Our latest study explores how the decline of Global North hegemony has shifted the geopolitical landscape and opened new possibilities for emergent organisations of the Global South.
JANUARY 23, 2024
Research for this document has been conducted collectively for over a year and has received contributions from many scholars and socialist practitioners. This document was compiled with data and charts provided by Global South Insights (GSI), with editing and coordination by Gisela Cernadas, Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, Tica Moreno, and Deborah Veneziale. The data and charts for Part IV of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.
Introduction
It has been a scant 30 years since the ‘end of history’ was declared by bourgeois ideologists in pantomimes of wish-fulfilment for sensing the inviolability of United States imperialism.1Vijay Prashad, Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism (New York: Haymarket Books, 2022); Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, dossier no. 56, 20 September 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-t ... onisation/.
For peoples’ struggles and movements feeling the boot of imperialism on their necks, no such end was in sight.
In the face of violent repression, such as Brazil’s Carajás Massacre in 1996, the Landless Workers’ Movement led the reclamation of land for popular agrarian reform through occupation and production, challenging agribusiness behemoths, such as the US multinational Monsanto.2Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Popular Agrarian Reform and the Struggle for Land in Brazil, dossier no. 27, 6 April 2020, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-27-land/.
FOOTNOTE
A ‘soldier who shook the continent’, Hugo Chávez won the popular vote in 1999, a sharp left turn that was followed by others in Latin America. This included a wave of mass mobilisation of millions of workers, peasants, Indigenous, women, and students that defeated the proposed US Free Trade Areas of the Americas in 2005, a direct challenge to nearly 200 years of the US Monroe Doctrine.3Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Strategic Revolutionary Thought and Legacy of Hugo Chávez Ten Years After His Death, dossier no. 61, 28 February 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-61-chavez/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar, dossier no. 49, 7 February 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-h ... n-america/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The US Ministry of Colonies and Its Summit, red alert no. 14, 25 May 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/red-alert ... -americas/.
In 2002, Nigerian women gathered at the gates of Shell and Chevron to protest environmental destruction and exploitation in the Niger Delta. Haitians refused the centuries of denigration in mass demonstrations following the US ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and US occupation in 2004. Millions of Nepalese celebrated the toppling of the monarchy through armed resistance under the leadership of the communists in 2006. When fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in 2010, the Tunisian people revolted against the neo-liberal system that had caused him to take such extreme measures.
In subsequent years, changes – sometimes small and imperceptible, at other times volatile and explosive – unfolded. These involved both popular movements and state actors, in some cases extremely powerful ones. The US was confronted by a rising economic powerhouse in China, growing economies in the Global South (which overtook the Global North’s GDP in PPP terms in 2007), years of domestic capital investment neglect, the financialisation of the economy, and the loss of manufacturing superiority.
The rise of the Tea Party in 2009 signalled internal fracturing of US domestic politics. Internationally, the US failed to achieve soft regime disruption in China and de-nuclearisation or regime change in Russia. After a temporary reduction in military spending with the end of the disastrous war on Iraq (2003–2011), the US shifted to the use and threat of military power as a central pillar of its response to these changes.
Hegemony is historically lost in three stages: production, finance, and military.4Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy’, ed. Lenski, Current Issues and Research in Macrosociology, 1 January 1984, 100–108, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004477995_008.
The United States has lost hegemony in production, though it still has some remaining areas of technological hegemony, including those related to the military. It is seeing its financial hegemony challenged, though still in the very early stages and revolving around the status of the US dollar. Even though the economic and political aspects of its decline might be accelerating, it still retains military power – creating a temptation for the US to attempt to overcome the consequences of its economic decline by military or military related means.
The US has defined China as its strategic competitor. The minimum programme of the US is the containment and economic diminishment of China, sufficient to guarantee the US’s own perpetual future economic hegemony.
From its own point of view, US capitalism is rational in its attempts to limit China’s rise. Failure to do so would erode the relative advantage the US has in controlling higher levels of productive forces and the resulting monopoly privileges that control entails. There is almost complete alignment amongst the US state actors to continue to manage decoupling from China (despite the near impossibility of fully re-modernising US productive forces domestically) and to advance military preparations against China.
