawan Emigration,” in Okinawa: Cold War Island, ed. Chalmers Johnson (Oakland, CA: Japan Policy Research Institute, 1999), 63.
10. Quoted in Michiyo Yonamine, “Economic Crisis Shakes US Forces Overseas: The Price of Base Expansion in Okinawa and Guam,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, no. 9 (2011): https://apjjf.org/2011/9/9/Yonamine-Michiyo/3494/article.html.
11. Beyond bases, U.S. support for ongoing French and British colonial rule became a key U.S. strategy of the early “Cold War”; the European militaries and their colonial regimes served as auxiliary forces to try to maintain U.S.-led NATO domination across most of the globe not controlled by the Soviet Union or China.
12. António José Telo, “Foreign Bases and Strategies in Contemporary Portugal,” in Military Bases: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Luís Rodrigues and Sergiy Glebov (Amsterdam: IOS, 2009), 159.
13. Vine, Island of Shame, chap. 3. I stress “perceived” because threats are a matter of subjective rather than objective assessment.
14. Barber to Ryan, April 26, 1982, 3.
15. Horacio Rivero to Chief of Naval Operations, “Assuring a Future Base Structure in the African-Indian Ocean Area,” enclosure to memorandum, July 11, 1960, folder 5710, box 8, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives; Rivero, “Long Range Requirements.”
16. Rivero, “Assuring a Future Base.”
17. Roy L. Johnson to Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans and Policy), memorandum, July 21, 1958, A4–2 Status of Shore Stations, box 4, 00 Files, U.S. Navy Archives, Washington, DC, 2–3. See also Vine, Island of Shame, introd., chap. 3. Barber was responsible for the memorandum signed by Johnson.
18. Vine, Island of Shame, chap. 3.
19. U.S. Embassy, London, to Secretary of State, telegram, February 27, 1964, folder 11000/1B, box 20, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives, 1–2.
20. John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation Books, 2007), 25.
21. Vine, Island of Shame, chap. 4.
22. R. S. Leddick, “Memorandum for the Record,” November 11, 1969, folder 11000, box 98, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives.
23. Anthony Aust, “Immigration Legislation for BIOT,” memorandum, January 16, 1970, U.K. Lawyers for Chagossians Trial Bundle, on file with the author.
24. “Proposed Naval Communications Facility on Diego Garcia,” attachment, Op-605E4, briefing sheet, [January?] 1970, folder 11000, box 111, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives. See also Vine, Island of Shame, chap. 6; John H. Chafee to Secretary of Defense, memorandum, January 31, 1970, folder 11000, box 111, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives.
25. Vine, Island of Shame, esp. chap. 5.
26. Parts of this section derive from Vine, Island of Shame, and David Vine, “Islands of Imperialism: Military Bases and the Ethnography of U.S. Empire,” in McGranahan and Collins, Ethnographies of Empire, 249–69.
27. S. J. Dunn, “Shore Up the Indian Ocean,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 110, no. 9/979 (1984): 131.
28. David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), chap. 14.
29. Quoted in Robert D. Kaplan, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (New York: Vintage, 2008), 60–61.
30. Quoted in Minagahet Chamorro, “Whether Cruel or Kind . . . ,” No Rest for the Awake (blog), June 11, 2014, http://minagahet.blogspot.com/2014/06/whether-cruel-or-kind.html; see also Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 388.
31. Vine, Base Nation, chap. 16.
32. Immerwahr, Hide an Empire, 343.
33. Joseph Gerson, “The Sun Never Sets,” in The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases, ed. Joseph Gerson and Bruce Birchard (Boston: South End, 1991), 14.
34. Catherine Lutz, “Empire Is in the Details,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 4 (2006): 593–611.
35. Paul Kramer, “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 5 (2018): 919. U.S. officials also supported a violent counterinsurgency campaign against Filipino leftists.
36. Gretchen Heefner, “Military Power: Overseas Bases,” in Cambridge History of America and the World, ed. David Engerman, Melani McAlister, and Max Paul Friedman, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
1. David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), chap. 3.
2. Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 36–37.
3. David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–6.
4. Elmo Zumwalt to E. L. Cochrane Jr., attachment to memorandum for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans and Policy), March 24, 1971, folder 11000, box 174, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives, Washington, DC.
5. Vine, Island of Shame, 113–14.
6. David Ottaway, “Islanders Were Evicted for U.S. Base,” Washington Post, September 9, 1975, A1. See also “The Diego Garcians,” editorial, Washington Post, September 11, 1975.
7. Vine, Island of Shame, chap. 10. See, for example, Benedict Carey, “Did Debbie Reynolds Die of a Broken Heart?,” New York Times, December 29, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/health/did-debbie-reynolds-die-of-a-broken-heart.html.
8. Cheryl Lewis, “Kahoʻolawe and the Military,” ICE case study 84, Spring 2001, http://mandalaprojects.com/ice/ice-cases/hawaiibombs.htm.
9. “Conference Report Filed in House (07/26/1988),” H. R. 442: Civil Liberties Act of 1987, accessed February 17, 2020, www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/442.
10. Katherine T. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 38–39.
11. Aqqaluk Lynge, The Right to Return: Fifty Years of Struggle by Relocated Inughuit in Greenland (n.p.: Atuagkat, 2002).
12. Miyume Tanji, “Japanese Wartime Occupation, Reparation, and Guam’s Chamorro Self-Determination,” in Under Occupation: Resistance and Struggle in a Militarised Asia-Pacific, ed. Daniel Broudy, Peter Simpson, and Makoto Arakaki (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 162–67.
13. Leevin Camacho, “Resisting the Proposed Military Buildup on Guam,” in Broudy, Simpson, and Arakaki, Under Occupation, 186. Some quote a figure as high as 82 percent. See LisaLinda Natividad and Gwyn Kirk, “Fortress Guam: Resistance to US Military Mega-buildup,” Asia-Pacific Journal 19, no. 1 (2010): https://apjjf.org/-LisaLinda-Natividad/3356/article.html.
14. Timothy P. Maga, Defending Paradise: The United States and Guam, 1898–1950 (New York: Garland, 1988), 203–7.
15. “Definitions of Insular Area Political Organizations,” Office of Insular Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior, accessed February 26, 2020, www.doi.gov/oia/islands/politicatypes.
