Verisoph story dossier
The foreign-base pattern scaled up under the new hegemons: the United States runs roughly 750 bases in some 80 countries under deals that keep its troops out of local courts, from Okinawa to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and Manda Bay in Kenya...
The foreign-base pattern scaled up under the new hegemons: the United States runs roughly 750 bases in some 80 countries under deals that keep its troops out of local courts, from Okinawa to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and Manda Bay in Kenya, while Israel became a top exporter of arms, training, and surveillance tools like Pegasus.
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A 1903 lease signed under US military occupation gives Washington control of Guantanamo Bay for a naval station. After the 1959 revolution Cuba rejects the arrangement and refuses to cash the annual rent checks, but the United States keeps the base. It is the oldest overseas US base and the clearest case of one held over the host country's protest.
The United States takes Okinawa in 1945 and administers it directly until 1972. The small island holds the bulk of US military facilities in Japan, including Kadena Air Base and Marine Corps installations. Local resentment over noise, accidents, crime, and land use makes Okinawa the sharpest flashpoint in the US-Japan alliance.
Fighting a two-ocean war leaves the United States with hundreds of installations across the Pacific, Europe, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Rather than fully demobilizing, Washington keeps many of these outposts and negotiates access to others. This wartime infrastructure becomes the seed of a permanent overseas military presence.
After the war the United States keeps tens of thousands of troops in occupied and then allied West Germany. Ramstein Air Base and the surrounding Kaiserslautern complex grow into the largest concentration of American military power outside the United States. Germany remains the hub for US operations across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
NATO members sign a Status of Forces Agreement in London in 1951 to govern the legal standing of troops stationed on allied soil. It divides jurisdiction between the sending and host states and, in practice, keeps US personnel largely under US military law. It becomes the model for the web of bilateral agreements that follow.
After the Korean War armistice the United States keeps tens of thousands of troops in South Korea under a mutual defense treaty. In the 2000s and 2010s these forces consolidate at Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, which becomes the largest US overseas base by area. It remains a standing tripwire and command hub facing North Korea.
Alongside the revised security treaty of 1960, the United States and Japan sign a Status of Forces Agreement governing American troops in the country. Critics in Japan argue it gives US authorities the first move over crimes committed by service members and limits Japanese prosecution. The agreement has never been formally revised and remains a recurring source of friction, especially in Okinawa.
From the 1960s onward Israel builds military training and security relationships with a range of African and Asian states, sending advisers and selling equipment. These ties expand and contract with diplomatic shifts, including a wave of renewed relations in the 1980s and 1990s. They form part of a wider pattern of exporting security expertise as a foreign-policy instrument.
During the 1970s and 1980s Israel maintains close military trade with apartheid South Africa, selling weapons and technology as much of the world imposed embargoes. Historian Sasha Polakow-Suransky documents the relationship in The Unspoken Alliance, drawing on declassified records. Claims of joint nuclear cooperation, including around the 1979 Vela satellite event, remain contested and are denied by both governments.
When US Congress restricted aid over human rights abuses, Israel became a key supplier of arms and training to Guatemala's military during its civil war. Israeli-made Galil rifles and advisers supported the army under Efrain Rios Montt in the early 1980s. A later UN-backed truth commission found that army campaigns of this period included acts of genocide against Maya communities.
Israel builds a large defense industry around firms such as Israel Aerospace Industries, Elbit Systems, and Rafael. SIPRI data ranks it for years among the world's top ten arms exporters, selling drones, missiles, radar, and electronics worldwide. Arms exports become a significant part of the economy and a tool of Israeli foreign policy.
The United States reactivates its Fifth Fleet in 1995 and headquarters it at Naval Support Activity Bahrain in Manama. The fleet patrols the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the approaches to the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz. Bahrain becomes the permanent home of US naval power in the region.
In September 1995 three US service members abduct and rape a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. Anger that the men were first held by US authorities under the status of forces rules fuels a protest rally of tens of thousands in October. The case becomes the defining symbol of local grievance over US bases and immunity in Japan.
