What Are We Doing?!!

The United States maintains military bases in MMM countries in the world outside of our homeland, including a total of XXX military personnel. [Don't have the exact figures at my finger tips.] Generally speaking this is rationalized as necessary for our homeland security, though we also explain it as part of a program of pacifying the world, an obligation that we seem to have assumed after the Second World War. In the 65 years after the War, this "program" has been primarily aimed at suppressing Communism around the world, even where Communism was obviously the local popular choice. One could say that the whole thing has been motivated by "making the world safe for Capitalism" but it has obviously been mostly aimed at supporting Capitalist Imperialism around the world, with American Capitalists fully involved. The story behind this has always been that Communism was expanding to threaten us. But, of course, the truth of the matter has always been that we ourselves were taking an increasingly aggressive anti-Communist position around the entire world. How have we gotten away with this behavior?

How many other governments in the world have military bases outside of their own countries? How many foreign governments have military bases inside of the United states? When the world looks at this picture and answers these questions, how can they avoid believing that the United States is an aggressive militarist nation with world domination at the heart of their foreign policy?

Not only is this policy inappropriate for the democracy that we are supposed to be, but it is also the major reason for our economic shutdown. Yet I have heard no one in this midterm election cycle actually bring up the fact that our economic woes at home are due to our extravagant missions abroad. It seems so much easier for us, as a nation, to kill and maim foreign citizens than to educate our own children or feed our own poor or offer better health care to Americans who couldn't afford it. Why is it that the American character has arrived at this strange state in its historical evolution?