16. See, for example, Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 50–53, 200; and Alexander Cooley, Base Politics: Democratic Change and the US Military Overseas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 146.
17. Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly M. Barker, The Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2008).
18. David Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia: Discourses over Development in a Pacific Territory, 1944–1982 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1998), 193; Peter Marks, “Paradise Lost: The Americanization of the Pacific,” Newsday, January 12, 1986, 10; Pacific Concerns Research Centre, “The Kwajalein Atoll and the New Arms Race: The US Anti-ballistic Weapons System and Consequences for the Marshall Islands of the Pacific,” Indigenous Affairs 2 (2001): 38–43.
19. C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 36.
20. Catherine Lutz, “Introduction: Bases, Empire, and Global Response,” in Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts, ed. Catherine Lutz (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1–44.
21. Quoted in Vine, Island of Shame, 181.
22. McCaffrey, Military Power, 9–10.
23. Frances Fox Piven, conversation with the author, New York, 2002.
24. U.S. bases inside the United States have displaced locals of many races and ethnicities. There is reason to believe that most of the displaced have been disproportionately people of color and relatively poor. Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 26.
25. A. M. Jackson to Chief of Naval Operations, memorandum, December 7, 1964, folder 11000/1B, box 26, 00 Files, U.S. Navy Archives, Washington, DC, 3–4.
26. Regina (on the Application of Bancoult) v. Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, (2006) EWHC 1038, para. 27.
27. W. E. B. DuBois, The World and Africa, exp. ed. (1946; repr., New York: International, 1965); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pt. 2, Imperialism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951).
28. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,” in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 19.
29. Phillip W. D. Martin, “Why So Many Iraqis Hate Us? Try ‘Towel Head’ on for Size,” Huffington Post, April 11, 2008 (updated May 25, 2011), www.huffingtonpost.com/phillip-martin/why-so-many-iraqis-hate-u_b_96330.html; Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 24.
30. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction,” in Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, Violence in War, 20–22.
31. See, for example, Gillem, America Town; Lutz, Bases of Empire; and Vine, Base Nation.
32. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction,” in Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, Violence in War, 20.
33. Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, “Pentagon Papers (2): The Human Reality of Realpolitik,” Foreign Policy 4 (1971): 159.
34. John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 292, 328–30, 390n82; Natalie Y. Moore, “Payback,” Marshall Project, October 30, 2018, www.themarshallproject.org/2018/10/30/payback.
35. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction,” in Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, Violence in War, 21.
36. Quoted in Vine, Island of Shame, 197–98.
37. Quoted in Vine, Island of Shame, 195.
38. “Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965,” General List 169, International Court of Justice, February 25, 2019, www.icj-cij.org/en/case/169.
1. United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad: Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations, 91st Cong., vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 2433–34. Parts of the conversation with Walter Pincus in this chapter stem from David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 243–48.
2. James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1990).
3. United States Security Agreements, 2433–34.
4. C. S. Minter Jr. to Chief of Naval Operations [Elmo Zumwalt], memorandum, July 20, 1972, folder 11000, box 161, 00 Files, Naval History and Heritage Command Archives, Washington, DC.
5. Vytautas B. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia: Creation of the Indian Ocean Base (San Jose, CA: Writer’s Showcase, 2001), 49, 58.
6. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 64–71.
7. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 77, 112–13, 226, 238–40, 288, 352; Leffler, “American Conception,” 164–85.
8. At the end of World War II and in the early postwar period, U.S. leaders strongly opposed Stalin’s interest in establishing a base presence in the Turkish Dardanelles Straits. Melvyn P. Leffler, “Strategy, Diplomacy, and the Cold War: The United States, Turkey, and NATO, 1945–1952,” in Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 164–86; Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 148–49, 193, 204.
9. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 286.
10. Jimmy Carter, “State of the Union Address, 1980,” January 23, 1980, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/assets/documents/speeches/su80jec.phtml.
11. Joe Stork, “The Carter Doctrine and US Bases in the Middle East,” MERIP Reports, September 1980, 3.
12. “Diego Garcia ‘Camp Justice,’ ” GlobalSecurity.org, accessed February 13, 2020, www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/diego-garcia.htm; David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), chap. 6.
13. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 413–14.
14. Tom Hayden, Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (New York: New Press, 2004), 57; William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 699nn119–20.
15. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dalton, 2009), 218.
16. Todd Greentree, Crossroads of Intervention: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008), 117; LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 150, 297.
17. Greentree, Crossroads, 117.
18. Richard W. Stewart, ed., American Military History, vol. 2, The United States Army in a Global Era, 1917–2008, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2010), 398.
19. Greentree, Crossroads, 121–22, 162.
20. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 150, 297.
21. Glenn Garvin, Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1992), 40–41; LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 395.
22. U.S. General Accounting Office, Honduras: Continuing U.S. Military Presence at Soto Cano Base Is Not Critical, GAO/NSIAD-95-39 (Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 1995), 2, www.gao.gov/assets/230/220840.pdf.
23. Eric L. Haney, “Inside Delta Force,” in American Soldier: Stories of Special Forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, ed. Clint Willis (New York: Adrenaline, 2002), 28; Greentree, Crossroads, 116.
24. For details and source information on these bases, see Vine, Base Nation, chap. 5.
25. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 331
26. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 317, 587.
27. National Security Archive, Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras (New York: Warner Books, 1987), 52–53.
28. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 299.
29. Greentree, Crossroads, 7.
30. Haney, “Inside Delta Force,” 34.
31. U.S. General Accounting Office, Honduras, 1.
32. Thanks and credit to Joe Masco for suggesting this line of analysis.
33. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Empire (2000; repr., New York: Metropolitan, 2004), xi.
34. Adrienne Pine, Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 35–38; T. W. Ward, Gangsters without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
35. Paglen, Blank Spots, 237, 211.
36. Thom Shanker, “Lessons of Iraq Help U.S. Fight a Drug War in Honduras,” New York Times, May 5, 2012, 1.
37. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Study on Homicide 2013: Trends, Contexts, Data (Vienna: UNODC, 2014), 24, 126.
38. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 372–73; Enseng Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (2004): 212–13.
