The American Empire’s Bases Without Borders
New U.S. Global Basing Strategy Gears for a War to Last for Generations*

Since 9/11, the United States has set in motion a new basing strategy involving the most extensive realignment of U.S. military forces that will establish American military supremacy in all corners of the world. The strategy includes using the Philippines as a base for troop operations in the region and as a naval staging post for carrier groups headed for the Indian Ocean and Middle East.

By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat.com

U.S. military trucks in new Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad (left photo) while  U.S. President George W. Bush visits his soldiers stationed at the huge Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo (right).

The U.S. imperialist war on Iraq in March 2003 and in Afghanistan in October 2001 set a new stage of imperialist interventionism throughout the world. In its goal to strengthen its hegemony and domination of the world, U.S. imperialism continues to rely more and more on wars of aggression that are driven by the doctrines of unilateralism, pre-emptive action and attacks against international law and humanitarianism. Corollary to this new level of imperialist interventionism is the colonial occupation of the vanquished countries, particularly Afghanistan and Iraq and, in the case of its former colony, the Philippines, renewed attempts at recolonization.

U.S. imperialism may have won its recent wars of genocide in Afghanistan and Iraq, mainly because they were small and economically-depressed countries whose armies were weakened by years of economic sanctions and pre-invasion bombings. But U.S. imperialism is now pinned down by continued resistance and warlord infighting in Afghanistan and by an increasingly lethal guerilla war in Iraq where American deaths now total 500 – proving once again that the invincibility that imperialism purports to be is a myth.

U.S. unilateralism is also creating a new period of animosities between the U.S. itself and its chief imperialist rivals that will likely deteriorate into open inter-imperialist contention in the years to come. It is clear that the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq were not about weapons of mass destruction or “rogue regimes” but about the control of oil resources as well as preventing other major oil-dependent countries such as France, Germany, Russia and even China from making this energy more accessible to their economies. U.S. imperialism’s goal to control oil in the Persian Gulf and other regions such as South America and Northern Africa through war and other instruments is also a means of denying its economic rivals not only from acquiring a major foothold in the oil-rich regions but also from making them more competitive economically and militarily. This has been part of the post-Cold War agenda of U.S. imperialism.

For immediate air strikes

After Afghanistan and Iraq, the neo-conservative faction of the Bush administration that has been responsible for the invasion of the two countries is once again beating the drums of war for similar regime changes in Iran, Syria and North Korea – all remaining members of Bush’s “axis of evil.” Late December last year, Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and “intellectual guru” of the hardline neo-conservative faction, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, came out with a book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, that contained a public manifesto, “manual for victory.” In it, Perle and Frum warned of a tottering of the “will to win” arising from the post-Iraq war doldrums and called for immediate air strikes against the three countries.¹

In particular, the two proposed a Cuba-style military blockade followed by a war against North Korea and the toppling of Syria’s leader, Bashar Assad, along with shutting oil supplies from Iraq and raids into Syria. It should be recalled that it was Perle, chair of the Defense Advisory Board, who as early as February last year named Iran, Syria and Libya as the next targets of U.S. invasion. In the new book, he also called for actions against France and Saudi Arabia – two countries he considers as enemies.

Since the collapse of the revisionist USSR and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s-1991, the finance oligarchy of U.S. imperialism began to assert its global hegemony and dominance using various pretexts and ideological constructs such as “rogue regimes,” Islamic fundamentalist extremism, nuclear arms proliferation, humanitarian mission and war against terror. U.S. imperialism grabbed the opportunity of being the sole superpower to push its hegemonic ambitions in the vast landmass of territories and resources left in the fall of the revisionist regimes and other areas that were once flashpoints of superpower rivalry. These include Central Asia, parts of Indian subcontinent, southern and eastern Europe, the Caspian Region, the Persian Gulf, and northern Africa, all collectively known as the greater Eurasia. Greater Eurasia contains 70 percent of the world’s oil resources and other valuable natural wealth that can sustain U.S. imperialism as the dominant economic and military power throughout the 21^st century or even beyond. While before U.S. national security is defined as ensuring America’s access to the world’s resources, markets and cheap labor now it has been reconfigured to mean economic domination and modern colonialism. Making the American Empire a truly global empire began to be deemed as achievable.

