Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys are introducing David Vine.
He is the author of Island of Shame, about the Chagossians of Diego Garcia, and also Base Nation, how U.S. military bases abroad harm America and the world.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you, sir?
I'm great, and thank you so much for having me, Scott.
Happy to have you here.
And I meant to say, professor of anthropology at American University, importantly as well.
So you had this big left-right alliance.
You had me at left-right alliance.
Well, actually not necessarily.
That could be really bad.
Let's go further.
Left-right alliance for closing U.S. military bases around the world.
Okay, you had me at left and right alliance for closing U.S. military bases around the world.
Tell me all about this.
Good, I'm glad.
And it goes beyond a left-right alliance.
We're describing it as a trans-partisan alliance because it really spans the political spectrum far beyond the traditional notions of Republicans and Democrats, right and left.
So we've got Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Independents.
We've got a range of backgrounds and fields.
So we've got some folks who were military officials.
We've got peace advocates.
We have think tank analysts, academics, other activists.
It's really a range of people, all of whom have expertise on the issue of U.S. military bases overseas.
And the inspiration for this was a number of us realizing, that is a number of experts, people who have been studying the issue of U.S. military bases abroad for years, realizing that there are people across the political spectrum who actually agree to a great extent about U.S. bases abroad and agree that we have far too many, that they're quite dangerous in a number of ways, that they're hugely expensive and tremendously wasteful as a result.
So we decided to try to get as many people together as possible of these experts and had a series of meetings dating back to last spring.
And in these meetings, we came to realize that we could identify at least nine areas of consensus, nine areas of concern around which we all agreed that U.S. military bases overseas are deeply harmful and nine reasons for closing them or beginning a process to start closing wasteful, dangerous, unnecessary bases.
And we turned these nine points of consensus into a letter to the Trump administration and Congress and just yesterday released the letter and officially launched our coalition, which is called the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition, OBRAC.
And we are extremely optimistic because this isn't just a small group.
We've got 40 signatories.
We're focused on, the aim was not quantity.
The aim was to get people who've really developed expertise on this issue.
So we have 40 expert signatures on the letter and we are optimistic that the number of people who see this problem in the way that we do is actually growing and we're building momentum to pressure the administration and the military to begin a process of closing bases.
This is great.
And, you know, other than the trans ideological here, when it comes to the broad nonpartisan nature of the thing, I wonder if you have approached Stephen Walt.
I know that Mearsheimer, Walt, and a couple other people all have brand new books out from a realist perspective.
People who, like others in your coalition, I'm sure, are not entirely non-interventionist.
Stephen Walt's idea is that we should have offshore balancing, where we just make sure that no one state dominates either the Persian Gulf, Europe, or East Asia.
And as long as no single power dominates, we can just stay offshore.
So it's, you know, in a sense, a very interventionist foreign policy if it comes down to it.
And yet it still does not include the offense of stationing foreign combat troops in other people's countries and places where they're very likely to resent it and they're very likely to serve as tripwires for further conflict.
So I guess, you know, I bring that up because people with beliefs, I think, can be written off a lot more easily than someone who's saying, someone like Walt, who's strictly an academic and is saying, check out my equations.
They show that this is a better way to spend our defense dollars away.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we have reached out to Walt.
And I mean, I should say, you know, this isn't all kumbaya.
There are definitely disagreements among members of this coalition.
And I think you've pointed to some that some very much still envision a quite robust U.S. military presence and potentially interventionist one.
But I think we all agree that the current footprint of U.S. bases around the world makes it just all too easy to wage war and to wage the long now series of interventionist wars that have been so catastrophic for the greater Middle East, for the United States, for much of the world.
But I should say as well that so in addition to the 40 experts signatories on our letter, there are a number of other people who couldn't sign the letter for several reasons.
Some work for organizations that don't allow people to sign such public letters.
And in some cases, there were people who agree with most of our nine points of consensus, but didn't agree with every last one.
But we are optimistic that we'll be able to work with with these folks in the future.
Walt being a good example.
Barry Posen is another good example of someone who's been supportive, but for a few reasons, I think, couldn't sign on to the letter.
So we aim to build our coalition far beyond this initial step of releasing the letter to the Trump administration and Congress.
Cool.
Well, let's hope you get some pretty good media reaction from it, some discussion out of it.
I think people are probably shocked to hear the number 800 bases in 130 something countries.
How does that work anyway?
That sounds almost like it can't be right.
It's true, it's true.
The number 800 is my estimate, and others have accepted it pretty readily.
It's based on a annual accounting that the Pentagon does.
And the latest accounting in their list, there are 625 base sites is the term they use.
But their list of base sites excludes a large number of well known bases, some quite well known, for example, bases in Iraq and Syria and Saudi Arabia to this day, and others more secretive in Israel.
So 800, I believe, and we believe is an accurate estimate.
Although, as far as we can tell, even the Pentagon doesn't know for sure the precise number of bases.
And the scale, the total scale is the most important thing, especially when we get up to the hundreds upon hundreds of bases that the United States has been maintaining overseas now for almost 75 years, since the end of World War Two.
And this is basically an entrenched structure and an entrenched foreign policy that has gone unquestioned for far too long.
