Are U.S. Bases Overseas Doing Us More Harm Than Good?

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Located: The U.S. has military bases around the world, as depicted in this graphic. Daily Mail

David Vine, The Nation: The United States Probably Has More Foreign Military Bases Than Any Other People, Nation, or Empire in History

And it’s doing us more harm than good.

With the US military having withdrawn many of its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans would be forgiven for being unaware that hundreds of US bases and hundreds of thousands of US troops still encircle the globe. Although few know it, the United States garrisons the planet unlike any country in history, and the evidence is on view from Honduras to Oman, Japan to Germany, Singapore to Djibouti.

Like most Americans, for most of my life, I rarely thought about military bases. Scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson described me well when he wrote in 2004, “As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet.”

WNU Editor: This is what I said about this subject last year .... The positioning of numerous US bases throughout the world is a military advantage that no one else in the world even comes close to matching. This is a testament to years of U.S. diplomacy, the implementation of economic strategies in tandem with military strategies .... and .... of course .... the willingness to pay for it.

As to whether or not this makes us (and the world) safer .... when I look at the history of the Cold War and current tense spots like the Korean peninsula .... I would have to say yes.