1. Andrew Hoehn, interviews with the author, Pentagon City, VA, April 29 and July 2, 2012.
2. “Strengthening U.S. Global Defense Posture,” Department of Defense, September 17, 2004, 5, www.dmzhawaii.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/global_posture.pdf.
3. Keith B. Cunningham and Andreas Klemmer, Restructuring the US Military Bases in Germany: Scope, Impacts, and Opportunities, report 4 (Bonn, Germany: Bonn International Center for Conversion, 1995), 13, 20. There is a discrepancy in this report, which cites more than 92,000 acres (37,260 hectares) returned by the United States in total and more than 100,000 (40,500 hectares) returned by the U.S. Army alone.
4. Tim Kane, “Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950–2005,” Heritage Foundation, May 24, 2006, www.heritage.org/defense/report/global-us-troop-deployment-1950-2005.
5. Joshua Freeman, American Empire 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, (New York: Penguin, 2012), 434.
6. Freeman, American Empire, 433–34.
7. Freeman, American Empire, 433–34.
8. Quoted in Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 148.
9. Catherine Lutz, “Warmaking as the American Way of Life,” in The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do about It, ed. Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 50.
10. Roberto González, Hugh Gusterson, and David Price, “Introduction: War, Culture, and Counterinsurgency,” in The Counter-counterinsurgency Manual, or Notes on Demilitarizing American Society, ed. Network of Concerned Anthropologists Steering Committee (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2009), 5; Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).
11. Freeman, American Empire, 434.
12. U.S. General Accounting Office, Honduras: Continuing U.S. Military Presence at Soto Cano Base Is Not Critical, GAO/NSIAD-95-39 (Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 1995), 4, 1, 8, www.gao.gov/assets/230/220840.pdf.
13. Scott M. Hines, “Joint Task Force—Bravo: The U.S. Military Presence in Honduras; U.S. Policy for an Evolving Region” (master’s thesis, University of Maryland and National Defense University, 1994), 1.
14. William R. Meara, Contra Cross: Insurgency and Tyranny in Central America, 1979–1989 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 32, 155.
15. Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging Wars and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (New York: Norton, 2003), 199.
16. Priest, Mission, 200–206, 199, 77.
17. John Lindsay-Poland, “Pentagon Building Bases in Central America and Colombia Despite Constitutional Court Striking Down Base Agreement,” Fellowship of Reconciliation (blog), January 27, 2011, http://forusa.org/blogs/john-lindsay-poland/pentagon-building-bases-central-america-colombia/8445 (blog discontinued); David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), chap. 5.
18. Associated Press, “U.S. Military Expands Its Drug War in Latin America,” USA Today, February 3, 2013, www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/03/us-expands-drug-war-latin-america/1887481/; John Lindsay-Poland, “Pentagon Continues Contracting U.S. Companies in Latin America,” Fellowship of Reconciliation (blog), January 31, 2013, http://forusa.org/blogs/john-lindsay-poland/pentagon-continues-contracting-us-companies-latin-america/11782 (blog discontinued).
19. Vine, Base Nation, chap. 5.
20. Parts of this chapter draw on David Vine, “No Bases? How Social Movements against U.S. Military Bases Abroad Are Challenging Militarization and Militarism,” in “Cultures of Militarism,” ed. Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, supplemental issue, Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (2019): S158–72. See also Amy Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Alexander Cooley, Base Politics: Democratic Change and the US Military Overseas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
21. A communications station remained in Morocco after U.S. forces left Kenitra.
22. Bret Lortie, “And Then They Went Home,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May–June 2000, 7.
23. Andrew Yeo, Activists, Alliances, and Anti–U.S. Base Protests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 186.
24. Joseph Gerson, “The Sun Never Sets,” in The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases, ed. Joseph Gerson and Bruce Birchard (Boston: South End, 1991), 27; Andrew Yeo, “Not in Anyone’s Backyard: The Emergence and Identity of a Transnational Anti-base Network,” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2009): 573.
25. Richard W. Stewart, ed., American Military History, vol. 2, The United States Army in a Global Era, 1917–2008, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2010), 401–6.
26. Michael Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin America and United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 152.
27. Stewart, American Military History, 2:427.
28. Pratap Chatterjee, Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War (New York: Nation Books, 2009), 61–62.
29. P. W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 80.
30. Emma M. Ashford, “Better Balancing in the Middle East,” in US Grand Strategy in the 21st Century, ed. Benjamin H. Friedman and A. Trevor Thrall (London: Routledge, 2018), 179.
31. Quoted in Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006), 165.
32. Bradley L. Bowman, “After Iraq: Future U.S. Military Posture in the Middle East,” Washington Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2008): 85.
33. Matthew Evangelista, “Coping with 9/11: Alternatives to the War Paradigm,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, June 16, 2011, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2011/Coping%20with%20911.pdf. I am a board member of the Costs of War Project.
34. Michael O’Hanlon, “A Flawed Masterpiece,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 3 (2002): 47–53; Rebecca Grant, “The War Nobody Expected,” Air Force Magazine, April 2002, 34–40.
35. Ann Jones, Winter in Kabul: Life without Peace in Afghanistan (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 4.
36. Tom Englehardt, “The Wedding Crashers: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush’s Wars,” TomDispatch, July 13, 2008, www.tomdispatch.com/post/174954.
37. Rory Carroll, “Bloody Evidence of US Blunder,” Guardian, January 6, 2002.
38. I regret being unable to conduct firsthand ethnographic research in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq or any extensive research with refugees from the wars in these countries. Details in this section come from Afghanistan, Collateral Damage, directed by Alberto Vendemmiati and Fabrizio Lazzaretti (Rome: Karousel Films/POV/RAI 3, 2002). See also Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin (Nella Terra dei Mujaheddin), directed by Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Alberto Vendemmiati (Rome: Elleti/Karousel Films, 2001).
39. Afghanistan, Collateral Damage.
40. Congressional Research Service, United States Foreign Policy Objectives and Overseas Military Installations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), 101–102.
41. Ken Adelman, “Cakewalk in Iraq,” Washington Post, February 13, 2002, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2002/02/13/cakewalk-in-iraq/cf09301c-c6c4-4f2e-8268-7c93017f5e93/?utm_term=.ec010bc2a1a9.
1. Amy Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 183.
2. Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (Washington, DC: Project for a New American Century, 2000).
