Eighty years of US bases: the price paid in sovereignty

Eighty years of foreign bases: sovereignty for rent

Germany has hosted US troops on its soil for eighty years since the end of the Second World War. Japan, too. The official line says it is protection; an increasingly less marginal reading calls it permanent occupation. The difference is not semantic: it is the price in sovereignty that any country with a foreign garrison pays.

The occupation that stayed to live

The bases installed to "defend" the defeated from the USSR have not moved. The argument that Germany or Japan would remain threatened by Russia and China is circular: it is the US military architecture itself that exposes them to that threat. In this analysis, dependence is paid for in political debt and in energy bills: for years, Russia supplied cheap gas to German industry, a relationship that suited Berlin and not Washington. According to this account, a deliberate strategy then intervened to break it. The result: Germany earns less, industry suffers, and the alliance forces it to trinc the empire's line.

The price of living on borrowed time

The counterpoint is uncomfortable. For more than three decades, Europe and Japan got used to not paying for real defense. De Gaulle tried, and stepped out of line. Spain, half-heartedly at most. Nobody built autonomous armies or intelligence services. Those who now complain that Washington is presenting the bill forget that nobody wanted to bear the cost of being an adult. The question that remains is whether the solution is to spend more under the same umbrella or to start deploying sovereign capabilities of one's own. Eighty years on, the only thing that does not need updating is the census of bases: they are still there. The protection, however, has become a business with an invoice.