The February 2022 movement of Russian troops into Ukraine – a result of the continued violations of US assurances on the non-expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the continuing civil war between Kyiv and Donbas – marked an explicit new phase in world military alignment for the US. In a series of rapid-fire moves, the US openly subordinated all the Global North countries and, in so doing, further subordinated the military apparatus of those states. It established itself as the open military hegemon of what is euphemistically called NATO+, which includes all but three members of the former Eastern Bloc. Those who attended the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a member or observer – including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea – are de facto members of NATO+. Only Israel (excused from attendance for political expediency) and a few smaller countries of the Global North did not attend.
Beginning in October 2023, Israel began a campaign of displacement, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and genocide of Palestinians with the full and shameless support of the United States government. The developments in Ukraine followed by the recent escalations in Gaza are significant markers reflecting that there has been a qualitative change within the imperialist system. The US has now completed its economic, political, and military subordination of all the other imperialist countries. This has consolidated an integrated, militarily focused imperialist bloc. It aims to maintain a grip on the Global South as a whole and has turned its attention to dominating Eurasia, the last area of the world that has escaped its control.
It is not a matter of exaggeration to say that the Global North has declared a state of open hostility and war on any section of the Global South that does not comply with the policies of the Global North. This is seen in the joint declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation published on 9 January 2023:
We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.5Jens Stoltenberg, Ursula von der Leyen, and Charles Michel, ‘Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 10 January 2023, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/offi ... 210549.htm.
The Palestinian people in Gaza are certainly feeling the palpable barbarity of NATO+ and the forced ‘mass consensus’ of which the Global North is capable. As Palestinian liberation leader Leila Khaled put it recently:
We know that they speak about terrorism, but they are the heroes of terrorism. The imperialist force everywhere in the world, in Iraq, in Syria, in different countries… are preparing to attack China. All of what they say about terrorism turns to be about them. People have the right to resist with all means to it, including the armed struggle. This is in the Charter of the United Nations. So, they are violating the rights of people for resistance because it’s their right to restore their freedom. And this is, and I say it always, a fundamental law: where there is repression, there is resistance. People will not live under occupation and repression. History taught us that when people resist, they can keep their dignity and their land.6Leila Khaled, ‘Where There is Repression, There is Resistance’, Capire, 27 October 2023, https://capiremov.org/en/interview/leil ... esistance/.
***
Imperialism has begun its transformation to a new stage: Hyper-Imperialism.7Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (New York: International Publishers, 1939); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972); Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Reprinted (London: Panaf, 2004).
This is imperialism conducted in an exaggerated and kinetic way, whilst also subject to the constraints that the declining empire has foisted on itself. The spasmodic quality of its exertion is felt by the millions of Congolese, Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, and Yemeni living under US militarism, whose heads instinctively jerk for cover at sudden sounds.
Yet, this is not the full-blooded march across the globe that the Cold War initiated, fought in proxy battles that were followed by economic imperialism through the World Bank and other development institutions. It is the imperialism of a drowning billionaire who firmly believes he ought to be back on his yacht. It flexes the muscles of power that are still strong – the military. However, absent productive power and knowing that financial power is at a tipping point, the full suite of imperial technologies of control that the US once had is no longer at its disposal. It, therefore, channels its efforts through the mechanisms it has most at hand: culture (the control of truth) and war.
The tactics of Hyper-Imperialism are shaped partly by the modernisation of hybrid warfare, which includes lawfare, hyper-sanctions, seizure of national reserves and assets, and other manners of non-military warfare. New technological tools of surveillance and targeted communication characterising the digital age are deployed to wage imperialist control of the battle of ideas. This has involved implementing more perverse and covert methods against the truth, such as the political imprisonment of WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange, who exposed numerous crimes against the Global South.8Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014).
The Global North is an integrated military, political, and economic bloc composed of 49 countries. These include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, and secondary Western and Eastern European countries. In the military arena, Turkey (as a NATO member), the Republic of Korea and the Philippines (de facto militarised colonies of the US) are included in our definition of the ‘US-led Military Bloc’, even though they are part of the Global South.
Over the last twenty years, the Global North has endured a significant relative economic decline, along with a political, social, and moral decline. Its false ‘moral’ claims of civil rights and ‘press freedom’ are now complete mockeries as they seek to make illegal the public (including online) support for Palestinian rights. This full-on support for the humiliation and destruction of the darker peoples of the world is reminiscent of past centuries, exposing what can be described as collective ‘white fragility’.
The Global South countries comprise former colonies and semi-colonies, a few non-European independent states, and current and former socialist projects. The struggles for national liberation, independence, development, and total economic and political sovereignty still need to be completed for most of the Global South.