3. Nick Turse, “The Pentagon’s Shadow Military Bases,” Nation, January 9, 2019, www.thenation.com/article/syria-iraq-pentagon-overseas-military-bases/; David de Jong, email to the author, February 4, 2014, quoting a press officer for the Secretary of Defense: “Using October 2011 as a benchmark, we had about 800 facilities—ranging from very small checkpoints that have maybe a squad or platoon of ISAF forces on it to bases that have several hundred to as many as a thousand ISAF members on them.”
4. Tom Engelhardt, “How Permanent Are Those Bases?,” TomDispatch, June 7, 2007, www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/tom_engelhardt_how_permanent_are_those_bases.
5. Guy Raz, “U.S. Builds Air Base in Iraq for Long Haul,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, October 12, 2007, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15184773; Tom Engelhardt, “Baseless Considerations,” TomDispatch, November 5, 2007, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/174858/tomgram%3A__baseless_considerations.
6. “Diego Garcia ‘Camp Justice,’ ” GlobalSecurity.org, accessed February 13, 2020, www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/diego-garcia.htm.
7. David Vine, “Forty-Five Blows against Democracy: How U.S. Military Bases Back Dictators, Autocrats, and Military Regimes,” TomDispatch, May 16, 2017, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176281/.
8. David Vine, “The Bases of War in the Middle East: From Carter to the Islamic State, 35 Years of Building Bases and Sowing Disaster,” TomDispatch, November 13, 2014, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175922/tomgram%3A_david_vine,_a_permanent_infrastructure_for_permanent_war/; Robert F. Worth, Mark Mazzetti, and Scott Shane, “Drone Strikes’ Risks to Get Rare Moment in the Public Eye,” New York Times, February 5, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/middleeast/with-brennan-pick-a-light-on-drone-strikes-hazards.html?hp.
9. Matthew Wallin, “U.S. Military Bases and Facilities in the Middle East,” fact sheet, American Security Project, June 2018, www.americansecurityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Ref-0213-US-Military-Bases-and-Facilities-Middle-East.pdf; Congressional Research Service, The United Arab Emirates (UAE): Issues for U.S. Policy (Washington, DC: CRS, 2019).
10. Leila Fadel, “U.S. Seeking 58 Bases in Iraq, Shiite Lawmakers Say,” McClatchy DC, June 9, 2008, www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24486298.html.
11. Humeyra Pamuk and Phil Stewart, “U.S. Halts Secretive Drone Program with Turkey over Syria Incursion,” Reuters, February 5, 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-usa-drone-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-halts-secretive-drone-program-with-turkey-over-syria-incursion-idUSKBN1ZZ1AB.
12. Judah Ari Gross, “In First, US Establishes Permanent Military Base in Israel,” Times of Israel, September 18, 2017, www.timesofisrael.com/in-first-us-establishes-permanent-military-base-in-israel/; “U.S. Navy Returns to Israeli Port in Sign of ‘Deep Alliance,’ ” Haaretz, October 14, 2018, www.haaretz.com/israel-news/u-s-navy-returns-to-israeli-port-in-sign-of-deep-alliance-1.6554270. In Egypt there is at least one medical research facility (which may have other functions) in Cairo. U.S. troops have occupied at least two bases on the Sinai Peninsula since 1982 as part of Camp David Accords peacekeeping.
13. Quadrennial Defense Review, 2001 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2001), 25.
14. Raymond F. DuBois, interview with the author, Washington, DC, April 29, 2012.
15. George W. Bush, “Statement on the Ongoing Review of the Overseas Force Posture,” November 25, 2003, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-ongoing-review-the-overseas-force-posture.
16. David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 52–59; Douglas J. Feith, “A Smarter Way to Use Our Troops,” Washington Post, August 19, 2004, A25.
17. “Strengthening U.S. Global Defense Posture,” Department of Defense, September 17, 2004, 5, www.dmzhawaii.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/global_posture.pdf.
18. “DOD Announces Plans to Adjust Posture of Land Forces in Europe,” press release, U.S. Army Europe Public Affairs, February 16, 2012, https://media.defense.gov/2018/May/03/2001911883/-1/-1/0/02162012%20DOD%20ANNOUNCES%20PLANS%20TO%20ADJUST%20POSTURE%20OF%20LAND%20FORCES%20IN%20EUROPE.PDF.
19. National Defense Budget Estimates for FY 2014 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2013), 146–48.
20. National Defense Budget Estimates, 143.
21. U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriation Bill, 2014, Senate Report 113-048 (113th Congress, 1st session, June 27, 2013).
22. “World Military Expenditure Grows to $1.8 Trillion in 2018,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, April 29, 2019, www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2019/world-military-expenditure-grows-18-trillion-2018.
23. William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, “Boondoggle, Inc.: Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget,” TomDispatch, May 7, 2019, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176561/tomgram%3A_hartung_and_smithberger%2C_a_dollar-by-dollar_tour_of_the_national_security_state.
24. Neta C. Crawford, “United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of the Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion Spent and Obligated,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, November 13, 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/US%20Budgetary%20Costs%20of%20Wars%20November%202019.pdf.
25. R. Jeffrey Smith, “Pentagon’s Accounting Shambles May Cost an Additional $1 Billion,” Center for Public Integrity, October 13, 2011, https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/pentagons-accounting-shambles-may-cost-an-additional-1-billion/; Barbara Lee, “Audit the Pentagon,” Daily Kos (blog), October 25, 2012, www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/25/1150275/-Audit-the-Pentagon#.
26. Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Transforming Wartime Contracting: Controlling Costs, Reducing Risks; Final Report to Congress (Arlington, VA: CWCIA, 2011).
27. Some of the contracts are for nonbase items like weapons procurement. Because thousands of contracts are believed to be omitted from these tallies thanks to accounting errors, $385 billion is a reasonable reflection of the funds flowing to private contractors to support the country’s global base collection. Because of the Pentagon’s poor accounting practices and secrecy, the true total may be significantly higher. For a full discussion and methodology, see Vine, Base Nation, chap. 12.
28. Vine, Base Nation, chap. 13.
29. United States Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2015 Budget Amendment: Overview Overseas Contingency Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, June 2014), 5; United States Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2015 Budget Request: Overview Overseas Contingency Operations Budget Amendment (Washington, DC: November 2014).
