By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 25, 2024
Remarks at #NOWAR2024
We’ve heard a lot over the past few days about the damage foreign bases do and the good work people do to prevent them or close them. World BEYOND War works with our chapters, affiliates, and friends around the world on campaigns against bases. And we work globally to provide resources to these campaigns. The headquarters for getting informed and getting involved is worldbeyondwar.org/bases The leader of our close bases work is our Board Member Robert Fantina.
One resource you’ll find on the website is called Military Empires: A Visual Guide to Foreign Bases. One thing you can do with it is spin the globe and click on a particular one of what are currently 917 U.S. bases outside the United States. When you do, the map will zoom in to a satellite image of the base and provide information and links about the base, the damage it does, and who is doing what to get it shut down and converted into something useful, and the land cleaned up, put to better use, and possibly restored to those from whom it was stolen. As only a small percentage of people in the United States know or care to find out, U.S. bases are on land stolen from Hawaiians, Aleutian Islanders, the people of several Pacific atolls, Okinawans, Innuits, Chagossians, Koreans, Palestinians, and until those bases were closed the people of Vieques and Culebra, among others. Of course we are constantly update our maps ands depend on help from all of you for updates and corrections. The research for these maps is put together by Mohammed Abunahel, and the maps created by Marc Eliot Stein.
Another resource you’ll find is Mapping Militarism, a collection of maps of all things militaristic that includes, among much else, a map that color-codes countries based on how many U.S. military bases they have. Clicking on each country gives you the details. Another map gives you the number of U.S. troops present. Other maps display NATO members and partners, where U.S. wars have been waged, and where the U.S. government is applying sanctions. Together, these maps paint a picture that can be of nothing other than an empire very poorly understood by most of the people who pay for it.
You’ll also find a series of links to particular campaigns that some of our chapters are working on to close or to prevent particular bases, and to the successful campaign to prevent the construction of a military training ground in Sinjajevina, which you know all about if you’ve been participating in this conference. We hope to work with all interested parties to add more campaigns!
When you examine the 917 U.S. foreign bases, I think you will come to the following conclusion. These things are catastrophic.
They heighten tension.
They facilitate war.
They encourage militarism.
They provoke terrorism.
They endanger host countries.
They proliferate nuclear weapons and weapons in general.
They support repressive governments.
They cause irreparable environmental damage.
They cause pollution. We’ll hear a bit about some of that shortly.
They cost an exorbitant amount of money.
They deny land to indigenous populations.
They cause economic problems for so-called “host” countries.
They station troops who commit crimes and who are given immunity for those crimes.
They give a foreign nation influence.
They establish mini Apartheid states. That’s something I’ve been thinking about since reading the terrific books by David Vine. I don’t think anyone has ever done a serious study of this, but I cannot imagine there is no impact on how U.S. occupiers of these foreign bases think and act when back in the United States, given that many of these bases employ different looking and speaking local residents to do menial jobs on the bases while living off the bases with a very different social, economic, and legal status.
When you click on a particular base, you get more information about it. For those where we have been able to document the information, these bases tend to be very unpopular locally. Even in that minority of places where people fear some other empire might replace the U.S. empire, their desire is most commonly to be subject to no empires at all. Needless to say virtually no one in the United States or even the United States government could, without consulting our website, tell you where all the bases are. The U.S. public has never been asked to vote on the general idea or any particular bases. If there were suddenly 916 instead of 917, nobody would care. Leftists who want to invest in peace and climate and healthcare and housing oppose this madness. Rightwingers who want to pretend that the world outside the United States doesn’t exist, or who oppose spending money on anything regardless of its merits or lack thereof, oppose it too. Even top officials within the U.S. military believe that technology has rendered the empire of bases, or much of it, pointless for the project of being able to quickly wage war anywhere on Earth. And yet the bases persist and even expand as tools of imposing power, influencing governments, selling weapons, justifying militaries and alliances like NATO, not to mention providing lovely destinations with many golf courses and restaurants where occupiers can rule over the lower class locals, feel superior, and build hatred and resentment toward the United States.
While no other nations have anything like the 917 foreign bases that the United States has, the UK does have 117 — so only 800 more to catch up! India has 22, and Türkiye has 128 in just 10 countries. France has 15 in 10 countries. These are all close U.S. allies and weapons customers. Russia has 58 foreign bases in 10 countries — Syria and Djibouti being the farthest from Russia. We’ve created map tools similar to the U.S. one for each of these countries so that you can spin the globe and zoom in on each of their bases.
Another 12 countries have tiny numbers of foreign bases. In some cases their only base is in Djibouti, a small nation that seems to have gone out of its way to rent out bases to every possible foreign government for the financial gain of the brutal Djibouti government but not the people of Djibouti — and certainly not the people of the wider world which is put at risk of a conflict being sparked by countries like the United States and China having bases in the same place.
The key point to make here is that it is really weird to have foreign bases. Most countries on Earth do not do it at all. Some do it a tiny bit. It’s basically a U.S. thing. And there’s no evidence of any benefit. Bases are part of a global war machine that is dominated by the United States. In the latest numbers on military spending, of 230 other countries, the U.S. spends more than 227 of them combined. Russia and China spend a combined 21% of what the U.S. and its allies spend on war. Since 1945, the U.S. military has acted in a major or minor way in 74 other nations. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. Most places with wars manufacture no weapons. Most wars have U.S. weapons on both sides. The U.S. is the leading exporter of weapons to each and every type of government including the very worst. If bases reduced wars or militarism, this picture would be very different.
On the same webpage as the links to each nation’s base map is a link to a map of foreign bases that have been closed — such as Vieques, which you know about if you’ve been part of this conference. Closed doesn’t necessarily mean cleaned of toxins, poisons, unexploded bombs and mines. Closed doesn’t necessarily mean the land and water will ever recover. But closed is a start. Where we’ve been able to gather the information, we’ve included with each base who managed to get it closed when and how. The people who do this work need to be honored and thanked for their service. Bases are closed as a result of public pressure but also as a result of military coups, shifts in military strategies, and various other reasons. We hope that investigating this data will lead to some usable conclusions regarding getting more bases closed more quickly, as well as getting them closed without replacing them with others, and without seeing them reopened when public pressure eases — as we’ve seen in various locations, such as the Philippines.
Of course it’s easier to prevent a base than to close one that’s been built. You’ve heard examples from Czechia and Sinjajevina. It’s also possible to win a half-victory. In Vicenza, Italy, for example, massive public pressure that many of us were part of resulted in unwanted base construction, but of a smaller base than the U.S. government had sought.
We’ve focused on foreign bases because they do harm that domestic ones do not, but domestic military bases do a world of damage as well. Whether or not we ever manage to map them all for various nations, we are aware of many of their results and are working to get them closed where we can. Most of the worst environmental disaster sites in the United States are the creation of the United States’ own so-called “Defense” Department. More to come on that later today!
The lesson I draw from having worked to oppose bases in several countries while based in the Washington, D.C., area or not too far from it, is that we are stronger when we have solidarity across borders, and in particular when we are working together both at the location of a base or a proposed base and at the location of the heart of the empire here in Washington. A number of times now I have worked with opponents of U.S. bases in distant corners of the globe and watched as they were asked the inevitable question by U.S. Congress members or staffers, namely: “Well, if you don’t want the base there, then where do you want it.” And in each case, to their everlasting credit and praise, these good people have responded “We do not want it anywhere.”
Thank you for being here. We are stronger together.