Despite the limitations of the terminology, we will use the term ‘Global North’ and occasionally ‘the West’ (an often-used hollow phrase) interchangeably with the more accurate term of the ‘US-Led Imperialist Camp’. We will analyse the Global North in four ‘Rings’. The rest of the world is currently known as the ‘Global South’, much of it was previously called the ‘Third World’. We will analyse the Global South in six ‘Groupings’ that are determined by the relative degree to which a country is a target of regime change and the role its government plays in publicly advancing international, anti-imperialist stances (both in Figure 1). The Global North is engaged in much higher levels of generalised conflict with the rest of the world, the Global South.
PART I: The Rise of a Complete US-Led Global North Military Bloc
Shifts and Consolidation
The US-Led Military Bloc has had two internal changes in the last three decades:
The further expansion of the bloc to include all Eastern Europe countries (only missing Belarus).
The challenge to retain the full subordination of the Western European capitalist states, which abandoned any fundamental, and in many cases even the pretence of, independence.
The latter became evident in 2018 by the Western European states’ genuflection to Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal – a significant blow to their economic interests. Further down, we will discuss the history of this process.9Donald Trump, ‘President Donald J. Trump Is Ending United States Participation in an Unacceptable Iran Deal’, The White House, 8 May 2018, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/br ... iran-deal/.
The centre of the ‘US-Led Military Bloc’, as we call it, is NATO. It also includes Japan, Australia, Israel, New Zealand, three Global South countries, and the few other European countries who are not NATO members.
The US-Led Military Bloc is the world’s only bloc, a de facto and de jure military alliance with a central command. There is no other bloc of its kind. Its clarity and unity of purpose are sharply evident. The US has abandoned many important anti-nuclear proliferation treaties over the last ten years (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and Open Skies Treaty in 2020).10‘US Completes Open Skies Treaty Withdrawal’, Arms Control Association, December 2020, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2020-12 ... withdrawal; C. Todd Lopez, ‘US Withdraws From Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty’, US Department of Defence, 2 August 2019, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stori ... es-treaty/; George W. Bush, ‘Statement by the President’, The White House, 13 June 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives ... 613-9.html.
This has allowed military planners to potentially prepare for the placement of intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of obliterating Moscow in minutes.
Military Spending
In the November 2023 issue of Monthly Review, a well-researched paper by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, using only US official economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Office of Management and Budget (OMB), revealed that the actual US economic military spending is over twice that acknowledged by the US government or even the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).11Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, ‘Actual US Military Spending Reached US$ 1.53 trillion in 2022 – More than Twice Acknowledged Level: New Estimates Based on US National Accounts’, Monthly Review, 1 November 2023, https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/ac ... -accounts/.
The actual 2022 US military expenditure was US$ 1,537 billion.12The Quincy Institute and other authors have also published significantly higher US military spending estimates. Andrew Cockburn, ‘Getting the Defense Budget Right: A (Real) Grand Total, over $1.4 Trillion’, Responsible Statecraft, 7 May 2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/ ... -trillion/.
To calculate the world total military expenditure, we have selected SIPRI’s published numbers as our primary source for all countries, except for the US.13‘SIPRI Military Expenditure Database’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex.
For the US alone, we use the figures from Monthly Review. In 2022, SIPRI adjusted the Chinese government reported national defence budget number of $229 billion to $292 billion, a 27.5% increase.14Chen Zhuo, ‘Explainer: Prudent Chinese Defense Budget Growth Ensures Broad Public Security’, Ministry of National Defence, People’s Republic of China, 6 March 2022, http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/To ... 06180.html; National Bureau of Statistics of China, accessed 20 December 2023,
https://data.stats.gov.cn/english/adv.h ... uery&cnC01.
Starting in 2021, SIPRI began a new methodology for revising China’s military spending.15The 2022 SIPRI adjustment are expenses related to (a) spending on the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP); (b) soldiers’ de-mobilisation and retirement payments from the Ministry of Civil Affairs; (c) additional military research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) funding outside the national defence budget; (d) additional military construction expenses; (e) commercial earnings of the People’s Liberation Army (zero as of 2015); (f) subsidies to the arms industry (zero as of 2010); (e) Chinese arms imports (zero as of 2020); and (g) the Chinese Coast Guard (since 2013). The new series remains internally consistent over the period 1989–2019. See Nan Tian and Fei Su, ‘A New Estimate Of China’s Military Expenditure’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, January 2021, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/fil ... diture.pdf; ‘Sources and Methods’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex/s ... -for-china.
