..the deeper roots to why there are these U.S. bases popping up in Africa in particular [is that there is] something of a new scramble for Africa that resembles that of the late 19th century scramble among European empires for control of resources in parts of Africa.
China in particular, the greatest competitor to the U.S. government, has been pursuing this competition with economic tools by making strategic investments [and] by helping to build soccer stadiums. By contrast, the U.S. government has pursued the competition largely with U.S. military might — by making investments in military infrastructure, training, military exercises and the like.
U.S. military bases are, in my mind, a largely overlooked tool of U.S. imperial power since World War II. U.S. military bases have, since World War II, occupied dozens of countries and, at times, have actually numbered even more than the 800 today, and they’ve been a major tool by which the United States government has been able to exercise power and control over local governments [and] over local people to advance [the] economic and political interests of … U.S. corporations [and] U.S. elites
Many people in the United States don’t like to think of our country as an empire. In my mind, [we’re] a country that expanded across an entire continent from 13 original states to conquer the entire continent …with all the death and destruction that entailed, and then began acquiring territories, colonies, outside of North America as well as exercising imperial power through a long series of invasions in Latin America all the way to the invasions of the Middle East that we’ve seen since 1980 — the series of wars that have been, again, in my mind, catastrophic to say the least.
There’s a
large academic body of literature (*) that shows that it’s largely [either] inconclusive [or] does not support the idea that military bases are an effective form of deterrence. If anything, my biggest concern is that encircling China and Russia, in particular, with U.S. military bases and U.S. military power only encourages them to respond. My fear is that there’s the danger of a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people calling for a U.S. military buildup in east Asia to counter China …are actually helping to create the very threat that they’re trying to prevent, making war more likely, rather than less likely.
Many people within the military share the concerns I have about U.S. military bases abroad and people across the political spectrum increasingly [are] asking why the U.S. has so many military bases abroad [and whether] they justify the roughly $50 billion a year the U.S. government and U.S. taxpayers are paying to support them.