Reply #4: To quote from Chalmers Johnson, author of 'Sorrows of Empire', [View All]

[sinkingfeeling]

Q: You say there are at least 725 American military bases in existence outside the United States. What purpose do they serve?

Answer from Chalmers Johnson:

America's empire of military bases is there to garrison the world, to ensure that no nation or combination of nations can exert influence that the president, his advisers, and the Pentagon have not sanctioned.

It is possible to reduce the complex set of purposes and interests that have led to this gargantuan deployment of military power to five post-Cold War missions for our bases. These are:

maintaining absolute military preponderance over the rest of the world, a task that includes imperial policing to ensure that no part of the empire slips the leash;

eavesdropping on the communications of citizens, allies, and enemies alike, often apparently just to demonstrate that no realm of privacy is impervious to the technological capabilities of our government;

attempting to control as many sources of petroleum as possible, both to service America's insatiable demand for fossil fuels and to use it as a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions;

providing work and income for the military-industrial complex;

and ensuring that members of the military and their families live comfortably and are well entertained while serving abroad.


No one of these goals or even all of them together, however, can entirely explain our expanding empire of bases. There is something else at work, which I believe is the post-Cold War discovery of our immense power rationalized by the self-glorifying conclusion that because we have it we deserve to have it. The only truly common elements in the totality of America's foreign bases are imperialism and militarism -- an impulse on the part of our elites to dominate other peoples largely because we have the power to do so, followed by the strategic reasoning that, in order to defend these newly acquired outposts and control the regions they are in, we must expand the areas under our control with still more bases. To maintain its empire, the Pentagon must constantly invent new reasons for keeping as many bases as possible long after the wars and crises that led to their creation have evaporated.