All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, speaking of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, check out this awesome thing that they did, and I'm happy to note here in conjunction with David Swanson and the group at World Beyond War, importantly, and American University as well here, it says, it's this giant study, this big report, Drawdown, Improving U.S. and Global Security Through Military Base Closures Abroad, Quincy Brief, number 16, by David Vine, Patterson Deppin, and Lee Bolger, and by the way, Vine, as you guys may remember, is the author of Island of Shame, about America's and Britain's abuses of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, and then he also wrote, Base Nation, is that what it's called, David?
Sorry.
That's the one.
Base Nation.
I got holes in my brain, man.
I'm getting old.
I mean, I got it right, but I wasn't sure that I did.
Base Nation.
And this is, you know, essentially, this is the heir to Chalmers Johnson, warning about America's overstretched military global empire here, and so here's this great work, which is, you know, essentially, first of all, you know, making this great recommendation, but second of all, strike that reverse, describing this empire of bases around the world, which I got to say, you know, you kind of hear high numbers of U.S. bases around the world a lot of the times, but not like this.
Nobody ever really explains it and goes through to show what they mean by American preeminence in the world, so welcome back to the show, David.
How are you, sir?
Scott, thank you so much for having me.
I'm good.
I'm pleasure to get to talk to you, as always.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So make me understand.
How's this work?
Well, I'll do my best, but yeah, my colleagues, Patterson Deppin and Leah Bulger, and I did put out this recent report, Drawdown, which we think provides the best listing and details about the global collection of U.S. military bases abroad.
So 750 military bases outside the 50 states in Washington, D.C. in 80 foreign countries and colonies.
750 bases in 80 foreign countries and colonies.
And just to put that in perspective, China has eight bases abroad.
It has eight bases in Tibet, if you want to count those.
The rest of the world's countries combined have maybe 200 foreign bases among them.
So the U.S. has at least, well, well over three times the number of foreign military bases as the rest of the world's militaries combined.
It's also helpful to compare the 750 U.S. bases abroad to the 276 U.S. embassies, consulates, and missions overseas.
We think this, you know, sadly captures the emphasis in our foreign policy, which has been a foreign policy defined by war, not by diplomacy.
It's also important to point out that we're spending, U.S. taxpayers, that is, are spending $55 billion in conservative estimate, $55 billion a year to maintain these bases, just to keep them running.
And that doesn't even account for the costs of the personnel who are stationed on the bases, which brings the total to tens of billions of dollars a year more.
And $55 billion a year, that's a budget that's bigger than the budget of the State Department itself, again, underlining how misguided, how misappropriated the funds have been in how misguided our foreign policy has been for far too long.
Yeah.
All right.
So can we just start in the east and move west?
What is the American presence, for example, in South Korea, in Japan, Okinawa, really, right?
Not, Okinawa itself is a, is a territory colonized by the Japanese before it's colonized by us, right?
But do we have troops?
Do we have bases in the rest of Japan or it's all down in Okinawa?
There are U.S. bases and troops throughout Japan, but the vast majority are in Okinawa indeed, which was colonized by Japan, was a colony of the United States for two decades after World War II.
We just passed the anniversary of the Japanese technically going back to Japan.
But the people of Okinawa very much feel like they are still under occupation, the occupation of U.S. bases and troops.
And there are people around the world, unsurprisingly, who feel like they are under occupation of U.S. troops and bases.
And I think it's important for folks in the United States to think about, you know, how would we feel if there was a foreign military base in our town or city or wherever we might live?
How would it feel if there was, you know, even, even an ally like Britain or France had a base in our town or city?
And, you know, in Okinawa, it's a perfect example.
These are massive bases.
These are, you know, Guantanamo Bay.
Guantanamo Bay is a base that is the size of Washington, D.C.
These are not small plots of territory.
In Okinawa and Guinnewan City, there's a base that looks like a, Guinnewan City looks like a donut because the base is in the middle of the city and is completely surrounded by the rest of the city and is just this massive hole in the middle of the city that is taking up valuable land, property, and putting people's lives in danger because of the frequent overflight by all sorts of military aircraft.