Ultra-rightists

Pursued since the era of imperialism, the American Empire’s grand strategy for global hegemony and domination came into shape in its currency with the re-ascendancy of the ultra-right, militarist-minded sections of the U.S. finance oligarchy since the 1980s particularly during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations and presently under the Bush Jr. presidency. The likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle advocated the use of more aggressive political and military solutions to make the world safe for U.S. monopoly capital and to rein in countries along the path of globalization.

In 1992, then Defense Secretary Cheney, Wolfowitz (now deputy secretary of defense) and I. Lewis Libby (now Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff), fashioned a secret blueprint for world domination, called the “Defense Policy Guidance” (DPG). DPG called for the unilateral and pre-emptive use of U.S. military power in the launching of a “war on terrorism” against America’s enemies. Five years later, these Republican hawks along with Donald Rumsfeld (the current defense chief), Condoleezza Rice (the current national security adviser), Zalmay Khalilzad and others formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In the election year of 2000, PNAC authored candidate Bush Jr.’s security agenda, under the heading “Rebuilding America’s Defenses – Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.”²

Among other objectives, “Rebuilding” sought the strengthening of U.S. military supremacy throughout the world; the increase in defense spending and in the number of deployable forces; and the repositioning and shifting of overseas military installations. Specifically, it also called for a much larger military presence over more areas of the world; for more permanent military bases in the Middle East, Southeast Europe, Latin America and in Southeast Asia. All these meant going beyond the level reached by U.S. global military might in 2000: 800 military installations including 60 major ones; a military presence in 140 countries including major force deployments in 25 countries; training exercises including Special Operations Forces missions in 180 countries.³ The number of overseas military bases does not include several secret bases outside the U.S. and 6,000 other bases in its own territories.⁴

The project for redrawing the map of the oil-rich Middle East was also planned: it called for the launching of a second war against Iraq and mentioned Libya, Syria, Iran and, outside the region, North Korea as other targets for “regime change.” U.S. objectives in Iraq became both regional and international: Having its own puppet regime in Iraq would tighten the U.S. grip on Persian Gulf oil and sends signals to its economic rivals that they would suffer a similar fate.

Bush’s National Energy Policy report reveals that the U.S. will import two-thirds of its oil by 2020 and recommends that the U.S. president place energy at the top of its foreign and trade policy. “Middle East oil producers will remain central to world oil security,” the report adds.⁵ The hegemony of the American Empire rests on its control of the world’s energy resources.

“Regime removal” in Iraq

This grand strategy was galvanized into modes of action upon the assumption into the presidency of Bush as underlined in his Quadrennial Defense Review of 2001, pre-emptive doctrine, Nuclear Posture Review and the National Security Strategy Directive (NSSD) of 2002. A former Bush treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, revealed early January 2004 that within the first three months of the Bush presidency there was already a decision to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The elaborate plan included post-war occupation, war crimes tribunals and the privatization of Iraqi oil.⁶ But Iraq and the Middle East were not the sole targets because the launching of wars, covert operations and other forms of intervention was aimed against a total of 80 countries – later reduced to 60 – under the CIA’s “Going to War” and “Worldwide Attack Matrix.” ⁷ The new “attack matrix” began to be implemented as soon as the Bush regime acquired the pretext – the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks - to do so. In early 2002, Bush gave the directive to topple Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, allegations about his links to 9/11 remained unfounded.

While the “war on terror” gave U.S. imperialism the muscle to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq as a colonial force and install puppet regimes there, it also expanded the reach and breadth of its rings of military bases and other installations and forward deployed forces using various pretexts. Wars are being waged by American warmongers to build new military bases in nations that they vanquish as well as in neighboring countries from where new wars of intervention against new targets can be launched. Thus, for instance, the wars in Bosnia (1995) and in Kosovo (1999) resulted in the building of new military bases in Bosnia; Camp Bondsteel, a major military complex in southeastern Kosovo; and similar ones in Macedonia, Albania, and Hungary. During the 1990-1991 Desert Shield and Desert Storm campaigns against Iraq, the U.S. built up new military bases in the Persian Gulf centered in Saudi Arabia.

But since 9/11, new bases have been posted as well in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgiztan and Tajikistan. In its present colonial occupation of Iraq, the U.S. maintains about six military bases including a military base inside the Baghdad international airport; the 25-sq. km. Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad; Tallil air base near Nasariyah; in the western desert near the Syrian border; and at Bashur air field in the Kurdish region of the north. The U.S. also plans to establish military bases and recreation complexes in the whole northern quarter of Kuwait (1,600 sq. m. out of Kuwait’s 6,900 sq.m. ⁸

Elsewhere in South America, out of nine military bases five were added in 2001-2002 in the following locations: Vieques, Puerto Rico; Manta, Ecuador; Aruba’ Curacao; Comalapsa, El Salvador; Colombia; and Bahamas. The U.S. main military bases in Vieques supports its military missions in the Persian Gulf and Europe.