After the Philippine Senate rejected a new bases treaty in 1991 and the United States left Subic Bay and Clark, the two governments sign a Visiting Forces Agreement in 1998 to allow rotating US troops back in. It keeps American personnel under US jurisdiction, which becomes contentious in cases such as the 2005 Subic rape case and the 2014 killing of Jennifer Laude. The agreement lets US forces return without permanent bases.
Qatar builds Al Udeid Air Base in 1996 and the United States moves its regional air command there after leaving Saudi Arabia. The base hosts the forward headquarters of US Central Command and thousands of personnel. It becomes the main air operations center for US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and across the Middle East.
The United States takes over a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti in the early 2000s and builds it into Camp Lemonnier, its only large permanent base on the continent. It hosts several thousand personnel and serves as the hub for surveillance, special operations, and drone flights across the Horn of Africa and Yemen. Djibouti's location at the mouth of the Red Sea makes it strategically valuable.
The Coalition Provisional Authority issues Order 17, which shields foreign forces and contractors in Iraq from Iraqi legal process. The revised version signed just before the handover of sovereignty extends that immunity past the occupation. It leaves private security firms operating with little accountability under local law, a point that returns after the 2007 Nisour Square killings by Blackwater guards.
The United States announces a new Africa Command in 2007 and makes it operational in October 2008. No African government offers to host its headquarters, so AFRICOM stays based in Stuttgart, Germany. Its creation marks a formal expansion of US military attention to the continent.
Talks to keep US troops in Iraq past 2011 break down when Iraq's parliament refuses to grant them legal immunity from Iraqi courts. Without that guarantee Washington withdraws the remaining forces at the end of the year. The episode shows how central the immunity question is to where and whether US troops stay.
The Israeli firm NSO Group develops Pegasus, spyware that can take over a target's phone and read messages, calls, and location. Sold to governments as a licensed export overseen by Israel's defense ministry, it becomes one of the most powerful surveillance tools on the market. It marks the rise of a private Israeli cyber-intelligence industry serving state clients abroad.
Across the 2010s the United States builds a light footprint of drone bases, surveillance outposts, and special-operations training missions across the Sahel, run largely from Niger and Djibouti. Reporting by journalist Nick Turse and others documents US activity in dozens of African countries, much of it low-profile. The model favors small teams and remote strikes over large permanent bases.
Militants linked to the Islamic State ambush a joint US-Nigerien patrol near the village of Tongo Tongo, killing four US Army soldiers and several Nigerien troops. The deaths surprise many in Congress who did not know the scale of the US special-operations presence in the Sahel. The incident briefly forces a public reckoning with the light-footprint war in Africa.
The United States builds Air Base 201 near Agadez in Niger at a cost of about 100 million dollars, opening it for drone operations around 2019. It becomes a central node for surveillance and strikes against militants across the Sahel. The base is one of the largest US construction projects on the continent.
In January 2020 al-Shabaab fighters breach Camp Simba at Manda Bay in Kenya, an airfield used by US forces. The attack kills one US soldier and two American contractors and destroys several aircraft. It exposes the vulnerability of the light US footprint in East Africa.
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A journalist consortium reported in 2021 that NSO Group's Pegasus spyware had been used to target phones of journalists, activists, and officials. The findings showed how governments could silently monitor critics.
Anthropologist David Vine counts around 750 US military bases spread across roughly 80 countries and territories, by far the largest network of foreign bases any nation has ever maintained. For comparison, all other countries combined operate only a few dozen bases abroad. Vine argues in Base Nation and later work that this footprint reflects a standing posture of global military dominance, not just temporary wartime need.
After a July 2023 coup, Niger's new military government orders US forces out. The United States completes its withdrawal from Air Base 201 near Agadez by September 2024, giving up its main drone hub in the region. The exit follows the retreat of French forces and reflects a broader collapse of Western military access in the Sahel.