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US base in Syria, near the settlement of Al-Tanf.
US base in Syria, near the settlement of Al-Tanf.
"As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order."Grimly enough, 15 years later, as TomDispatch managing editor Nick Turse makes clear today, not a word of what Johnson wrote isn't applicable to this moment as well. The United States remains, in the phrase of another TomDispatch author, David Vine, a base nation. Millions of Americans have been to or served at one or more of those garrisons scattered in an historically unprecedented way across, as Johnson said, every continent but Antarctica. In recent years, in every size and shape those bases have, as Turse points out, only multiplied across the Greater Middle East and increasingly parts of Africa, thanks to Washington's never-ending war on terror. Yet coverage of them, discussion of them, debate about them in this country is essentially nil. America's Baseworld, a looming reality of the twenty-first century, remains no part of any conversation, not in the mainstream media, not on cable news, nowhere -- not, at least, until Donald Trump recently withdrew perhaps 1,000 U.S. military personnel from a number of small bases in northeastern Syria (even if new ones are soon to return to Southern Syria) to the shocked reaction of national security types everywhere.
In other words, an overwhelming fact that shapes the U.S. role in the world (and the forever wars that go with it) is generally absent from American thinking about that very role, which is why today's Turse piece couldn't be more timely. Tom
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