Do We Need Anyone Else? Chapter 1. From The Halls Of Montezuma…

Remember a guy named Enver Hoxha? He was the head of the People’s Republic of Albania, a Communist state which emerged at the end of World War II, and remained a client of the Soviet Union until a popular revolution produced a parliamentary government in 1991. The picture above is typical of the Albanian landscape which today makes it one of the most beautiful tourist destinations anywhere. But from 1945 until 1989, the country was entirely locked down. Nobody could get in, nobody could leave.

For over 40 years, Albania had no contact with any other country at all. In terms of human transit, the national borders were absolute. For that matter, trade and commerce between Albania and the rest of the world was also curtailed. Meanwhile, over this same forty-five year period, the country’s population became totally literate, vigorous industrialization and land reform programs pushed average incomes above incomes in many non-Communist states. Now hold that thought.

In 1989 or 1990 I drove a Renault 20 through the Pyrenees to get from France to Spain. I went through the mountains rather than taking the coastal superhighway because I wanted to eat in a restaurant in Saint-Jean-Pierre-de-Port named Les Pyrenees. It was worth the trip.

Got back into the Renault after lunch, drove down Highway D933 and crossed into Spain. How did I know I was in Spain? Because the road signs were now in Spanish rather than French. The border wasn’t marked in any way. No customs, no ‘arretez s’il vous plait’ and all that other nonsense which you even see at border crossings between Canada and the USA.

Ended up at Barajas Airport outside Madrid later that night; took a flight the next morning to Rome, changed to El Al and arrived at Lod outside of Tel Aviv around 4 PM later that day. Grabbed a car at the airport, drove up to Metula which is right on the border with Syria and took a walk around before going to bed. Two hundred meters or so from my hotel there was a machine-gun emplacement and a barbed-wire fence. I stood behind the soldiers and looked straight into no-man’s land. I could only assume that the Syrian military had their own machine gun on the other side of the line pointing at me.

In twenty-four hours I had gone from a border between two countries which wasn’t even marked to another border between two countries which could have erupted in gunfire at any time. France and Spain fought over their common border for more than three hundred years, the last military engagement taking place during the War of Spanish Succession in 1714. It probably took another two hundred years or more before the border was considered secure to the point that on the route I drove the line wasn’t marked at all.

How long have Israel and Syria been fighting over the line between the two countries that runs along the Golan Heights? Seventy years? That’s nothing in the bigger scheme of things. At least both countries know where their territory ends and the territory of the enemy begins. Bolivia and Paraguay fought the Chaco War from 1932 to 1935 which resulted in more than 100,000 casualties on both sides and to this day the countries still can’t exactly agree on where the demarcation line should be placed.

Beyond a primitive appeal to racism, when Trump and his alt-right hot-air balloons talk about ‘border security’ what does he really mean? By the same token, when liberals proclaim their reverence for the Emma Lazarus invitation to the world’s ‘huddled masses,’ do they understand what and who those masses represent? When we talk about borders, let’s not forget that everything goes two ways. If we haven’t figured that one out from the current COVID-19 crisis, we haven’t figured anything out at all.

If we were to go to the extreme and lock ourselves off from the rest of the man-made world (since we can’t prevent the weather from changing every day), we would experience an absolute elimination of the cross-border movement of the following things:

1. People;

2. Goods and items which we trade;

3. Money, credit and financial exchange;

4. Technology, digital and otherwise;

5. Cultural artifacts — music, cinema, books and art;

6. Intellectual property — innovations and designs.

I am going to devote a chapter to each of these issues, trying to figure out what would happen to our economy and society (what we often refer to as our ‘way of life’) if all or part of what comprises each of these categories were to disappear. In particular, I am going to try and frame each issue within the context of whether we should continue to allow people free entry into this country or not, as well as to what degree we should let Americans leave the country to go abroad. I will use the rest of this chapter to discuss the latter issue first, because we are the only country in the entire world that sends millions of Americans to live and work in other countries for years at a time.

Here are the number of military troops that have been stationed offshore over the last sixty years:

Notice that by the mid-70’s the huge manpower investment in Southeast Asia had come to an end. Note the slight upward tick during the Gulf War. Note that the current number is somewhere around 200,000, give or take a thousand here or there. These numbers are perhaps underestimated by more than half. They count uniform personnel, which means they do not include civilian para-contractors, which may add 50,000 more; they also do not count support staff, which probably comes in at a higher number than the number of uniformed troops. The Department of Defense currently employs nearly 700,000 civilians to support 1.3 million troops, so perhaps as many as 100,000 non-combat employees are overseas.

We currently station at least 700 combat troops in 19 countries, the largest contingents located in Germany (34,000) and South Korea (24,000). We have more than 12,000 troops in Italy, 8,500 in the UK, 3,200 in Spain, nearly 1,000 in Belgium. Maybe South Korea is something of a hot spot although they have more than 600,000 troops under arms, which certainly matches or exceeds the number of combat personnel on the other side of the 38th parallel line.