Other new military bases are being considered for Georgia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in North Africa; Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Sierra Leone and Kenya in sub-Saharan Africa; as well as in Pakistan (where the U.S. now has four bases), India, the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.⁹ Growing U.S. intervention in Nepal is beginning to be a prelude toward constructing a military base there as part of a loop of bases encircling China.

Mid-January 2003, the “a new front in the war on terror” was opened in the Sahara desert of West Africa which is inhabited by Muslim populations. A vanguard U.S. force arrived in Mauritania to pave the way for a $100 million plan to bolster military forces and border patrols of Mauritania, Mali, Chad and Niger.

Sweeping changes

Described as “the most sweeping changes in the U.S. military posture abroad in half a century”¹⁰, the strengthening of U.S. military supremacy worldwide is being prioritized in what Pentagon now calls the “arc of instability” – vast swaths of land and seas covering Latin America, North Africa, Central Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia including the Philippines and Indonesia. This is identical with what used to be described as Third World and covers the world’s strategic oil reserves. All these are on top of defense treaties that the U.S. maintains with 31 countries and access agreements with 51 countries.

Before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. troops stationed abroad numbered 298,490: 88,105 in Europe; 91,670 in East Asia and the Pacific (40,217 in Japan, 37,605 in South Korea); 26,878 in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa; and 14,015 in South America.¹¹ Adding, however, the 130,000 U.S. troops now occupying Iraq, and tens of thousands of others deployed in the Philippines and other locations, the total number of U.S. troops could reach 500,000.

What is now evolving is the most extensive global realignment of U.S. military forces involving the creation of a network of remote military bases designed for the preemptive and rapid projection of U.S. military power against its perceived enemies, hostile states and potential rivals. Under the new basing strategy, some permanent overseas bases will be replaced with smaller facilities while new but small “forward operating bases” will rise in many new locations. The new “forward operating bases,” which will be maintained by small support units, will be built in southern Europe, former Soviet republics, the Middle East and Asia, Pentagon officials said middle of last year.¹²

Outside the hubs (permanent bases) and forward operating bases would lie a ring of "forward operating locations," or prearranged but unmaintained staging areas that U.S. forces build in host nations and which can be occupied quickly in a conflict situation. In the Persian Gulf, some of the forward operating bases have been put up in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Similar smaller bases have been built or are being built in Eastern Europe that could be used as staging areas to move troops quickly to Africa and the Middle East.¹³

In anticipation of an attack against North Korea, the U.S. is also relocating 18,000 Army troops from the DMZ in South Korea to areas 75 miles south meant to make them more mobile for quick retaliation and beyond the reach of missiles that may be unleashed by Pyongyang as a defensive measure.

Military base in the Philippines

The Pentagon, according to Washington Post, still maintains plans to reestablish bases or locations in the Philippines, although it remains unclear how this will finally materialize. Since last year, the U.S. military including a delegation from the U.S. National Defense University has tried to convince the Philippine government to reestablish permanent military bases here. ¹⁴

But the continuing Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) war exercises are proving to be an effective way of installing military facilities and rotational forces that will, so to speak, cobble together the basic bricks of a military facility. U.S. troops including SOFs are coming to the Philippines in hundreds and thousands on a regular and rotational basis with some of them remaining for several months along with sophisticated weaponry and equipment. A Pentagon official once called this, “temporary-permanent” base.

U.S. plans to maintain bases in the Philippines and possibly other Southeast Asian nations are intended for its troops to operate in the region as well as to serve as naval staging posts to support the transit of carrier groups toward the Indian Ocean and Middle East. ¹⁵

Related to this, the Pentagon is planning to earmark over $1 billion for its overseas military construction although 70 percent of this will be used for Europe and South Korea.¹⁶ 

Integral to the new basing strategy and redeployment is what is emerging to be a new system of military alliances, the formation and propping up of new puppet regimes and surrogate armies and other forms of global intervention. In Asia, U.S. imperialism is pushing for the integration of a security arrangement among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). It is also gearing for the mutation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) into a new alliance composed of the “New Europe” – countries allied to the former USSR and some former Soviet republics – in the light of the growing signs of countries from the “Old Europe” particularly France and Germany to form an independent EU Rapid Reaction Force (RRF).¹⁷ All these offer U.S. imperialism some flexibility in the course of its growing aggressive actions that are being pursued under its unilateralist and pre-emptive doctrines, i.e., to mobilize the support of what it calls new “coalitions of the willing” when it is to its advantage.

Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commander of 1,800 troops at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea, says the new basing strategy is designed to put “preventive war” into action, requiring a “global presence,” which means establishing hegemony over every corner of the world. The right-wing American Enterprise Institute calls this “a global cavalry” that can ride in from “frontier stockades” and shoot up the “bad guys.” ¹⁸

With the new basing strategy laid out, expect a new long-term war. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney stressed that point himself on Jan. 15, 2004 when he said that the new structures spreading into new areas of the globe are geared for a “war on terrorism” that could last for generations.

All these developments bring U.S. imperialism to a new height of militarism and aggression surpassing the monstrosity that it reached during the Cold War. On a wider-scale, it continues to undermine the independence, freedom and territorial integrity of many nations - especially the small ones – and worsen the exploitation and oppression that they experience under imperialist globalization. As in the past, it also underscores the fact that during periods of acute global capitalist crisis U.S. imperialism is bound to commit more acts of genocide and plunder against many peoples of the world.

In countries where U.S. military forces are present or are intimidating because of their proximity, U.S. imperialism is able to pursue its oil and other corporate projects, allow the expansion and domination of TNC operations while the host or vanquished countries are subjected to the bitter pills of liberalization, privatization and other globalization prescriptions. Indeed, U.S. interventionism promotes and secures imperialism’s economic and geopolitical objectives in every corner of the world.

Poor and oppressed peoples

Even if U.S. imperialism camouflages itself with universalist and democratic values and claims to be a benign empire in order to justify its intervention and acts of aggression, its main victims are the poor and oppressed peoples of the world reminiscent of the massacres and plunder it committed in more than 200 wars of intervention.

On the other hand, this new stage of U.S. imperialism, militarism and fascism will accelerate the decline of the American Empire not only because huge resources are used up for non-productive and destructive,  adventurist wars but also by creating new zones of instability, peer competition and ever-increasing people’s resistance that U.S. military power will be unable to contend with in the years ahead.

References:

1. David Rennie, Telegraph UK, Dec. 31, 2003.

2. Bobby Tuazon, “The New American Empire and the Rise of State Terrorism,” CAIS Monograph, Oct. 2003.

3. Tuazon, “Bush’s War on Terrorism and the U.S. Drive for World Hegemony,” from the book Unmasking the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialist Hegemony and Crisis. 2002. Philippines, Center for Anti-Imperialist Studies.

4. Chalmers Johnson, “America’s Empire of Bases,” TomDispatch, Jan. 15, 2004. By today, Johnson estimates that the actual size of U.S. military power would top 1,000 bases in foreign countries.

5. Larry Everest, “The U.S. Drive to War on Iraq,” ZMag, July-August 2002.

6. CBS News, “Saddam’s Ouster Planned in 2001?” Jan. 10, 2004.

7. Washington Post, Jan. 31, 2002.

8. Johnson, “America’s…”

9. Ben Moxham, “The U.S. Military: Bringing Hope ‘to Every Corner of the World,’” Focus on the Global South; also Johnson, “America’s…”

10. Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003.

11. Harpal Brar, “Imperialism – Intensification of the Struggle for a New Re-Division of the World,” Monthly Review 2003.

12. Vernon Loeb, “New Bases Reflect Shift in Military,” Washington Post, June 9, 2003.

13. Lawrence Morahan, “U.S. Plans for Military Bases Reflect New Political Reality,” CNSNews.com, April 30, 2003.

14. “Worldwide Reorientation of U.S. Military Basing in Prospect,” Center for Defense Information, Sept. 19, 2003.

15. “Worldwide Reorientation…”

16. Morahan.

17. Brar, “Imperialism – Intensification.”

18. Johnson, “America’s…”

* This article is based on a paper contributed by the author for the Center for Anti-Imperialist Studies (CAIS) in the international conference Mumbai Resistance 2004, January 16-19, 2004, in Mumbai, India.

Back to top

We want to know what you think of this article.