US Military Bases Are Key Pieces of the Global War Machine - 0 views
jacobinmag.com/...global-war-machine-imperialism
USA US history colonialism military bases book review
shared by Ed Webb on 26 Dec 20
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“bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.”
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While the idea that the global expansion of military bases corresponds with the rise of US empire may seem obvious, this book convincingly shows that it is both consequence and cause. Vine brilliantly documents the way widespread global military positions — which are always sold to the public as defensive — are, by their very nature, offensive and become their own, self-fulfilling ecosystems of conquest.
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Over “almost 115 consecutive years of U.S. wars against indigenous nations,” as Vine puts it, US military forts played a consistent role in protecting white settler pillaging and conquest.
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Just as the “induced demand” principle shows why building more lanes on highways actually increases traffic, United States of War makes the argument that military bases themselves incentivize and perpetuate military aggression, coups, and meddling.
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While giving the illusion of increased safety, these bases actually made foreign wars more likely, argues Vine, because they made it easier to wage such wars. In turn, conflict increased construction of US bases.
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a “permanent war system,” as Vine puts it, was established. During the post–World War II era of decolonization, the United States used its military base network and economic influence, buttressed by new institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to protect its preeminence.
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Organized labor, immigrants, recently freed slaves, indigenous peoples at home and abroad: They were all subdued by the same military and police forces making way for white settlement and capital expansion.
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“To this day,” Vine notes, “Chagossians and many others among the displaced are struggling to return home, to win some justice and recompense for what they have suffered.” This is where Vine’s book is at its best: showing the moral stakes of US empire. Shrouded in the sanitized and sterile think tank–ese of “forward positions,” “kinetic action,” and “open door policy,” the average media consumer would be hard-pressed to know the human costs of these bases. Vine documents the stakes from the vantage point of the displaced and disenfranchised.
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While the Bush-Cheney administration closed some bases in Europe, overall spending on bases “reached record highs” during their time in office
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Since September 11, 2001, the United States has also expanded its presence in Africa, building “lily pads” across the continent — smaller profile, somewhat secretive installations, suggesting “a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad toward its prey,” writes Vine. US bases have been central to waging the 2011 NATO war in Libya, drone strikes in Yemen, military intervention in Somalia and Cameroon. “The military has been conducting a variety of operations regularly in at least 49 African countries,” writes Vine. “It may be operating in every single one.”
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The War on Terror ethos, in which the whole world is considered a US battlefield and the United States grants itself broad latitude to wage preemptive war, has come to define US foreign policy.
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Engaging Vine’s book is less like reading a tidy cause-and-effect theory of the relationship between US military bases and wars, and more an exploration of the symbiotic relationship between capital, US empire and racism, and their primary mode of interaction: the military base.