30. “Defense: Long-Term Contribution Trends,” Center for Responsive Politics, accessed February 17, 2020, www.opensecrets.org/industries/totals.php?cycle=2020&ind=D.
31. See “Adding It Up: The Top Players in Foreign Agent Lobbying,” ProPublica, August 18, 2009, www.propublica.org/article/adding-it-up-the-top-players-in-foreign-agent-lobbying-718.
32. Vine, Base Nation, 244–51.
33. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961,” January 17, 1961, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp.
34. Gareth Porter, “The Permanent-War Complex,” American Conservative, November–December, 2018, 32. There is some debate about whether Eisenhower called it the “Military Industrial Congressional Complex” in an early draft but shortened the name to avoid offending Congress.
35. Porter, “Permanent-War Complex,” 28.
36. Heidi M. Peters, Moshe Schwartz, and Lawrence Kapp, Department of Defense Contractor and Troop Levels in Iraq and Afghanistan: 2007–2017, report R44116 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2017).
37. Week Staff, “ ‘Top Secret America’: By the Numbers,” Washington Post, July 19, 2010, https://theweek.com/articles/492600/secret-america-by-numbers; Porter, “Permanent-War Complex,” 28–29.
38. Quoted in Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 188.
1. The description at the beginning of this chapter builds off David Vine, “The Lily-Pad Strategy: How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War,” TomDispatch, July 16, 2012, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175568.
2. Craig Whitlock, “Mysterious Fatal Crash Provides Rare Glimpse of U.S. Commandos in Mali,” Washington Post, July 8, 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mysterious-fatal-crash-provides-rare-glimpse-of-us-commandos-in-mali/2012/07/08/gJQAGO71WW_story.html; Thomas Gibbons-Neff et al., “Chaos as Militants Overran Airfield, Killing 3 Americans in Kenya,” New York Times, January 22, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/world/africa/shabab-kenya-terrorism.html; Nick Turse, “U.S. Secret Wars in Africa Rage On, Despite Talk of Downsizing,” Intercept, July 26, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/07/26/us-special-operations-africa-green-berets-navy-seals/.
3. Quoted in Nick Turse, “The U.S. Has More Military Operations in Africa Than the Middle East,” Vice, December 12, 2018, https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3my38/exclusive-the-us-has-more-military-operations-in-africa-than-the-middle-east.
4. Quoted in Nick Turse, “America’s War-Fighting Footprint in Africa: Secret U.S. Military Documents Reveal a Constellation of American Military Bases across That Continent,” TomDispatch, April 27, 2017, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176272/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_u.s._military_moves_deeper_into_africa/.
5. Stephen J. Townsend, “Statement of General Stephen J. Townsend, United States Army Commander, United States Africa Command before the Senate Armed Services Committee,” U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, January 30, 2020, 9, www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Townsend_01-30-20.pdf; Nick Turse, “Commandos sans Frontières: The Global Growth of U.S. Special Operations Forces,” TomDispatch, July 17, 2018, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176448/.
6. Turse, “Commandos sans Frontières.”
7. Amedee Bollee, “Djibouti: From French Outpost to US Base,” Review of African Political Economy 30, no. 97 (2003): 481–84.
8. Lauren Ploch, Africa Command: U.S. Strategic Interests and the Role of the U.S. Military in Africa (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2011), 9, 13; Benjamin A. Benson, AFRICOM, email to the author, November 13, 2014.
9. George W. Bush, “President Bush Creates a Department of Defense Unified Combatant Command for Africa,” press release, White House, February 6, 2007, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/02/20070206–3.html.
10. Catherine Besteman, “Counter AFRICOM,” in The Counter-counterinsurgency Manual, or Notes on Demilitarizing American Society, ed. Network of Concerned Anthropologists Steering Committee (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2009), 118–21.
11. Akil R. King, Zackary H. Moss, and Afi Y. Pittman, “Overcoming Logistics Challenges in East Africa,” Army Sustainment, January–February 2014, 30.
12. Turse, “America’s War-Fighting Footprint.”
13. The following details rely heavily on Turse’s important work, especially Nick Turse, “U.S. Military Says It Has a ‘Light Footprint’ in Africa: These Documents Show a Vast Network of Bases,” Intercept, December 1, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/u-s-military-says-it-has-a-light-footprint-in-africa-these-documents-show-a-vast-network-of-bases/. I also benefited from the generous help of Adam Moore and the Costs of War Project (Stephanie Savell, emails to the author, November 9, 2018, and March 10, 2020). See also David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), chap. 16.
14. Quoted in Turse, “America’s War-Fighting Footprint.”
15. Quoted in Turse, “U.S. Military Says.”
16. Richard Reeve and Zoë Pelter, From New Frontier to New Normal: Counter-terrorism Operations in the Sahel-Sahara (London: Remote Control Group/Oxford Research Group, 2014), 25.
17. Turse, “U.S. Military Says”; “Al Shabaab,” Mapping Militant Organizations, Stanford University, February 20, 2016, http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/view/61?highlightpal1shabaab; Catherine Besteman, “The Costs of War in Somalia,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, September 5, 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/Costs%20of%20War%20in%20Somalia_Besteman.pdf; Gibbons-Neff et al., “Militants Overran Airfield.”
18. See, for example, Nick Turse, “ ‘What Does War Have to Do with Me?’ Combat Viewed from the Rooftops and Beyond,” TomDispatch, June 27, 2019, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176580.
19. Turse, “U.S. Military Says”; Craig Whitlock, “U.S. to Airlift African Troops to Central African Republic,” Washington Post, December 9, 2013.
20. Contractors have carried out significantly larger projects worldwide. Nick Turse, “U.S. Military Is Building a $100 Million Drone Base in Africa,” Intercept, September 29, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/09/29/u-s-military-is-building-a-100-million-drone-base-in-africa/.
21. Turse, “U.S. Military Says.”
22. “Statement of General Carter Ham, USA Commander: United States Africa Command before the Senate Armed Services Committee,” United States Africa Command, March 7, 2013, www.africom.mil/Doc/10432. While some of the Air Force and Navy construction could be for local military forces, building a base almost always involves inspection, “end-use monitoring,” and usage rights, making it another effective way to disguise a U.S. presence. Thanks go to John Lindsay-Poland for making this point.