But beyond Okinawa, beyond Japan, as you asked, you know, there are now upwards of 70 bases still in South Korea, decades after the end of the Korean War, although the Korean War technically still persists, 119 bases throughout all of Japan, 119 bases in Germany still, 44 in Italy.
And these numbers, it's important to point out, come from the Pentagon itself.
The basis for our list of the 750 bases in 80 countries and colonies, the basis for that list is the Pentagon's own accounting.
That is that the Pentagon previously on an annual basis put together a list of its bases and it was well known that this list had many omissions and errors, but we use that as the base, so to speak, for our list, which we then added to with well-documented bases that the Pentagon simply, you know, didn't put on this list for reasons of secrecy or just perhaps incompetence or reasons we don't even know.
Yeah.
And, you know, I was in a debate with Bill Kristol the other night and I'm just kicking myself for all the things that he said that I didn't get a chance to address.
I bet he feels the same way.
But one of them, I did address it, but not as well as I could or should have, was about how, you know, you call us an empire, but all these people around the world, they're glad we're there.
And if you asked them if they wanted us to leave, then they would say no.
You know, trust me, believe me about that.
And so I came back with some crack about, oh, I'm sure when he goes to dinner parties in Poland that they, you know, are very happy to have NATO money, you know, showered on them or whatever.
But that's not necessarily how the people feel.
And he went so far as to claim that, like, that's how the people of East Timor would feel too and this kind of thing.
Yeah, I really don't think so.
But what I really should have done was beat him over the head with Okinawa because I've read Chalmers Johnson and I know those poor people.
Of course, David can never forgive the at least double digits, maybe high double digits or even more of young girls who've been raped and even murdered by American soldiers and Marines stationed in their country.
All these, you know, for these generations since World War Two, people run over by trucks speeding down the road and whatever other, you know, the occupation of Japan.
It ain't like the occupation of Iraq.
But if you live there, it's the worst thing in your life.
No question about it.
You know, and they hate.
Of course they resent it.
Yeah, I think there is a lot of anger and resentment.
I think, you know, it's actually in some ways surprising that I found very little hate.
Hate, of course, is a strong word.
But, you know, in fact, in Okinawa, when I went to do research there and in places around the world where there are U.S. bases and protest movements that are asking the U.S. either to leave or are trying to block the expansion of the U.S. presence, I was welcomed.
But, you know, the protest one sees at U.S. bases around the world is not motivated by anti-Americanism.
It's motivated by an opposition to U.S. military policy, by what bases do to people and their lives, including, as you pointed out, the crimes committed by U.S. military personnel, the accidents that also have taken many, many lives.
And not just in Okinawa, but again in places around the world, accidents involving troops just in their daily lives outside the base or accidents involving military aircraft, for example.
But that's just the beginning.
Of course, you know, bases are bad for the environment.
Wherever military bases, bases cause damage to the local environment.
And the damage that U.S. bases have caused has often been far worse overseas because basically the military can get away with doing things that they wouldn't be able to get away with in the 50 states.
So, you know, you pointed to the, you mentioned the Chagossians, who are the subject of my first book, Island of Shame.
They are an example of the kind of displacement that we've seen at U.S. military bases abroad where bases during their creation, like in the creation of the base on Diego Garcia, or in the expansion of bases have frequently displaced local, mostly indigenous populations.
And I've been able to document more than 20 such cases since the end of the 19th century where U.S. bases during their creation or expansion have displaced local people.
It's also important to point out, and I wonder if this came up in your conversation with Crystal, but, you know, we can't forget what bases are.
Their primary function, of course, is to be weapons of war.
These are bases that have enabled the last 20 years of endless war.
These are bases that in the Middle East in particular, which has a huge infrastructure of U.S. bases, has enabled the U.S. to launch wars and deploy combat troops to no fewer than 25 countries since 2001.
Twenty-five countries far beyond Afghanistan and Iraq alone, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines.
Twenty-five countries.
