And—presto!—before you knew it, three-quarters of the world was a colony of Europe, the United States, or Japan. Not bad, all in all, for a few floating centuries. In the latter part of this period, the phrase “gunboat diplomacy” came into existence, an oxymoron that nonetheless expressed itself all too eloquently.
Our Little “Diplomats”
Today, “gunboat diplomacy” seems like a phrase from some antiquated imperial past, despite our many aircraft carrier task forces that travel the world making “friendly” house calls from time to time. But if you stop thinking about literal gunboats and try to imagine how we carry out “armed diplomacy”—and under the Bush administration the Pentagon took over much that might once have been labeled “diplomacy”—then you can begin to conjure up our own twenty-first-century version of gunboat diplomacy. But first, you have to consider exactly what the “platforms” are upon which we “export force,” upon which we mount our “cannons.”
What should immediately come to mind are our military bases, liberally scattered like so many vast immobile vessels over the lands of the earth. This has been especially true since the neocons of the Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing policy globally; set about, that is, creating more “mobile”
versions of the military base, ever more stripped down for action, ever closer to the “arc of instability,” a vast swath of lands extending from the former Yugoslavia well into northern Africa, and all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy heartlands of the planet. The Pentagon’s so-called lily pads strategy is meant to encircle and nail down control of this vast set of interlocking regions—the thought being that, if the occasion arises, the American frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned pad to another, knocking off the “flies” as they go.
Thought about a certain way, the military base, particularly as reconceived in recent years, whether in Uzbekistan, Kosovo, or Qatar, is our “gunboat,” a “platform” that has been ridden ever deeper into the land-locked parts of the globe—into regions like the Middle East, where our access once had some limits, or like the former Yugoslavia and the -stans of Central Asia, where the lesser superpower of the cold war era once blocked access entirely. Our new military bases are essentially the twenty-first-century version of those old European warships, the difference being that, once built, the base remains in place, while its parts—the modern equivalents of those sixteenth-century cannons—are capable of moving over land or water almost anywhere.
As Chalmers Johnson has calculated in his book
The Sorrows of Empire
, our global baseworld consists of at least seven hundred military and intelligence bases, possibly—depending on how you count them up—many more. This is our true “imperial fleet” (though, of course, we have an actual imperial fleet, our aircraft carriers alone being like small, massively armed towns). In the last decade-plus, as the pace of our foreign wars has picked up, we’ve left behind, after each of them, a new set of bases like the droppings of some giant beast marking the scene with its scent. Bases were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates after our first Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and several Central Asian states after the Afghan War of 2001; and into Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
The process speeded up under the Bush administration, but you would have had almost no way of knowing this. Basing is generally considered either a topic not worth writing about or an arcane policy matter
best left to the inside pages of the newspaper for the policy wonks and news junkies. This is in part because we Americans—and by extension our journalists—don’t imagine us as garrisoning or occupying the world, and certainly not as having anything faintly approaching a military empire. Generally speaking, those more than seven hundred bases, our little “diplomats” (and the rights of extraterritoriality that go with them via Status of Forces Agreements) don’t even register on our media’s mental map of our globe.
Enduring Camps
In Iraq, our permanent bases are endearingly referred to by the military as “enduring camps.” Such bases were almost certainly planned before the 2003 invasion. After all, we were also planning to withdraw most of our troops from Saudi Arabia—Osama bin Laden had complained bitterly about the occupation of Islam’s holy sites—and they weren’t simply going to be shipped back to the United States.
The numbers of those potential enduring camps in Iraq are startling indeed. As one rare
Chicago Tribune
article on the topic noted, early on in the occupation of Iraq, “From the ashes of abandoned Iraqi army bases, U.S. military engineers are overseeing the building of an enhanced system of American bases designed to last for years.” Some of these bases are already comparable in size and elaborateness to the ones we built in Vietnam four decades ago. Christine Spolar, who wrote the article, continues:
As the U.S. scales back its military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq provides an option for an administration eager to maintain a robust military presence in the Middle East and intent on a muscular approach to seeding democracy in the region.…
“Is this a swap for the Saudi bases?” asked Army Brig. Gen. Robert Pollman, chief engineer for base construction in Iraq. “I don’t know.… When we talk about enduring bases here, we’re talking about the present operation, not in terms of America’s global strategic base. But this makes sense. It makes a lot of logical sense.”
And keep in mind as well that all of this construction is being done to the tune of billions of dollars under contracts controlled by the Pentagon and, as Spolar writes, quite “separate from the State Department
and its Embassy in Baghdad” (which is slated to be the largest embassy in the world).
As the Pentagon planned it, and as we knew via leaks to the press soon after the invasion began, newly “liberated” Iraq, once “sovereignty” had been restored, was to have only a lightly armed military force of some forty thousand troops and no air force. The other part of this equation, the given (if unspoken) part, was that some sort of significant long-term U.S. military protection of the country would have to be put in place. And we proceeded accordingly, emplacing our “little diplomats” right at a future hub of the global energy superhighway.
But we’ve made sure to cover the other on- and off-ramps as well. As James Sterngold of the
San Francisco Chronicle
wrote in a rundown of some of our post-9/11 basing policies:
[T]he administration has instituted what some experts describe as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history.
The policy has involved not just resorting to military action, or the threat of action, but constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls “lily pads.” They are seen not merely as a means of defending the host countries—the traditional Cold War role of such installations—but as jumping-off points for future “preventive wars” and military missions.