23. Nick Turse, “The Pivot to Africa: The Startling Size, Scope, and Growth of U.S. Military Operations on the African Continent,” TomDispatch, September 5, 2013, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175743; Reeve and Pelter, New Frontier, 22; Lalit Wadhwa, “The Society of American Military Engineers” (PowerPoint presentation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Europe District, April 12, 2013).
24. Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations since 9/11 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2011), 10; Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 147–48; Alexander Cooley, Base Politics: Democratic Change and the US Military Overseas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 238, 242.
25. Reeve and Pelter, New Frontier, 16–18, 14.
26. Ploch, “Africa Command,” 22–23.
27. Turse, “Pivot to Africa”; Oscar Nkala and Kim Helfrich, “US Army Looking to Contractors for African Operations,” Defence Web, September 17, 2013, www.defenceweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=31919:us-army-looking-to-contractors-for-african-operations&catid=56:diplomacy-a-peace&Itemid=111.
28. Nick Turse, “Drug Wars, Missing Money, and a Phantom $500 Million: Pentagon Watchdog Calls Out Two Commands for Financial Malfeasance,” TomDispatch, February 8, 2018, www.tomdispatch.com/post/176383/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_u.s._military%27s_drug_of_choice/.
29. Herbert Docena, “The US Base in the Philippines,” Inquirer, February 20, 2012, http://opinion.inquirer.net/23405/the-us-base-in-the-philippines; “Philippines: Security and Foreign Forces,” Jane’s Sentinel Security Assessment, May 14, 2009.
30. Robert D. Kaplan, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (New York: Vintage, 2008), 315.
31. Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military (New York: Vintage Departures, 2005), 131–84; Carlo Muñoz, “The Philippines Re-opens Military Bases to US Forces,” June 6, 2012, http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/operations/231257-philippines-re-opens-military-bases-to-us-forces-.
32. Vine, Base Nation, chap. 16; Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Policy), “Global Defense Posture and International Agreements Overview” (slide presentation, U.S. Department of Defense, April 27, 2009), 6, 9–10.
33. Chris Woods, “CIA Drones Quit One Pakistan Site—but US Keeps Access to Other Airbases,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, December 15, 2011, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/15/cia-drones-quit-pakistan-site-but-us-keeps-access-to-other-airbases/.
34. Vine, Base Nation, chap. 16; 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.
35. Vine, Base Nation, 53–59.
36. Turse, “U.S. Military Says.”
37. David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), chap. 6.
38. United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad: Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations, 91st Cong., vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 2433–34.
39. “Drone Bases Updates,” Center for the Study of the Drone, Bard University, October 1, 2018, https://dronecenter.bard.edu/drone-bases-updates/.
40. Nick Turse, “The U.S. Is Building a Drone Base in Niger That Will Cost More Than $280 Million by 2024,” Intercept, August 21, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/08/21/us-drone-base-niger-africa/.
41. Carmela Fonbuena, “PH, US ‘Close’ to Signing Military Deal,” Rappler, February 5, 2014, www.rappler.com/nation/49733-philippines-united-states-bases-access.
42. Docena, “US Base.”
43. Quoted in Robert D. Kaplan, “What Rumsfeld Got Right: How Donald Rumsfeld Remade the U.S. Military for a More Uncertain World,” Atlantic, July–August 2008, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/what-rumsfeld-got-right/306870/.
44. Kaplan, “What Rumsfeld Got Right.”
45. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 41; Joint Staff Planners, “Over-all Examination of U.S. Requirements for Military Bases and Rights,” enclosure C to “Over-all Examination of U.S. Requirements for Military Bases and Rights,” JCS 570/40 report, October 23, 1945, Central Decimal File 1942–45, box 272, sec. 9, 217, RG 218, U.S. National Archives, Washington, DC.
46. George W. Bush, “Text of Bush’s Speech at West Point,” New York Times, June 1, 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/international/text-of-bushs-speech-at-west-point.html.
47. Thomas Donnelly and Vance Serchuk, “Toward a Global Cavalry,” American Enterprise Institute, July 1, 2003, www.aei.org/research-products/report/toward-a-global-cavalry/.
48. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts, 1–2.
49. Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 2; Byrd, quoted on 33.
50. Phillip W. D. Martin, “Why So Many Iraqis Hate Us? Try ‘Towel Head’ on for Size,” Huffington Post, April 11, 2008 (updated May 25, 2011), www.huffingtonpost.com/phillip-martin/why-so-many-iraqis-hate-u_b_96330.html.
51. Townsend, “Statement,” 10; Mark T. Esper, “In-Flight Media Availability by Secretary Esper,” transcript, U.S. Department of Defense, January 22, 2020, www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2063275/in-flight-media-availability-by-secretary-esper/.
52. Paul C. Wright, “U.S. Military Intervention in Africa: The New Blueprint for Global Domination,” Global Research, August 20, 2010, www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=20708; “Sao Tome Sparks American Military Interest,” Voice of America, October 28, 2009, www.voanews.com/archive/sao-tome-sparks-american-military-interest.
53. “US Naval Base to Protect Sao Tome Oil,” BBC News, August 22, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2210571.stm.
54. Joeva Rock, “Pythons and Lily Pads,” Africa Is a Country, April 2, 2018, https://africasacountry.com/2018/04/pythons-and-lily-pads.
55. Quoted in James Bellamy Foster, “A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy,” Monthly Review 58, no. 2 (2006): www.monthlyreview.org/0606jbf.htm.
56. “Mapping Africa’s Natural Resources,” Al Jazeera, February 20, 2018, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2016/10/mapping-africa-natural-resources-161020075811145.html.
57. “Mapping Africa’s Natural Resources.”
58. Michael Klare and Daniel Volman, “America, China and the Scramble for Africa’s Oil,” Review of African Political Economy 33, no. 108 (2006): 298–302.
59. Townsend, “Statement,” 7.
60. Nick Turse, “The New Obama Doctrine, a Six-Point Plan for Global War: Special Ops, Drones, Spy Games, Civilian Soldiers, Proxy Fighters, and Cyber Warfare,” TomDispatch, June 14, 2012, www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175557/nick_turse_the_changing_face_of_empire.
