Military Bases - Map/Data

The Far-Reaching Hands of America's Power

In the eyes of most Americans, the United States has remained at worst an "informal" empire. After all, it had no colonies and its massive military forces are deployed around the world only to maintain "stability," or guarantee "mutual security," or promote a liberal world order based on free elections and American-style "open markets."

Yet not including the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, we now station over half a million U.S. troops, spies, contractors, dependents, and others on military bases located in more than 130 countries, many of them presided over by dictatorial regimes that have given their citizens no say in the decision to let us in.

As but one striking example of imperial basing policy: For the past 61 years, the U.S. military has garrisoned the small Japanese island of Okinawa with 37 bases. Smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, Okinawa is home to 1.3 million people who live cheek-by-jowl with 17,000 Marines of the 3rd Marine Division and the largest U.S. installation in East Asia—Kadena Air Force Base. There have been many Okinawan protests against the rapes, crimes, accidents, and pollution caused by this sort of concentration of American troops and weaponry, but so far the U. S. military has deftly been able to ignore them.

Our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into major fiascoes, discrediting our military leadership, ruining our public finances, and bringing death and destruction to hundreds of thousands of civilians in those countries.

Whether Americans intended it or not, we are now seen around the world as

• approving the torture of captives (at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq among others),
• enabling a global network of secret CIA prisons,
• electing a President / Commander-in-chief who operates beyond the constraints of the Constitution or international law.

Tragically, we are now saddled with a rigged economy based on record-setting trade and fiscal deficits, the most secretive and intrusive government in our country's memory, and the pursuit of "preventive" war as a basis for foreign policies.

View an interactive world map of America's military presence around the world