I think most people in the U.S. aren't aware of this.
And bases are the infrastructure of war.
They are what make war possible.
And my greatest fear now is that if we don't begin to draw down, as the title of our report says, draw down this huge infrastructure of bases, we're going to end up in yet more wars, despite the encouraging development of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, as terrible as the actual last days of the withdrawal were.
That is moving us in the right direction.
And the right direction for me and for my co-authors, Patterson, Deppin, and Leah Boulger, is not just to close bases abroad, not just draw down, but we have to draw down and then build up, as we say.
We have to build up our diplomatic presence overseas.
We have to build up our diplomatic engagement, our other forms of non-military engagement with regular people and foreign governments, and draw down this foreign policy that's been defined by bases in war.
All right.
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You know, I can't remember the dates and things as well anymore, but it's in my first book, Fool's Errand.
Oh, I think I stole this from Chalmers Johnson.
It was a congressional report from the 70s saying, they even had coined a phrase for it even, I think, about the necessity for certain military officers to keep any base that they happen to be in charge of at any given time open, no matter what, for their own career or their own careers, you know, even after the mission is over.
So, well, we need to have this base in Turkey for drug interdiction efforts.
Then they destroy the mafia ring that was, you know, using that transit point that they were there for or whatever, and then they just come up with a new excuse.
Now we have the Iranians, you know, whatever it is.
And so, in other words, it's just the economics of bureaucracy, but just for the entire Pentagon.
And which is funny, because I was just talking with John Kiriakou about, you know, the economics of keeping Guantanamo open.
And then the other interview today, which was supposed to already happen, but I think probably will happen right after yours, is with Gareth Porter, who wrote this great piece about the self-licking ice cream cone, primarily in Afghanistan, but essentially, again, about the institutional interests of the Pentagon itself and of the individual military officers, all of whom are lined up to get their tickets punched.
That says that they did this and they did that and they were the commander here and they were the commander there.
That way they can get more ribbons and more stars and more money later when they sit on the board of Raytheon and whatever like that.
And so, essentially, it doesn't have a damn thing to do with national defense.
Somewhere like way down the chain, somebody pays a think tank to write a study saying we need it to be this way.
But it's almost like after the fact, right?
This whole thing is a self-licking ice cream cone.
Yeah, what you're pointing to, of course, is the military-industrial complex or the military-industrial-congressional complex, as we think Eisenhower originally coined the term.
And indeed, you know, in my book, Base Nation, I refer to a Marine officer who describes seeing bases in Afghanistan where you had military contractors protecting cooks who were cooking for the military contractors who were protecting the cooks who were cooking for the military contractors.
And that is no better example of the self-licking ice cream cone and points to the way in which when we have situations like that, someone is benefiting.
And it's not primarily the cooks or the military contractors who are protecting the cooks.
You know, it's massive military contractors who are laughing their way all the way to the bank.
And that's part of the entrenched nature of the problem we're facing.
And in addition to folks protesting it around U.S. bases abroad, there are people in the host countries, of course, who support the presence of these bases because they, too, are benefiting.
Some of them, you know, work on the bases and have jobs, but there are also large corporations headquartered either in the host countries or transnational corporations that are making money maintaining these bases and that make them entrenched features in the local political economy, which then makes them all the more difficult to close.
But what you pointed to is the even deeper reason for the continued existence of many of these bases is located within the Pentagon itself and its links to military contractors.
That once a base is established, as Chalmers Johnson pointed out, drawing on research that actually Congress did in the early 1970s, late 1960s, showed that once a base is established, it becomes very difficult to shut down for a whole variety of reasons having to do with the bureaucratic inertia and the entrenched financial interests that benefit from keeping bases open, all the while actually undermining U.S. national security and global security.
And that's what needs to change.
And, you know, you can't underestimate how important those stars and ribbons are to these officers, too.
You know, it's their business.
It's not outside of the rules of business other than the fact that they get all their money for free and they don't have to earn any of it.
But as far as wanting to profit as much as they can, all that part is still there.
