Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

The Monroe Doctrine assumed ever-new opportunistic forms. In December 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt enunciated the Roosevelt Corollary to it, calling for intervention throughout the Americas to suppress political movements that might interfere with the payment of Latin American debts. Because the United States was a “civilized nation,” Roosevelt wrote, it had a duty to exercise “an international police power” to stop “chronic wrongdoing” wherever it occurred among America’s neighbors to the south. Theodore Roosevelt’s successor as president, William Howard Taft, the former governor of the Philippines, proclaimed something he called “dollar diplomacy”—another euphemism for imperialism—and invoked Roosevelt’s Corollary to promote and protect American business interests overseas, particularly in the Caribbean and Central America. 6Between 1898 and 1934, the United States sent marines to Cuba four times, Honduras seven times, the Dominican Republic four times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico three times, Colombia four times, and Nicaragua five times (where they built bases and maintained an uninterrupted presence for twenty-one years except for a short period in 1925). 7As the political scientist David Abernethy observes, “The country that had proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine to protect the independence of Spanish-speaking countries on the New World mainland now found itself in the anomalous position of replacing Spain as a colonial ruler and repressing national independence movements.” 8The Roosevelt Corollary was supplanted only in 1934, by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy.

The first war devoted explicitly to creating military bases outside mainland North America was the Spanish-American War. Though officially it was launched to assist Cuban rebels against Spanish rule and avenge the sinking of the USS Maine, the actual reason was to establish military and naval bases in the Caribbean and the Western Pacific, in accordance with plans of then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of State John Hay, several leading Republican senators, including Henry Cabot Lodge and Albert Beveridge, naval theorist Captain Alfred T. Mahan, and various other supporters like Brooks Adams and Elihu Root. As a result of victory in that war, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were made colonies, Hawaii and the Panama Canal Zone (in which numerous military bases were located) were annexed, and a military base was established in Cuba.

After World War II, we gave the Philippines its independence but, until the Philippine Senate expelled us in 1992, we maintained two of our largest overseas bases there—Clark Air Base at Angeles City and Subic Bay Naval Base at Olongapo, both on the island of Luzon. Ever since 1992, the Pentagon has been trying to find a way to reestablish a military presence in the islands, whether by exaggerating the threat of China, through military “exchanges” under so-called visiting forces agreements, or more recently under the rubric of the “war on terrorism.” During 2002, the Bush administration succeeded in reintroducing forces into the Philippines to train Filipinos to fight Muslim guerrillas in the southern islands.

WORLD WAR II AND THE GERMAN BASES

World War II fatally weakened all the major colonial empires and simultaneously left the United States as the most powerful nation on earth, indeed an imperial power of the first order. With the onset of the Cold War, America decided not just to hang on to its wartime territorial gains but to expand them into a huge ring of bases reaching from Iceland to Japan that would completely surround the USSR and China, whose Communist Party had emerged victorious from a bitter civil war.

Whether or not most of these bases would have proved of real importance in a Soviet-American war, their possession was justified as a crucial part of a policy of“containing” Communism. It was sometimes argued as well that the bases needed to be retained just to keep them out of Soviet hands. Containment and strategic denial became the rationales for a new version of imperialism that replaced the old and discredited practice of colonialism. Military bases, vaguely legitimized through alliances and mutual security pacts, became the institutional form this new imperialism took. Even in Latin America, where the United States had for over a century maintained a more traditional form of political and economic domination, using older imperial explanations for its acts, it now began to apply Cold War ideology, claiming that the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala, Chile, and Nicaragua and the training of thousands of Latin American military officers in the techniques of domestic repression were an essential part of containing Communism and Soviet influence in the hemisphere.

The two biggest prizes of World War II were Germany and Japan. The American army occupied all of Japan, while the standoff between the United States and the USSR in Germany, where the two victorious armies had met at the Elbe River in 1945, became the supreme symbol of the Cold War. In the four-power division of occupied Germany, the United States controlled the southern and central states of Bavaria, parts of what is today Baden-Württemberg, and Hesse. France occupied the western regions, Britain the north, the USSR the eastern half of the country, and all four powers jointly governed the capital, Berlin. Facing the USSR from Germany’s south-central quarter, a territory about the size of the state of Oregon, some 285,000 U.S. combat troops, armed with nuclear weapons, were deployed at just under 800 bases. Across the artificial border created where the armies stopped, the USSR stationed approximately 380,000 troops and some 20,000 tanks, one of the largest land armadas ever assembled. Initial NATO military planning for repelling a Soviet invasion contemplated a defensive line at the Rhine River; therefore the main NATO command and air bases were located behind the Rhine, in France. But in May 1966, at the height of the Vietnam War, the French government, led by former General Charles de Gaulle, declared its intention to regain “full sovereignty [over] French territory.” It would no longer “accept the presence of foreign units, installations, or bases in France falling in any respect under the control of authorities other than French authorities.” 9France opted out of NATO because, as supreme commander, an American general dominated it. (In 1993, France rejoined.)

On April 1, 1967, NATO was evicted from France, and Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) moved to Brussels. Major U.S. Army commands relocated to Stuttgart and Heidelberg, and south-central Germany became even more congested with American military bases. Even though the threat of war with the USSR was already receding, the United States developed a new “defensive” strategy, placing its air bases as close to the French border as possible. American strategists put six combat airfields (Bitburg, Hahn, Ramstein, Sembach, Spangdahlem, and Zweibrüchen) in the small German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which became, as it remains today, an American sphere of influence. U.S. commanders posited that a Soviet invasion, if it came, would be launched through a gap between the Rhön and Vogelsberg Mountains where the terrain was advantageous for invading tanks. The small central German city of Fulda, only twenty miles from the East German border, was directly in the path of the projected invasion. The army therefore created a “military community” in Fulda that occupied the city center and twenty-two other sites around the town, all part of the 104th Area Support Group headquartered in nearby Hanau. With the reunification of Germany in 1990, the city’s importance vanished overnight. The last U.S. soldiers said good-bye to Fulda in the summer of 1994.