SIPRI changed their calculations for China’s military spending both for previous years and current years.16SIPRI figures for China 2021 were on average about 1.36 times larger than China’s official national defence budget, though reducing the estimates made in the past. For instance, for the year 2019, the new SIPRI estimate is 1,660 billion yuan or US$ 240 billion, slightly lower than the old estimate of 1,803 billion yuan or US$ 261 billion. Under the previous estimates, SIPRI increased China’s official 2021 defence budget by 48.6%. Under the new estimates, China’s 2021 budget was increased 36.8% by SIPRI. With the new adjustments China’s military spending corresponds to 1.6% of GDP, compared to 1.3% that the official budget represents. Calculations for GDP are based on IMF WEO GDP CER data.
SIPRI adjusted the US annual military budget reported by the OMB for the year 2022 by 14.5% up from US$ 765.8 to 876.9 billion.17Office of Management and Budget, ‘Historical Tables. Table 3.2. Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962–2028’, The White House, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/h ... al-tables/.
This was about half of the percentage increase added to China.
SIPRI’s treatment of China’s military spending is quite different from how it deals with the US, as it adopts a much more circumspect approach to US calculations.
Even if SIPRI doubled the military spending reported by China itself to US$ 458 billion, it would represent 2.6% of its GDP. This is significantly below the actual 6% spent by the US and, even then, China’s military spending would be only 29.8% of that of the US, with a population over four times greater than the US .18Calculations based on the estimates of actual US military spending for the year 2022 by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster. See note 11.
Additionally, unlike the US, China does not have 902 overseas foreign bases.19‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.
US bases and interventions create a drain not only on the annual budget but also on long-term economic debt. Additional details can be found in the endnote.20For decades, it has been recognised by independent researchers that actual US military spending is approximately twice the officially acknowledged level. The independent research is not restricted to left-wing circles, but it includes the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, funded by the right-wing billionaire George Soros, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), and the ‘liberal’ Centre for American Progress. See Lawrence J. Krob and Kaveh Toofan, ‘A Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget? – Centre for American Progress’, Centre for American Progress, 12 July 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/articl ... se-budget/; Cockburn, ‘Getting the Defense Budget Right: A (Real) Grand Total, over $1.4 Trillion’; William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, ‘Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget’, Project on Government Oversight, 7 May 2019, https://www.pogo.org/analysis/making-se ... ate-budget.
What emerged from our analysis was a series of clear findings. The first is that the US controls, through NATO and other means, an astounding 74.3% of all military spending worldwide (Figure 2). This amounts to over US$ 2 trillion.21Our worldwide military spending figures use current exchange rates (CER). PPP conversion factors to measure military spending are necessarily less reliable than currency exchange rates. PPP rates are statistical estimates, calculated on the basis of collected price data for baskets of goods and services for benchmark years. No such price data is collected for military expenditure. Therefore, the nature of military spending lacks this information for international comparisons. Thus, the calculation of the military spending applying PPP rates through GDP conversion factors is methodologically invalid since it’s based on the implicit assumption that the ratio of military prices equals the ratio of relative prices of GDP for which no evidence is presented. SIPRI recognises that using the PPP adjustment for military spending is inaccurate and therefore it is less reliable than using currency exchange rates. See Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, accessed 25 November 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex/f ... stions#PPP.
Figure 3 shows that imperialist countries account for 12 of the top 16 military budgets in the world.
Figure 4 shows the 16 highest military per capita spending by Global North countries versus the three largest Global South military spenders. The United States spends 21 times more on its military per person than China does on its military.22Since China’s military spending is focused on only Chinese territory, there are clear limits to China’s military expansion, The country does not have significant military bases abroad, unlike the US with 902 in 2022. This idea is supported by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft: ‘China has thus far established only one actual, operating overseas military base, on the horn of Africa, in Djibouti, and is probably establishing a naval facility in Cambodia. But there are real limits to how far China can go in duplicating such places. As Isaac Kardon of the Carnegie Endowment has pointed out, China has no formal military alliances (beyond the dubious case of DPR Korea) and is unlikely to acquire any in the foreseeable future, a fact that imposes major constraints on its ability to establish serious military bases. Few if any countries wish to commit to housing full-fledged, sizeable military facilities that could project Chinese military power across their region and, in the process, invite an American response.’ See Michael D. Swaine, ‘Actually, China’s Military Isn’t Going Global’, Responsible Statecraft, 8 September 2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-military/.
