eli5: Why does USA have military bases and soldiers in many foreign countries?
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The Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars were – to an extent – the result of complex international relations where peace relied on a precarious balance of power between a relatively large number of large states. When the system inevitably became unbalanced, it led to massively destructive wars between multiple parties, with WWII costing the lives of around 80 millions people.
The world emerged from WWII with two military superpowers (USA and USSR) and one economic superpower (the USA). The world was effectively split in half between the USA’s sphere of influence and the USSR’s, and bases were built by both sides in areas they considered their sphere. The host countries *wanted* US bases because it allowed them to outsource some of their defense to America, while allowing the US to formulated a more cohesive plan for defending against a war with the USSR as much of the infrastructure is already in place.
This is a good deal for the host countries (they get to spend less on defense and more on domestic items), and for American business (these deals usually came with advantageous economic deals for American businesses, not to mention the massive profits of the military-industrial complex funding this massive military machine). However, it’s a bad deal for the American taxpayer (the business deals abroad do bring in a lot of wealth and we do get access to cheap goods, but most of the profit goes to the rich business owners, and a huge chunk of our taxes are spent on the military and not on building schools, infrastructure, etc). On top of that, America often acts out of line with its stated goals of working towards a more just world, like the invasion of Iraq for questionable reasons in the early 2000’s.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, America was left as the sole superpower for a time, until the growing Chinese economy began to challenge the United States for economic hegemony in the world. China has made great strides in this regard, and are now trying to expand their military bases around the world to exercise a comparable level of control over global geopolitics to the United States.
So, in conclusion, being the sole “world police” helps prevent large wars erupting between nations (the current war in the Middle East would likely involve many more countries if the threat of United States intervention wasn’t hanging over the region), and if the United States shut down all its bases tomorrow, China would seek to fill the vacuum and become the new “world police”.
While America has and continues to be less than inspiring in its role as the paragon of the world, it has bought an unprecedented period of almost a century without the world’s great powers fighting each other, and the United States vision of the world, while flawed, is vastly preferable to the Chinese version that would replace it.
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