61. Townsend, “Statement,” 17–18.
62. Raymond F. DuBois, interview with the author, Washington, DC, April 29, 2012.
63. Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 235.
64. DuBois, interview.
65. Anonymous State Department official, interview with the author, Washington, DC, February 2011.
66. See Vine, Base Nation, 283–90; Keith B. Cunningham and Andreas Klemmer, Restructuring the US Military Bases in Germany: Scope, Impacts, and Opportunities, report 4 (Bonn, Germany: Bonn International Center for Conversion, 1995), 6.
67. Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 22.
68. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Defense Headquarters: DOD Needs to Reassess Options for Permanent Location of U.S. Africa Command; Report to Congressional Committees (Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 2013).
69. Vine, Base Nation, 313; David M. Rodriguez, “Statement of General David M. Rodriguez, USA, Commander, United States Africa Command before the Senate Armed Services Committee Posture Hearing,” March 6, 2014, 9, www.securityassistance.org/sites/default/files/Rodriguez_03-06-14.pdf.
70. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief FinancialOfficer, Operation and Maintenance Overview: Fiscal Year 2015 Budget Estimates, U.S. Department of Defense, March 2014, 78, https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2015/fy2015_OM_Overview.pdf; Inspector General, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa Needed Better Guidance and Systems to Adequately Manage Civil-Military Operations (Alexandria, VA: U.S. Department of Defense, October 30, 2013).
71. Jonathan Kennedy, “How Drone Strikes and a Fake Vaccination Program Have Inhibited Polio Eradication in Pakistan: An Analysis of National Level Data,” International Journal of Health Services 47, no. 4 (2017): 807–25.
72. Turse, “Drone Base in Niger.”
73. Amnesty International, “Cameroon’s Secret Torture Chambers: Human Rights Violations and War Crimes in the Fight against Boko Haram,” July 19, 2017, www.amnestyusa.org/reports/cameroons-secret-torture/; Nick Turse, “New Video Shows More Atrocities by Cameroon, a Key U.S. Ally in Drone Warfare,” Intercept, August 31, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/08/31/cameroon-video-execution-boko-haram/.
74. Reeve and Pelter, New Frontier, 3, 27.
75. Alex de Waal and Abdul Mohammed, “Handmaiden to Africa’s Generals,” New York Times, April 15, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/opinion/handmaiden-to-africas-generals.html. See also Adam Moore and James Walker, “Tracing the US Military’s Presence in Africa,” Geopolitics 21, no. 3 (2016): 686–716.
76. Klare and Volman, “Scramble for Africa’s Oil,” 306; Sandra T. Barnes, “Global Flows: Terror, Oil, and Strategic Philanthropy,” African Studies Review 48, no. 1 (2005): 11.
77. Reeve and Pelter, New Frontier, 3.
78. Kofi Nsia-Pepra, “Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy in Africa: Strategic Gain or Backlash,” Military Review, January–February 2014, 58.
79. Nick Turse, “Special Ops at War: From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More,” TomDispatch, January 9, 2018, www.tomdispatch.com/post/176371/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_coming_year_in_special_ops/; Seth G. Jones et al., The Evolution of the Salafi-Jihadist Threat (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2018).
80. Seth G. Jones and Martin C. Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa’ida (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008); Erik Goepner, “In Afghanistan, the Withdrawal of U.S. Troops Is Long Overdue,” CATO Institute, September 29, 2017, www.cato.org/blog/afghanistan-withdrawal-us-troops-long-overdue.
81. The countries are France, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, the United States, and possibly Saudi Arabia. Neil Melvin, “The Foreign Military Presence in the Horn of Africa Region,” SIPRI Background Paper, April 2019, 2, https://sipri.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/sipribp1904.pdf.
82. Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007), chap. 6; Klare and Volman, “Scramble for Africa’s Oil,” 307.
83. Nick Turse, “The U.S. Will Invade West Africa in 2023 after an Attack in New York—according to Pentagon War Game,” Intercept, October 22, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/10/22/the-u-s-will-invade-west-africa-in-2023-after-an-attack-in-new-york-according-to-pentagon-war-game/.
84. Peter Cronau, “The Base: Pine Gap’s Role in US Warfighting,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio, August 20, 2017, www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/the-base-pine-gaps-role-in-us-warfighting/8813604.
85. Eric G. John to U.S. Secretary of Defense, cable, May 23, 2008, Bangkok, Thailand, WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/05/08BANGKOK1611.html; Kaplan, Hog Pilots, 79–82; Craig Whitlock, “U.S. Seeks Return to SE Asian Bases,” Washington Post, June 22, 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-seeks-return-to-se-asian-bases/2012/06/22/gJQAKP83vV_story.html.
1. Anand Gopal cited “dozens” of bases in Syria alone in a 2017 interview. “Anand Gopal: As U.S. Continues Strikes in Afghanistan and Syria, Where Is Coverage of Civilian Deaths?,” Democracy Now!, November 21, 2017, www.democracynow.org/2017/11/21/anand_gopal_as_us_continues_strikes; Tara Copp, “Pentagon Strips Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria Troop Numbers from Web,” Military Times, April 9, 2018, www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/04/09/dod-strips-iraq-afghanistan-syria-troop-numbers-from-web/.
2. Oriana Pawlyk, “2 Years into Yemen War, US Ramps Up Refueling of Saudi Jets,” Military.com, February 15, 2017, www.military.com/daily-news/2017/02/15/2-years-yemen-war-us-ramps-up-refueling-saudi-jets.html.
3. There was a pause in CIA drone assassinations toward the end of the Obama administration, when the president transferred the killing exclusively to the military. Stephanie Savell and 5W Infographics, “This Map Shows Where in the World the U.S. Military Is Combatting Terrorism,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 2019, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/map-shows-places-world-where-us-military-operates-180970997/.
4. Michael Horton, “Is China Waiting Us Out?,” American Conservative, November–December 2018, 15.
5. Surgeon at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, phone interview with the author, July 5, 2012. After we spoke the hospital lost its top-tier status, because it no longer sees a sufficient number of trauma patients to receive the top rating. Matt Millham, “With Fewer War Injuries, Landstuhl Becomes Level III Trauma Center,” Stars and Stripes, May 28, 2014, www.stripes.com/news/with-fewer-war-injuries-landstuhl-becomes-level-iii-trauma-center-1.285819.