There can be no doubt as to the significance of these findings.
FIGURE 5
Countries with military spending exceeding 20 billion USD
Global North and Global South, 2022
Country Name (GSI) Military Spending
US Dollars (mil.)
Percentage of
GDP (CER) Per Capita
>world avg. (times)
US-Led Military Bloc
United States 1,536,859 6.0% 12.6
United Kingdom 68,463 2.2% 2.8
Germany 55,760 1.4% 1.9
France 53,639 1.9% 2.3
Rep. Korea 46,365 2.8% 2.5
Japan 45,992 1.1% 1.0
Ukraine 43,998 27.4% 3.1
Italy 33,490 1.7% 1.6
Australia 32,299 1.9% 3.4
Canada 26,896 1.3% 1.9
Israel 23,406 4.5% 7.2
Spain 20,307 1.4% 1.2
Global South
China 291,958 1.6% 0.6
Russia 86,373 3.8% 1.7
India 81,363 2.4% 0.2
Saudi Arabia 75,013 6.8% 5.7
Brazil 20,211 1.1% 0.3
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on IMF, UN, SIPRI & Monthly Review
Figure 5 lists all countries that have military budgets exceeding US$ 20 billion, 11 of which are in the Global North compared to six (out of 145) countries in the Global South. For this chart, Republic of Korea is listed under the US-Led Military Bloc.
It is clear that the Global South, in contrast to the Global North, is not a bloc and certainly not a military bloc. The Global South thus faces the extreme monopoly of military spending by the US-Led Military Bloc. This represents a clear and present danger to all countries of the Global South; it presents an imminent danger to the continued existence of humankind and the planet.
In turn, the single most important aspect of state power – that is, military power – the absolute central danger to the working classes of all countries, especially to the darker nations of the world, lies in the US-Led Imperialist Camp. Objectively, there is no such thing as sub-imperialism or non-Western imperialist powers (such concepts are subjective deceptions that cloud over the factual realities).
US and UK Military Bases
In March 2002, Monthly Review published an article with a list and map of countries with known US military bases, arguing that the extent of the US empire could be depicted by its bases.23The Editors, ‘US Military Bases and Empire’, Monthly Review, 1 March 2002, https://monthlyreview.org/2002/03/01/u- ... nd-empire/.
This created a storm in some US military circles. Others have expanded on this work in subsequent years, including David Vine and World Beyond War (which has made an interactive map publicly available). 24‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.
The information about the location of these bases opened a window onto the absolutely pervasive nature of US military hegemony. The location and number of bases is valuable for understanding the shape and trajectory of imperialism by illuminating its frontiers and showing its role in policing them.
There are 902 known US military bases and 145 known UK military bases described below.25The Military Balance 2023, International Institute for Security Studies, 15 February 2023, https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/th ... y-balance/.
Due to the secrecy of the US military and government, there is a lack of data on US military functions that occur inside these bases and the actions launched from US military forces located there. This makes a full qualitative analysis of US foreign military activities incomplete. Some of the analytical deficiencies include that:
Listed bases exclude the facilities and locations of the many privatised military functions that the US has created over the last 40 years. Companies such as DynCorp International, Fluor Corporation, AECOM, and KBR, Inc. run operations worldwide, including in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.26Sally Williamson ‘Logistics Contractors and Strategic Logistics Advantage in US Military Operations’, Logistics In War, 4 June 2023, https://logisticsinwar.com/2023/06/04/l ... perations/.
They do not include ‘unofficial’ projects by the US military like the commandeering of Terminal 1 in Kotoka International Airport in Ghana’s capital city, in which US soldiers do not need passports or visas to enter (only their US military ID) and US military aircrafts are ‘free from boarding and inspection’.27‘Agreement Between the United States of America and Ghana’, Treaties and Other International Acts, series 18–531, US Department of State, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/upload ... Forces.pdf.
Terminal 1 is thus a de facto US military base. Ghana has ceded national sovereignty to the US.28Vijay Prashad, ‘Why Does the United States Have a Military Base in Ghana?’, Peoples Dispatch, 15 June 2022, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/06/15/ ... -in-ghana/.