Yeah, that said, I'm happy to report that there are members of the military who are coming to see that this longstanding policy to maintain hundreds of military bases abroad and hundreds of thousands of troops abroad is actually not a good way to protect the United States or to bring peace and security to the world, which they don't, by and large.
The highest ranking officer in the U.S. military, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mike Milley, last year said, I think we have too much infrastructure overseas.
He called for a close look at this huge network of bases.
He's acknowledging there's too much infrastructure, too many bases abroad.
Another general, former General Roger Brady, said we have too many doggone bases, Air Force General.
And this also reflects a growing recognition across the political spectrum outside the U.S. military.
So people in think tanks, academics, activists, others, people across the political spectrum who've come to criticize, sometimes for very different reasons, but criticize this huge collection of bases.
And the reason this report drawdown came to be is because of a coalition that has brought together people from across the political spectrum who share this critique and concern about this longstanding policy of encircling the globe with military bases.
It's the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition.
And we have been working together to bring people together across the political spectrum and say this policy does not make sense.
It is undermining U.S. national security.
We need to begin closing bases abroad, and we need to do it urgently.
Yeah.
Now, I got to tell you, though, that number 750 is so big it makes me, well, not wonder.
That's not the right way to say it.
It's hard for me to get my head around that.
Does that mean, you know, there's a base here, but there's some sheds down the road from the base, and that counts as a separate base?
When you say base, you really mean base.
It's hard for me to understand how there's that much room in the world for American military bases, you know, in that quantity.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Well, the world's a big place.
There are thousands of bases in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Oh, sure.
I think about 4,000 by the Pentagon's latest count.
Oh, yeah.
Now, I believe that, man.
No problem.
I mean, we got military bases in Austin like they're protecting us from the Comanche still or something, you know?
Exactly, exactly.
And, you know, there have been more U.S. bases abroad in recent years.
At the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were more than 2,000 U.S. bases abroad.
They range in size.
Some are literally city-sized bases with tens of thousands of troops and family members, schools, yoga studios, fast food, all the trappings of a not-so-small U.S. American town.
Suburban housing developments, find that, Guantanamo Bay.
And on the other end of the spectrum, there are what are often referred to as lily pad bases, much smaller bases with just a few hundred troops, sometimes even fewer, a few dozen troops.
So there's a wide range.
But we think 750, again, using the Pentagon's definition of a base site, is an appropriate way to measure and capture the breadth of this collection of bases around the world.
There are longstanding debates about how do you define a base, and there is no objective definition of a base, so we felt the Pentagon's definition was the best way to go.
Okay.
And then I love this chart that you have here with the map of the world and all the lines and stars and everything showing, especially West Africa and, of course, all through the Middle East and Europe.
And I guess this is kind of, in my last question, what I was thinking was we don't have too many bases in Latin America because they all hate us from all the things that we did to them before and all of that kind of thing.
But I guess that's really not right.
We've got how many military bases in South America and in Central America now?
Not many, it's true.
The U.S. presence in Africa now exceeds the presence in Latin America, although it is important to point out, and the history of Latin America, of course, shows this, that there are forms of U.S. military and paramilitary presence that are not captured by our 750 base figure.
CIA bases and CIA installations are not part of our calculation, but they should very much be thought about when we think about the U.S. presence abroad and the U.S. military and paramilitary presence abroad.
But the main U.S. presence in Latin America now is in Guantanamo Bay, which is really a colony of the United States.
The base remains there against the will of the Cuban people, longstanding will, even before the Cuban Revolution, the Cuban government wanted the United States out.
There's also a sizable base still in Honduras that should have closed decades ago.
So this is just an example of the spread of this base empire, and these are actually really good examples.
Honduras and Guantanamo Bay are good examples of where we could start closing bases abroad, bases that should have been closed decades ago.
Well, as we talked about with Japan, just the fact that they're a democracy doesn't mean that the will of the people of Okinawa is being represented in their basing policy there.
And I know they've had huge protest movements and all these things to try to at least minimize the harm as best they can.