In fact, our particular version of military empire is perhaps unique: all “gunboats,” no colonies. The combination of bases we set down in any given country is referred to in the Pentagon as our “footprint” in that country. It’s a term that may once have come from the idea of “boots on the ground,” but now has congealed, imagistically speaking, into a single (and assumedly singular) boot print—as if, as it strode across the planet, the globe’s only hyperpower was so vast that it could place but a single boot in any given country at any time, an eerie echo perhaps of that British sun which was never to set on their vast empire (until, of course, it did).
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith was the main Pentagon architect of a plan to “realign” our bases so as to “forward deploy” U.S. forces into the “arc of instability.” In a December 2003 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he offered a Pentagon
version of sensitivity in discussing his forward deployment plans: “Realigning the U.S. posture will also help strengthen our alliances by tailoring the physical U.S. ‘footprint’ to suit local conditions. The goal is to reduce friction with host nations, the kind that results from accidents and other problems relating to local sensitivities.” In the meantime, to ensure that there will be no consequences if the giant foot, however enclosed, happens to stamp its print in a tad clumsily, causing the odd bit of collateral damage, he added:
For this deployability concept to work, U.S. forces must be able to move smoothly into, through, and out of host nations, which puts a premium on establishing legal and support arrangements with many friendly countries. We are negotiating or planning to negotiate with many countries legal protections for U.S. personnel, through Status of Forces Agreements and agreements (known as Article 98 agreements) limiting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court with respect to our forces’ activities.
Bradley Graham of the
Washington Post
offered a more precise glimpse at Feith’s realignment strategy, which would move us away from our cold war deployments, especially in Germany, Japan, and Korea:
The Pentagon has drafted plans to withdraw as many as half of the 71,000 troops based in Germany as part of an extensive realignment of American military forces that moves away from large concentrations in Europe and Asia, according to U.S. officials….
U.S. officials have said before that they intended to eliminate a number of large, full-service Cold War bases abroad and construct a network of more skeletal outposts closer to potential trouble spots in the Middle East and along the Pacific Rim.
In fact, the structure of major bases and “forward operating sites” in the arc of instability and, from Eastern Europe to the Central Asian states, inside the former Soviet empire, is already in place or, as in Iraq, in the process of being built or negotiated. As Michael Kilian of the
Chicago Tribune
writes:
[T]he U.S. now has bases or shares military installations in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates,
Oman, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials are soon expected to unveil plans for a new U.S. military “footprint” on the rest of the world. The plan is expected to include a shift of resources from the huge Cold War- era bases in Western Europe to new and smaller ones in Poland and other Eastern Europe nations as well as a relocation of U.S. troops in South Korea.
In the meantime, Pentagon strategic planning for ever more aggressive future war-fighting is likely only to intensify this process.
Los Angeles Times
military analyst William Arkin wrote of the unveiling of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s plan for a new military map of the globe:
The Rumsfeld plan envisions what it labels a “1-4-2-1 defense strategy,” in which war planners prepare to fully defend one country (the United States), maintain forces capable of “deterring aggression and coercion” in four “critical regions” (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and Southwest Asia), maintain the ability to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and be able to “win decisively”—up to and including forcing regime change and occupying a country—in one of those conflicts “at a time and place of our choosing”.…
In the Clinton era, the Pentagon planned for fighting two wars simultaneously (in the Middle East and Northeast Asia). Under the new strategy, it must prepare for four.…
The planning model Rumsfeld and company have embraced is certainly more ambitious. It covers domestic and foreign contingencies and favors preemption over diplomacy, and military strikes over peacekeeping operations. The plan signals to the world that the United States considers nuclear weapons useful military instruments, to be employed where warranted.
At least as imagined in the Pentagon, twenty-second-century “gunboat diplomacy” will be conducted by what the Air Force’s Space Command refers to as “space-based platforms,” and the “cannons” will be a range of “exotic” weapons and delivery systems. In still unweaponized
space (if you exclude the various spy satellites overhead), we plan for our future “ships” to travel the heavens alone, representatives of a singular version of gunboat diplomacy. Among the “five priorities for national security space efforts” set out by Peter B. Teets, Bush’s undersecretary of the air force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office, in an article for
Air & Space Power Journal
, the most striking, if also predictable, was that of “ensuring freedom of action in space”—as in freedom of action for us, and no action at all for anyone else.
Space, long depicted as a void, is now being reimagined as the ocean of our imperial future, thanks to space weaponry on the drawing boards like the nicknamed “Rods from God.” These are to be “orbiting platforms stocked with tungsten rods perhaps 20 feet long and one foot in diameter that could be satellite-guided to targets anywhere on Earth within minutes. Accurate within about 25 feet, they would strike at speeds upwards of 12,000 feet per second, enough to destroy even hardened bunkers several stories underground.”
Planning among “high frontier” enthusiasts for the conquest and militarization of space began in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, but it has reached new levels of realism (of a mad sort). Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information, writing in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, described a “new U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan”: “The document details a stunning array of exotic weapons to be pursued over the next decade: from an air-launched missile designed to knock satellites out of low orbit, to ground- and space-based lasers for attacking both missiles and satellites, to ‘hypervelocity rod bundles’ (nicknamed Rods from God)…. Far from being aimed solely at the protection of U.S. space capabilities, such weapons are instead intended for offensive, first-strike missions.”