6. Walter Pincus, interview with the author, Washington, DC, August 24, 2012.
7. Catherine Lutz, “Warmaking as the American Way of Life,” in The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do about It, ed. Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 50, 46.
8. Congressional Budget Office, Funding for Overseas Contingency Operations and Its Impact on Defense Spending (Washington, DC: CBO, 2018), 20.
9. Mike Holmes, “2018 WEPTAC Conference Keynote Speaker: General Mike Holmes,” Air Combat Command, February 13, 2018, www.acc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1440031/2018-weptac-conference-keynote-speaker-general-mike-holmes/.
10. Andrew Cockburn, “The Military-Industrial Virus,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2019, 63–64.
11. Stephanie Savell, “Credit-Card Wars: Today’s War-Financing Strategies Will Only Increase Inequality,” TomDispatch, June 28, 2018, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176442/tomgram%3A_stephanie_savell%2C_how_america%27s_wars_fund_inequality_at_home/.
12. Heidi Garrett-Peltier, “War Spending and Lost Opportunities,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, March 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/March%202019%20Job%20Opportunity%20Cost%20of%20War.pdf.
13. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 622.
14. For “peacetime crimes,” see Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,” in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 20–22.
15. My thanks to Cara Flores-Mays for making this point so powerfully at a public meeting in Guam. See David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 94–95.
16. Neta C. Crawford, “Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, November 2018, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2018/Human%20Costs%2C%20Nov%208%202018%20CoW.pdf.
17. Falih Hassan and Rod Nordland, “Battered ISIS Keeps Grip on Last Piece of Territory for over a Year,” New York Times, December 9, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/09/world/middleeast/isis-territory-syria-iraq.html.
18. Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, “The Uncounted,” New York Times Magazine, November 19, 2017, 42–53, 68–69.
19. Robert F. Worth, “How the War in Yemen Became a Bloody Stalemate—and the Worst Humanitarian Crisis in the World,” New York Times Magazine, October 31, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/31/magazine/yemen-war-saudi-arabia.html.
20. “Yemen War Death Toll Exceeds 90,000 according to New ACLED Data for 2015,” press release, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, June 18, 2019, www.acleddata.com/2019/06/18/press-release-yemen-war-death-toll-exceeds-90000-according-to-new-acled-data-for-2015/.
21. Oriana Pawyk, “General Argues to Continue Refueling Saudi Planes in Yemen Fight,” Military.com, March 13, 2018, www.military.com/daily-news/2018/03/13/general-argues-continue-refueling-saudi-planes-yemen-fight.html; Robert F. Worth, “They Break Us or We Break Them,” New York Times Magazine, November 4, 2018, 50–51.
22. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace” (speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, DC, April 16, 1953), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d03597166h&view=1up&seq=1.
23. Neta C. Crawford, “United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, November 13, 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/US%20Budgetary%20Costs%20of%20Wars%20November%202019.pdf.
24. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities: 2011 Update (Amherst, MA: Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, 2011).
25. “Marilyn Young on the Exercise of American Power Abroad,” Cornell Program on Ethics and Public Life, September 23, 2013, YouTube video, 1:28:04, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CkxRe0c7eA.
26. Craig Whitlock, “At War with the Truth,” Washington Post, December 9, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/.
27. Claudia Grisales, “Senate Approves Legislation to Limit President’s War Powers against Iran,” National Public Radio, February 13, 2020, www.npr.org/2020/02/13/805594383/senate-approves-legislation-to-limit-presidents-war-powers-against-iran.
28. “We Must End the Forever War,” Common Defense, accessed February 13, 2020, https://commondefense.us/end-the-forever-war/.
29. “About QI,” Quincy Institute, accessed February 14, 2020, https://quincyinst.org/about/.
30. John Feffer, “After Trump,” Foreign Policy in Focus, March 20, 2019, https://fpif.org/after-trump/; James Carden, “A New Poll Shows the Public Is Overwhelmingly Opposed to Endless US Military Interventions,” Nation, January 9, 2019, www.thenation.com/article/new-poll-shows-public-overwhelmingly-opposed-to-endless-us-military-interventions/.
31. “Transcript: Donald Trump on NATO, Turkey’s Coup Attempt and the World,” New York Times, July 21, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/donald-trump-foreign-policy-interview.html.
32. President Trump said of the U.S. war in Iraq and the fate of Iraqi oil: “It used to be to the victor belong the spoils. Now, there was no victor [in Iraq]. . . . But I always said, ‘Take the oil.’ ” Ryan Teague Beckwith, “Read Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s Remarks at a Military Forum,” Time, September 8, 2016, https://time.com/4483355/commander-chief-forum-clinton-trump-intrepid/.
33. Vine, Base Nation, chaps. 15, 17.
34. Organizations and movements that provide plans for and movements toward significant military budget cuts include About Face: Veterans against the War, the Cato Institute, the Center for International Policy, Codepink, Common Defense, National Priorities Project/Institute for Policy Studies, #PeopleOverPentagon, the Poor People’s Campaign, the Project on Government Oversight, the Quincy Institute, and Win without War. Shailly Gupta Barnes, Lindsay Koshgarian, and Ashik Siddique, eds., Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody Has the Right to Live (Washington, DC: Poor People’s Campaign/Institute for Policy Studies/Kairos Center/Repairers of the Breach, 2019).
35. Dan Grazier, “The F-35 and the Captured State,” POGO, June 10, 2019, www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/06/the-f-35-and-the-captured-state/.
36. I believe that Chalmers Johnson deserves credit for identifying the Pentagon as the fourth branch of government.
37. See Vine, Base Nation, chap. 11.
38. See Kishore Mahbubani, “What China Threat?,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2019, 42; and Horton, “Is China Waiting?”
39. For “our liberties,” see Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961,” January 17, 1961, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp.
40. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam” (speech, Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967), https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam.
41. King, “Beyond Vietnam.”
42. King, “Beyond Vietnam.”
43. Rebecca Solnit, “Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage,” Orion Magazine, January 2, 2004, www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/211/.
44. Andrew Bacevich, “What Happens When a Few Volunteer and the Rest Just Watch: The American Military System Dissected,” TomDispatch, April 10, 2018, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176409/.