But you've got this great chart where you go through and you count up how many of these bases are in countries that are dictatorships, monarchies, or, you know, run by El Presidentes like Sisi in Egypt, things like that, hybrid regimes, which I guess you'd call America a hybrid regime, right?
And so—oh, I was being sarcastic, maybe.
No, I think that's— But, I mean, just the point being that if our bases are in a dictatorship or a monarchy, then by definition, the civilian population of those countries have no say in our presence there at all.
And it's presumably against their will, right?
And then there's a chance, if it's a democracy, that the people somehow are okay with it.
But we don't really know that.
Yeah, that in something we would call a full democracy, I would agree.
I do not think the United States is a full democracy in any respect.
But in a full democracy, there is some legitimacy to a foreign military presence.
Although frequently, including in democratic countries, the legal basis for a U.S. military presence is secret.
The original agreements, for example, in Italy, have not been made public.
So there's often very limited democratic legitimacy, even in democracies.
But as you pointed out, U.S. bases can be found in at least 38 countries and colonies that are less than democratic, getting either outright authoritarian regimes or, as you mentioned, hybrid regimes.
We used, again, a very conservative estimate of The Economist magazine.
And The Economist intelligence report was how we defined different government types.
Again, there was no desire to exaggerate.
But what we need to look at when we look at the countries and colonies where these bases are located is the kinds of governments that the United States is supporting with its military presence.
And I think we should be profoundly troubled by the way in which U.S. bases are de facto helping to prop up and support undemocratic, often authoritarian, often murderous regimes.
And again, when we think about where should we start closing bases first, I think bases in authoritarian-ruled countries are a place to start absolutely.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I remember even thinking about this as a kid, meaning when it was just completely abstract, right?
I don't even know.
Never heard of most of these countries in Africa at the time or whatever.
But just the idea that, oh, these are fledgling democracies, so we need to give them all this aid, that it just immediately occurred to me that, yeah, but then whoever happens to be in charge then, they get the aid, and it helps keep them in power.
But maybe if there really is a democracy there, maybe these guys would have lost the next election and wouldn't be the ones still in charge because democracy is a form of government.
It's not a group of people in power.
And so if you're intervening to help a democracy, you're just picking winners and losers inside that country.
You know, I figured that out in like 10th grade or something, just even hearing the concept of foreign aid to poor developing nations overseas, et cetera, et cetera, as though it's all, you know, presuming the kindest and most benign of motivations to do so.
You're still tipping the balance for people that you couldn't possibly know what the results of the next election would have been instead, you know?
Sure.
Even, you know, the best forms of humanitarian aid, you know, will have a certain self-serving motivation behind them in almost every case.
I do think that, you know, the United States and U.S. government I would like to see is one that does focus on continuing to provide much needed humanitarian aid of various kinds.
Again, we won't ever strip out all the self-serving interests, but if we could focus our foreign policy there and move our foreign policy away from providing military aid, military aid that is often fueled coups and crackdowns by governments against their own people and move our foreign policy away from a foreign policy defined by military bases and war, that's the direction we need to go in.
And if we don't, my greatest fear is that we're going to end up in yet more wars and, you know, empires don't go on forever.
Chalmers Johnson showed us this.
Empires fall.
And the United States empire is going to fall if we don't wind it down on our own.
It's going to fall in an even more catastrophic war than the last 20 catastrophic years of war or it's going to fall in bankruptcy or some combination of the two.
And we urgently must transform our foreign policy and how the United States behaves in the world.
This huge infrastructure of military bases abroad is a damn good place to start.
Yeah.
Boy, got that right.
Okay, great work.
Thank you so much for doing this and for coming on the show to talk about it, David.
As always, appreciate it.
Scott, thank you so much for having me.
All right, you guys, you got to read David's book, Island of Shame, about the Chagossians.
It's just incredible.
And then, of course, Base Nation.
And this study is at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, quincyinst.org.
So it's not at responsiblestatecraft.org.
It's an official study at quincyinst.org.
Drawdown, improving U.S. and global security through military base closures abroad.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
