Empire of Bases
The US Declaration of Independence listed grievances against the British, including “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us." Even so, the US has established hundreds of military bases around the globe, more than 800 in all, excluding those in Iraq and Afghanistan. By some estimates, these bases cost more than $1 billion to maintain. “The United States has pioneered a leaner approach to global empire,” argues Hugh Gusterson in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Amid global economic crisis, expensive military bases are a target for those who seek to reduce government budgets. Gusterson argues that the foreign military bases are “cocoons” that benefit only a few in other countries via trade without doing much to strengthen cultural or other connections. In listing a range of conflicts at specific bases, Gusterson contends that “U.S. foreign bases have a double edge: they project American power across the globe, but they also inflame U.S. foreign relations, generating resentment against the prostitution, environmental damage, petty crime, and everyday ethnocentrism that are their inevitable corollaries.” He concludes that the system of military bases is not so different from the derided policy of colonialism. – YaleGlobal
Empire of Bases
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Click here for the article on The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
An anthropologist, Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He has conducted considerable fieldwork in the United States and Russia, where he studied the culture of nuclear weapon scientists and antinuclear activists. Two of his books encapsulate this work – “Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War” (University of California Press, 1996) and “People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex” (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
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