They exclude essential projects for the US military-industrial-digital communications complex. Many undersea cable terminus locations are controlled by US intelligence-cleared officials only. Control of the undersea cable communications of the world is one of the key US intelligence priorities.29 Matthew P. Goodman and Matthew Wayland, ‘Securing Asia’s Subsea Network: US Interests and Strategic Options’, Centre for Strategic International Studies, 4 April 2022, https://www.csis.org/analysis/securing- ... ic-options.
This is part of the NSA ‘Collect It All’ program to gather all communications of the world and store them in places like the Bluffdale Utah Data Centre (code-named ‘Bumblehive’), the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative data centre.30‘Utah Data Centre’, Domestic Surveillance Directorate, accessed 27 November 2023, https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/.
They exclude secret military projects and locations (including host-nation facilities known as ‘lily pads’), although some have been exposed and included.31Nick Turse, ‘Pentagon Misled Congress About US Bases in Africa’, The Intercept, 8 September 2023, https://theintercept.com/2023/09/08/afr ... -military/.
There is little information regarding US military movements between locations, the nature of the activities carried out (such as troop movements or targeted assassinations), and the volume of goods, planes, and vessels.
Not all bases are equal in scale or function, assessing relative importance is near impossible. Sometimes a single building is classified as a base because it is discontiguous from other buildings a kilometre away. Some bases are massive and destructive to everything in their path – like the military facilities in Guam, destroying the natural environment and the lives of people living there. Others are known as small spy network installations.
The result of these limitations is a tendency to report on what is measurable, not what is unknown but strategic.
First, we provide a map using World Beyond War data that shows which countries have bases without showing the exact number in each country. This helps to reduce possible incorrect comparisons. The existence of even one US base within a country means that the country has already ceded some national sovereignty to the US. Second, for completeness, we include below two charts (one for the Global North and one for the Global South) that list countries with known bases as per World Beyond War.
Figure 6 shows the US has at least 902 foreign military bases. They are heavily concentrated in bordering regions or buffer zones around China and seriously undermine the sovereignty of Global South countries.32‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.
FIGURE 7
United States military bases in Global North countries and territories
2023
Number of bases Country/territory
50+ Germany (171), Japan (98)
20-49 Italy (45), United Kingdom (25)
5-19 Australia (17), Belgium (12), Portugal (9), Romania (9), Norway (8), Israel (7), Netherlands (7), Greece (5), Poland (5)
1-4 Bulgaria (4), Iceland (3), Spain (3), Canada (2), Georgia (2), Hungary (2), Latvia (2), Slovakia (2), Cyprus (1), Denmark (1), Estonia (1), Greenland (1), Ireland (1), Kosovo (1), Luxembourg (1)
Total 445
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on World Beyond War
US foreign military bases not only exist in the Global South, but also have a significant presence in the Global North (Figure 7). More than two-thirds of known bases are concentrated in the two countries defeated in World War II: Germany and Japan.
FIGURE 8
United States military bases in Global South countries and territories
2023
Number of bases Country/Territory
50+ Rep. Korea (62)
20-49 Guam (45), Puerto Rico (34), Syria (28), Saudi Arabia (21)
5-19 Panama (15), Turkey (12), Philippines (11), Bahrain (10), Iraq (10), Marshall Islands (10), Bahamas (9), Belize (9), Honduras (9), Niger (9), Guatemala (8), Jordan (8), Kuwait (8), Oman (8), Pakistan (8), Egypt (7), Colombia (6), El Salvador (6), Somalia (6), Northern Mariana Islands (5), Peru (5), Qatar (5)
1-4 Cameroon (4), Costa Rica (4), Virgin Islands (U.S.) (4), Argentina (3), Central African Republic (3), Chad (3), Kenya (3), Mauritania (3), Nicaragua (3), Palau (3), Thailand (3), United Arab Emirates (3), American Samoa (2), Brazil (2), Diego Garcia (2), Djibouti (2), Dominican Republic (2), Gabon (2), Ghana (2), Mali (2), Singapore (2), Suriname (2), Tunisia (2), Uganda (2), Yemen (2), Antarctica (1), Aruba (1), Ascension (1), Botswana (1), Burkina Faso (1), Burundi (1), Cambodia (1), Chile (1), Cuba (1), DR Congo (1), Indonesia (1), Netherlands Antilles (1), Samoa (1), Senegal (1), Seychelles (1), South Sudan (1), Uruguay (1), Wake Island (1)
Total 457
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on World Beyond War
Figure 8 lists the locations of US foreign military bases in Global South countries and territories. The Republic of Korea hosts 62 permanent US military bases.
