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Middle East Books Review All books featured in this section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1 The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to The Islamic State By David Vine, University of California Press, 2020, hardcover, 464 pp. MEB $29
Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson
In this in-depth account, anthropologist David Vine illuminates the role of military bases in fueling a largely unbroken history of American global intervention. The book is a sweeping indictment of the nation’s heavily militarized foreign policy, including the nearly incalculable costs, financial as well as moral, that have been exacted both at home and abroad. The United States of War immediately becomes the definitive account of the history of U.S. overseas bases and their role in the history of American militarism. Vine, the author of a previous study on Diego Garcia, a key U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean, devoted 18 years to researching and writing the book, including visits to more than 60 bases in 14 countries around the world. The study is supContributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. 62
plemented with a series of intricately detailed two-page maps illustrating American overseas bases across the globe. Vine is not the first critic to argue that the “state of war is the norm in U.S. history,” but his exhaustive study of the history of American military bases underscores the point. According to U.S. government sources, as Vine points out, “the U.S. military has waged war, engaged in combat, or otherwise employed its forces aggressively in foreign lands in all but eleven years of its existence.” In the overwhelming majority of these cases, he correctly notes, the United States initiated military conflict rather than being forced into it. The United States of War views military bases as “windows to understand the pattern of endless U.S. wars.” The bases provided “the infrastructure that made the wars possible.” Vine argues that military bases are thus “a particularly important cause” of American militarism, though he does not deny that economic, racial,
strategic, psychological and other motives also fueled the virtually uninterrupted history of intervention. Vine, ultimately, is less convincing about bases being the cause of American militarism than about them being an indispensable instrument embodying and carrying out the nation’s imperial foreign policy. To his credit, unlike many other authors who focus overwhelmingly on the postWorld War II period, Vine understands that American militarism is deeply rooted in the nation’s history—indeed, in its prehistory. The book is divided into five parts, the first of which centers on the deep roots of U.S. empire in European colonization followed by the brutal and prolonged subjugation of the indigenous people of North America. Part II, which analyzes 18th and 19th century U.S. empire, begins with a chapter chronicling militarization of the continental United States, appropriately entitled, “Why are so Many Places Named Fort?” After analyzing the burst of imperialism in the socalled “Spanish-American War,” including the establishment of overseas occupations and military bases stretching from the Caribbean to the Pacific, Vine focuses on the pivotal impact of the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. Part IV hones in on the global intervention spawned by the post-World War II Cold War, while Part V pivots the narrative to the 21st century “global war on terror.” The book is well-organized as well as comprehensive, capably written and passionately argued. Vine is deeply concerned about the ways in which militarism undermines America’s putative democratic values both at home and abroad. He provides in-depth analysis of the ways in which U.S. bases function as outposts of imperialism undermining the sovereignty and ways of life of those under U.S. occupation, whether indigenous people driven from their homes or the residents of “developed” nations, which often only appear to have “invited” the Yankee occupation of their countries. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021
