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In Foreign Affairs, Alexander Cooley
writes about how a less unipolar world is prompting competition for
foreign expansion among the great powers, particularly the US, Russia,
and China in the Central Asian countries. And it means the American
Empire is costing a lot more.
Most dramatically, in 2009, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan,
host to the Manas Transit Center, initiated a bidding war between the United
States and Russia by threatening to close the base. He extracted hundreds of
millions of dollars from both sides, in the form of a Russian assistance
package and a renewed lease at a higher rent with the United States. Since
2008, the United States also has paid transit fees, about
$500 million annually, to the Uzbek and other Central Asian
governments to ship equipment bound for Afghanistan through the Northern
Distribution Network.
The same dynamic is playing out elsewhere. The availability of
alternative patrons has made U.S. strategic engagement more expensive
everywhere, both in terms of dollars and politics. In 2008, Ecuadorian
President Rafael Correa refused to extend a ten-year lease of the U.S. base
at Manta, after having been offered $500 million to upgrade the facility by
a Hong Kong port operator. Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, has observed that
in post-revolutionary Egypt the United States has continued to provide
assistance in return for overflight rights and access to the Suez Canal,
even as U.S. leverage over the country diminishes. And during Pakistan’s
seven-month fallout with Washington, in which it closed Afghanistan-bound
supply lanes, Islamabad publicly demanded an increase in transit fees and
courted China. Eventually, U.S. officials reportedly agreed to release $1.1
billion for the Pakistani military from the Coalition Support Fund to get
the route back open.
Comparisons to the Roman Empire and the overextended expansionism that
helped lead to its downfall can sometimes get stale, but all of these examples
make it clear that maintaining an empire of military bases and client states
is getting increasingly unaffordable for a US government
$16 trillion in debt.
The Obama administration is also in the process of surging our expensive
high-tech military presence in the
Persian Gulf and all throughout the
Asia Pacific region. And as David Vine recently
wrote for TomDispatch, America’s
Empire of Bases is growing
worldwide. Sooner or later, America will be drained.
Incidentally, the late, great Chalmers Johnson predicted the very scenario
Cooley relays. In Baseless
Expenditures he wrote: “I have a suggestion for other countries that are
getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: cash in
now, before it’s too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go
home. I encourage this behavior because I’m convinced that the US Empire of
Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country.”
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