eli5: Why does USA have military bases and soldiers in many foreign countries?
In: Other
The US, through both soft and hard manifestations of its power, maintains global hegemony on matters of international trade. Some of the “soft” power manifestations of this hegemony include oil (the world’s most valuable commodity) being priced in dollars, the dollar itself being the base standard all other currency is based on, and the US being the largest overall net importer of goods in the world. None of these things happened by accident, they were the result of deliberate economic policies adopted at various points by the US Government. The US has tremendous advantages through simple geography, but a big reason we have dominated the world ever since WWII is because we were the last powerful country that wasn’t bombed to shit and had a functioning economy, and so we designed the postwar economic system to our advantage and continue to leverage that power.
Those military bases fall into the “hard power” category. If you [look at the map of where they’re all laid out](https://ubique.americangeo.org/map-of-the-week/map-of-the-week-mapping-the-global-u-s-military-bootprint/), virtually everywhere in the world outside of parts of Central and Southeast Asia has US military bases. In many cases, it’s because we built them during World War II, as we effectively never retreated from the lines established in Japan, West Germany, North Africa, and Southern Italy. There are a large number of bases left over in Kuwait, South Korea, and Thailand/Cambodia from our military entanglements there. This all used to be justified as a counter to Soviet influence, as they likewise never retreated from their own lines in Asia, Central and Eastern Europe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, ever more nebulous threats have been used to justify our military presence throughout the world. But it’s really not that hard to figure out.
In brute terms, [look at a map](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fhq2sp7atgxa91.jpg%3Fwidth%3D960%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D9e970550e22e8699885c70da457a3bf012c326eb). Japan and South Korea literally form a buffer between the pacific and our two main geopolitical rivals Russia and China. So we have a ton of military bases there. We used to have bases in Taiwan, but removed them in the seventies as part of the normalization of relations with mainland China. The Persian Gulf is full of US bases that are in close proximity to Iran, Syria, and Iraq which have frequently aligned against the US geopolitically (and now only one of those countries isn’t a failed state full of US bases). This is called “power projection”, and allows us to plausibly retaliate very quickly if any of those countries decides to try something. A major reason Russia invaded Ukraine was because Ukraine joining NATO would have effectively put US military bases right at Russia’s border and given us access to their only warm-water port. Outside of the Crimean peninsula, Russia has historically only had access to ports that freeze in the winter. It’s a huge reason they’ve been an expansionist power and the country is so large and crisscrossed with trains.
Other bases have purely economic explanations for their presence. We have the world’s largest navy and maintain naval bases near most of the world’s major shipping bottlenecks. Many of the bases in Turkey, Panama, Colombia, Israel, Egypt, Portugal, Greece, Ethiopia, Singapore, etc are maintained primarily for this purpose. This effectively makes the United States the “police” of international trade, and allow us to enforce sanctions and embargoes against countries that do not cooperate with us. And in Central Africa, one of the most resource rich parts of the world, we have bases that grant us access and authority over local trade while those weak governments have some backup against terrorists and rebels.
We have no bases in France because they maintain the vestiges of their own empire in Africa and Southeast Asia, and we have kind of a “gentleman’s agreement” to act like they still have equal standing with the US, unlike the UK, which is for all intents and purposes our forward operating base, especially as their economy declines. India, China, Russia, and South Africa have no bases because they are powerful economies with their own geopolitical prerogatives, and Russia and China have obviously been our main rivals since the 50’s, although it must be mentioned that not even the Soviet Union at the height of its power and influence had anywhere near the force projection and economic hegemony that we did.
This all might sound quite cynical and mercenary. That’s because it is! We as a species have failed so far to develop a model of international relations that does not rest on the dominance of weaker countries by stronger ones. The current model is this one where the US holds our big guns to everyone else’s heads. The US does not *explicitly* maintain an empire, but that’s effectively what this is. We’ve been known to frequently remove governments that complain about this state of affairs. And unlike many of the commenters here indicate, while *the governments* of all of these countries (except Cuba) cooperate with the US military, *the people* of these countries very frequently demonstrate their dissatisfaction with our presence there, either through protest (as frequently happens in Okinawa) or terrorism (as happened in Beirut in the 80’s). Even Hawaii has frequent protests against US military bases. But nothing terrifies the US establishment more than a world where they don’t have total control, and so the bases stay.
It’s very debatable whether this is all worthwhile to the US taxpayer, especially since some of these countries where we basically subsidize their militaries have far more economic rights than we do. But we get lots of goods from all over the world, and it all stays relatively affordable, because we run the world.
**tl;dr** **~~It’s an empire.~~** **Excuse me, sorry. It’s “the rules-based international order”.**
Latest Answers