So our coalition is really trying to unite people across the political spectrum who have been questioning this long standing foreign policy and this long standing footprint that has been so disastrous for the United States and the world and wasted literally tens upon tens of billions of dollars in the process that could have been spent, of course, on pressing domestic needs.
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Well, and I wonder, do you know how many bases are there in the US right now?
According again to the Pentagon's annual base structure report, the number is a bit above 4000 base sites in the continental United States.
Wow.
I bet we could get rid of most of them too.
Yeah, I mean, they range in size, both domestically and overseas.
They range in size dramatically from massive city sized bases like those in South Korea or Germany, where you have tens of thousands of troops and and family members as well.
Hospitals, schools, restaurants, yoga studios.
I mean, we see those here in the United States as well in California and Texas and Georgia and many states.
And then there are also, of course, much smaller National Guard facilities, for example, around the United States.
And and well, we know for sure that according to the Pentagon study that there is excess capacity in the United States, meaning that bases domestically could close.
But part of the strategy for closing overseas bases in the eyes of, I would say, many of us is that we should take advantage of this excess capacity in the United States and bring the troops home, bring many of them home, at least, and family members take advantage of the excess capacity and close bases abroad, which are in almost every case much, much more expensive than a comparable base in the United States.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Although at the same time, you know, I don't know if you've ever spent any time in Austin, Texas, but there's this huge Camp Mabry National Guard military base right in the middle of town on the west side of town.
And some of the most expensive neighborhoods surround it, you know, really nice neighborhoods.
And this is a bazillion dollars worth of property there.
That's just completely taken off the market and and is used by the National Guard.
And it's all just a bunch of do nothing, make work all day long.
You know, just a massive waste.
And it just goes unquestioned.
Everyone knows it'll always be there forever, as though it was ever even protecting us from the Russkies back when they were the Russkies.
Right?
There's no enemy around here.
They finished killing off the last Apache like 180 years ago.
Yeah, I think you're pointing again to how deeply entrenched this system is in the United States as well.
But I mean, I agree, though, that like, hey, let's go ahead and bring them home from Korea and the Middle East and where they're, you know, from Japan, where they're really causing problems for foreigners.
And, you know, expanding the power of the American Empire overseas and all that.
Let's, let's, let's knock all that off first.
I get that.
I just kind of want to get rid of all of it at the same time.
But I hear you.
Sure.
No, I think I think many of us in our coalition would agree that we need to have a fundamental reconsideration and debate about the proper size of the US military and and proper military spending.
Because, you know, military spending, if the official budget is upwards of $700 billion a year now in the actual budget, if you toss in, you can't toss these things in.
But if you add in nuclear weapons, Veterans Administration and other CIA spending, the actual military budget is really around a trillion dollars a year.
And this in a in an era where there is no great Soviet Empire, that was, you know, a legitimate threat in some ways to the United States.
The size of the military budget is totally out of proportion to the any threats that actually face the United States.
Yeah.
And don't get me wrong, because there was a time when the Apache and the Comanche were a military threat to the Anglo settlers of Austin, Texas.
It's just that that state of affairs ceased to exist in like the 1850s.
Was there done mopping up 1860s, maybe mopping up the very last Apache militias out in West Texas somewhere?
Well, no, it's important that you mention that when in my work on bases abroad, I think it's always important to point out that the first bases abroad, of course, were here in North America.
They were bases on Native American people's lands.
And they enabled, of course, the conquest of US Euro-American settlers across the continent.
And just like the overseas bases, the domestic ones outlive whatever their stated purpose was back a long time ago to become a whole brand new thing.
I mean, it used to be that the entire justification for the bases in Japan was containing communism, which exists now only in Cuba.
I mean, even North Korea is not really communist anymore, whatever they are, totalitarian as they are.
That's exactly right.
But, oh, well, you know, they come up with new stuff.
Gotta keep, well, and I guess, you know, China still is an independent power, so it doesn't serve as much of a real fake enemy, though, when you look at their naval power versus ours or anything like that.
Part of the problem is that the military is quite good and creative at coming up with threats, inventing threats that justify greater spending, that justify the continued maintenance of bases overseas.
And the results are really tragic, because by doing that, they, of course, are diverting funds away from pressing needs here.
Every child who goes to school and gets a substandard education, every child who goes to bed hungry, that money is there.
We have the money to meet those needs, but it's being spent needlessly on bases that are actually also harming the military, because they're overstretching the military and preventing the military from serving its proper defensive function based here in the United States.
Well, I really like the website you guys have up here, OverseasBases.net.
And OBRAC is the acronym here, Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Organization.
And you got some fact sheets and media contacts and this and that.
So what's next if people want to help?
Well, they should go visit the website.
I'm glad you mentioned it, OverseasBases.net, OverseasBases.net.
And there they can click on the contact button and submit their information and we will loop them in.
We'll also be allowing anyone to sign our experts letter shortly.
So we sent the initial version, but we've had other people who want to show their support.
So there'll be a way to do that on the website shortly.
Great.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your great work on this most important of all issues, David.
Thank you for your interest and continued coverage of the issue.
All right, you guys, that is David Vine, a professor at American University, author of Island of Shame about the Chagossians of Diego Garcia.
Well, formerly of Diego Garcia.
He's also the author of Base Nation.
And then check this out, OverseasBases.net for the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Group and find out all about how to help there.
OverseasBases.net.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