In fact, we have roughly 800 overseas bases located in 163 countries, the number may be as high as 177. In the Introduction I stated that we presently had troops in 63 countries, but this number covered only countries where the Department of Defense has constructed an actual military base with housing, storage, equipment of various kinds, a guarded perimeter, so forth and so on. In the other 100 countries we have military or civilian DOD personnel doing whatever either we or the host country wants them to do.

In 1969–71, I was a graduate student doing dissertation research in Spain. I worked in archives located in the city of Toledo, driving back and forth every day to Madrid. One day I happened to drive back to Madrid on a local road and noticed a rather interesting building sitting on a ridge and surrounded by barbed wire and a double-wall of metal and concrete. What made the building interesting was the fact that parked in the driveway were three American cars with American license plates. What were these cars doing in the middle of a deserted plateau in the middle of Spain?

I found out the next day when I drove through the village near this strange building and saw one of the American cars parked in front of a local joint that sold coffee, beer and cigarettes. Parked my car, walked in and found myself face-to-face with two American GIs. One thing led to another thing, and we spent some time comparing notes. It turned out they were technicians working in the structure up the road which was a communications hub connected to the American air base at Torrejon.

Spain was still under the thumb of its Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, who in exchange for substantial American economic aid beginning with the Eisenhower Administration gave us an airbase outside of Madrid and a submarine base in the South. Both bases held stockpiles of atomic weapons, no other European parliament would have approved having American nukes on their soil; Spain didn’t have a parliament.

It turned out, however, that the Americans with whom I shared a coffee and a cigarette weren’t doing anything that was in support of our military at Torrejon. The purpose of this station was to jam radio transmissions from an anti-Franco radio station operated by Spanish exiles living in France. When I expressed surprise about why these Americans were working for a Fascist regime, one of them shrugged and said, “Well, Spain’s our host country. We have to help them out.”

How many of the 100-plus host countries where we have military personnel represent any kind of threat to us? None. How many of these host countries utilize the expertise and talents of their U.S. military guests for reasons over which we have little, if any control? Who knows? Meanwhile, we spend more than $100 billion every year to keep these soldiers in places where it can hardly be said that U.S. interests are involved at all.

The first time we sent troops overseas was to fight a battle at Derna, now known as Tripoli, in 1805. In 1845 we sent another squadron of Marines to Mexico to fight at Chapultepec, a.k.a., Montezuma (as in ‘from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli….’) The third foreign adventure was the Spanish-American War from 1895 to 1898 which resulted in the first American military garrisons being established in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the Philippines.

We really started to become a global military presence during and after World War I. It was also directly after World War I that we began to get serious about border security, largely a response to the new Bolshevik threat. Between 1810 and 1910, the government issued more than 500,000 individual and family passports, but while European countries required visiting Americans to have a passport for crossing their borders, the United States did not demand passports from anyone who entered or left this country until 1921. The Palmer Raids and the first Red Scare occurred in 1919 and 1920.

We extended our anti-Red border security measures after World War II except now we defined our borders in worldwide terms. And by 1950, we had to defend ourselves against two Communist threats, hence the buildup of military personnel in Formosa and Japan. Along with these troop deployments came those multi-lateral treaties, NATO and SEATO, both of which gave us opportunities to enlarge our military presence worldwide.

Although SEATO was disbanded in 1977, the military commitments behind the treaty remain in force. As for NATO, with all the grumbling by Trump about how everyone else should be picking up the tab, NATO membership now includes both Poland and the Czech Republic, formerly Soviet satellites on Germany’s eastern side. That being the case, why do we need to keep 34,000 combat troops in Germany and at least that many or more support personnel as well?

One could make the argument that because the War on Terror very quickly replaced the Cold War, that perhaps we need to maintain a significant military presence abroad. But in fact, we have more than 60,000 troops stationed in Western Europe and around 30,000 troops in the Near East — Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Qatar, Afghanistan, Bahrain and Iraq. Shouldn’t these regional troop levels be the other way around? Here’s a map of where American troops are located in locations outside the United States:

Just for argument’s sake, let’s say that we would announce a complete and total withdrawal of all U.S. troops stationed abroad over the next several years. As a guide, it should be mentioned that between 1989 and 1993, the then-Soviet Union pulled more than 500,000 troops out of Warsaw Pact states, along with 9,000 tanks, 1,700 aircraft and tactical missile systems. Many of these military resources may have ended up in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union was still fighting even though the Soviet state had collapsed in 1991.

Would the United States government go down the tubes if 200,000 combat troops came back from overseas? Not the slightest chance of anything like that happening at all. To the contrary, we could resurrect the Civilian Conservation Corps, rebrand it as the Military Conservation Corps and put them to work helping to pave roads and clean up the national parks.

I am going to return to the issue of cutting off military resources when I summarize the whole question of redefining America’s place in the world at the conclusion to this book. Suffice it to say at this point however, that not just where we station troops but the whole notion of American military presence abroad appears to be stuck in a groove that is now a century old. With the exception of the Twin Towers attacks, this country has now been a major player in seven conflicts since TR rode up San Juan Hill. none of which involved military events of any kind on our own shores. As of May, 2019, we have suffered 677,242 casualties in these conflicts, and I do not see how or why placing American soldiers outside our own borders has made any difference at all.