eli5: Why does USA have military bases and soldiers in many foreign countries?
In: Other
The US military is like a herpes infection, it never really goes away. Once you’ve been infected, you’ll have periodic outbreaks of it. It comes and goes as it pleases, and you have no truly viable means to stop it.
Attempting to stop it returning or staying as it pleases would likely cause the host government to be overturned, and it would just come back anyway.
It’s basically just a power thing. Little countries can’t really say no.
Edit: Comment hidden despite a positive vote count. Must have struck a nerve or reddit has shadow banned me.
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.
Why does the cash truck send security guards to pick up cash from the store? Why are bananas $0.29 all year around in Kansas?
To maintain global economic hegemony. US Marine General Smedley Butler gave a great speech after the end of his career when he talks about the his military career just being used as a global form of security for big business.
Because it is the only army currently that projects power globally. Projecting power globally means that you have infantry, aircraft and naval vessels able to operate in any part of the world. In practice this means that it’s much more practical to have permanent bases of infantry, aircraft and naval vessels all across the world, and they do that by placing them wherever they’re allowed, namely in Europe due to the NATO alliance, most notably Germany which is a holdover from the Cold War, Japan due to alliance with Japan, South Korea due to an alliance with them, the Middle East due to alliances of the governments they backed there (whether these governments have any actual control or not), the Pacific in various locations due to various complicated reasons, Africa in Djibouti due to a special arrangement which multiple countries take advantage of, and the list goes on.
Basically they have bases wherever they can. This allows them to operate everywhere.
The short answer is that it gives us the ability to attack anyone, at anytime, anywhere on earth. Establishing a military base from where soldiers can be deployed takes weeks to months. If you already have them you save a lot of time. If there’s a situation, almost anywhere in the world, where a strategic strike could change the tide of a conflict, we can do it in a matter of hours.
1. The US pays big rental fees to poorer countries for the bases they have, making it a form of foreign aid.
2. Technically, “anything goes” in international waters. US ports exist to keep the peace on international trade routes over the seas so the whole world gets their Amazon packages and gasoline without some Somali pirate stealing my knock off air fryer.
3. Someone’s ass we kicked a century ago that we needed to make sure wasn’t going to slide back into a National Socialist Worker Party {Nazi} form of government and declare war on the entire world. (Cough, Germany, cough)
4. Containment (looking at you, China) for countries that have not entered their “Colonization” stage of their history and want to try and manifest destiny all over other democratic countries. Also, in the Middle East, when a larger country (Iran) happens to find natural gas underneath the sea of its weak ass neighbor (Qatar) the weak neighbor invites a US base to move in so that it can fairly access the natural resources underneath its own borders without a neighbor bullying them out of it.
5. Space communication: SatComm (Diego Garcia) is used to communicate with satellites that are not seeable from an American horizon and their comms need to be “caught” when they are on the other side of the world.
6. Hemisphere Defense (Thule, Greenland). Someone fires a nuke over the North Pole, we need to shoot it down fast.
7. Most importantly, weak allies…No other country has a desire to spend an enormous amount of money every year to keep the world safe for practically free. We are seeing America slowly retreat from this stance, but no one wants this responsibility because of the price tag it comes with. It’s why we don’t have socialized medicine, we secure the democratic countries of the world…Russia and China don’t stay about night worried about Finland for God’s sake…it’s the US…for better or worse..
EDIT: Sorry for the language my 5 year old friend..
In military strategy, there is something called the ‘loss of strength gradient’: in essence, the farther a military is operating from “home”, the less power they can project to that area. “Home”, usually within their own borders, provides reliable logistics, familiar systems, nearby resources (including, for personnel, familial and social resources), local industry, extremely high situational awareness, and other factors that improve the performance of the unit.
The purpose placing a base overseas is to reduce this ‘loss of strength gradient’ by extending, in some way, the region where it means to be ‘home’. By placing permanent bases in Germany, for instance, many of the benefits that US military forces have operating in the United States are replicated over seas, and the loss of strength gradient starts from Germany, rather than the continental United States.
Of course, a US base exists to further the interests of the US government and its foreign policy, and a host country does not have an intrinsic motivation to host the US. Therefore, the US typically has to offer the host country some other benefit in order to receive basing rights. This may include mutual defense, including nuclear security, in the case of NATO allies, Japan or South Korea, or other allies. It may be a purely economic benefit (ie, that US servicemembers and the Department of Defense will spend a lot of money in the local area, although often significant infrastructure costs are taken up by the host country, depending on their geopolitical relationship to the United States), or some other aspect of mutual defense.
While placing soldiers in another country is often colloquially called ‘basing’ them there, frequently there is no foreign base in a formal sense. If the reason for placing soldiers overseas is to complete a *specific mission* together with the host ( rather than a broader geopolitical sense of mutual benefit), even if that mission is permanent, then they will usually share facilities with the host country. For instance, a fair number of Canadian airmen are permanently stationed in the United States, and American airmen in Canada, in order to operate NORAD. However, neither operates a base in the other country as NORAD is a bilateral command, such that each is integrated into the host facilities (eg, Canadian airmen at Peterson Space Force Base, a US installation, and US airmen at 22 Wing – North Bay, a Canadian installation).
It’s like being friends with a REALLY buff gym-rat kid in high school. Bullies are a lot less likely to mess with you, ebcause they know your friend is right there and is very likely to get involved. So you get some of the benefit of being the gym-rat buff guy without the ‘cost’ of having to spend half your free time in the gym. And yeah, maybe he is a bit of a mooch and stops by for dinner all the time and hogs your XBOX when you hang out and hits in your sister. But small price to pay.
HAving a military strong enought to deter someone like China or Russia (or even middling militaries like N. Korea, India, Iran etc.) from fucking with your country will take a LOOOOTTT of money. More than most countries can afford. But if they host a US military base, you get many of the benefits of a military that big (being that buff) without nearly as much cost (spending all that time in the gym).
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”.**
To maintain global hegemony, the United States needs immediate power over smaller nations and a penopticon of military presence due to low global response times. We lord over the global south with weaponized debts from inequal trade to steal their natural resources and give relatively little in return other than the construction of some productive forces their own peoples are restricted from legitimately profiting from. Anyone who tells you a us military base is good for a country in the long run is selling you trickle down economics and calling it something else.
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