FIGURE 9
United States foreign military structures
No. of buildings, building area, land area, and no. of bases
2023
Country/territory Building Internal
m2
Buildings
total number
Area
hectares
Military Bases
total number
Japan 10,339,000 12,079 41,715 76
Germany 9,135,000 12,537 2,682 93
Rep. Korea 5,631,000 5,832 12,262 62
Italy 2,011,000 2,032 945 31
Guam 1,382,000 2,807 25,322 45
United Kingdom 1,364,000 2,883 3,253 14
Kuwait 676,000 1,503 2,549 6
Qatar 661,000 663 2
Cuba 588,000 1,540 11,662 1
Turkey 478,000 817 1,356 8
Spain 419,000 889 3,802 2
Puerto Rico 411,000 794 7,042 29
Bahrain 390,000 468 83 9
Belgium 362,000 479 10
Marshall Islands 286,000 633 551 6
Greenland 220,000 197 94,306 1
Djibouti 171,000 379 459 2
Netherlands 151,000 150 5
United Arab Emirates 128,000 400 5,059 3
Portugal 114,000 170 532 6
Honduras 92,000 336 1
Singapore 86,000 120 3
Romania 70,000 179 177 4
Bahamas 62,000 179 219 6
Greece 61,000 85 41 4
Saint Helena 43,000 124 1,402 1
Australia 41,000 83 8,124 5
Bulgaria 39,000 93 2
Virgin Islands (U.S.) 26,000 29 5,964 5
Jordan 17,000 31 3,978 1
Cyprus 16,000 38 1
Israel 13,000 19 2
American Samoa 11,000 10 2 1
Niger 11,000 45 1
Poland 11,000 20 3
Curaçao 9,000 15 17 1
El Salvador 6,000 14 14 1
Northern Mariana Islands 5,000 17 6,499 10
Peru 5,000 7 1
Norway 3,000 4 1
Iceland 2,000 7 425 1
Kenya 2,000 5 1
Canada 91 1
Total 35,548,000 48,712 240,533 468
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on the Dept. of Defense
Figure 9 shows the scale of the US military footprint: 36 million square metres in 49,000 buildings covering 245,000 hectares. Ranked by number of buildings, the three Axis powers are in the top four.
Whilst the sun now happily sets without concern for the British Empire, Figure 10 shows how large the UK network of bases remains, with its focus on West Asia and Africa.
US and UK Military Invasions, Interventions, and ‘Deployments’
NATO countries conduct extensive military deployments and interventions worldwide, supported by their vast network of bases.
Figures 11 and 12 are for the year 2022 only. Imperialist forces deployed 317 military operations in Global South countries and 137 in Global North ally nations, totalling 454 (45 of which are not UN member states). The imperialist nations who carried out the highest number of military deployments include the US (56), the UK (32), France (31), Italy (20), Germany (17), Spain (15), Canada (13), and the Netherlands (13) (Figure 11).33The Military Balance 2023.
Figure 12 shows how Africa and West Asia remain the focal points of Western schemes, with the following five nations suffering the most military deployments in 2022 alone: Mali (31), Iraq (30), Lebanon (18), the Central African Republic (13), and South Sudan (13).34The Military Balance 2023.
Looking at the geography of US and UK bases and Global North deployments, it is clear where the frontiers of US policing lie and how Eurasia and regions that buffer it are the battlegrounds of our time.
The US and its Global North allies, especially the UK, have had centuries of interventions as indicated in Figures 13 and 14. Since Congressional Research Services (CRS) is an official US government publication, it serves as a primary source of data on US military intervention. It is used to demonstrate the scale and historical longue durée of US military intervention. However, it must be noted that CRS does not include secret missions and does not aggregate its data to differentiate between various types of US Armed Forces’ overseas interventions. The data is not organised based on the qualitative and quantitative nature or scale of the instances. The listed instances (over 480) vary greatly in size, duration, legal authorisation, and significance.35Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023, Congressional Research Service, 7 June 2023, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42738.
The Military Intervention Project (MIP) uses a more comprehensive definition of military intervention that encompasses ‘united instances of international conflict or potential conflict outside of normal peacetime activities in which the purposeful threat, display, or use of military force by official US government channels is explicitly directed toward the government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state actor’.36Kushi and Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’, 4.
MIP has not published their database, so exact instances of all the military interventions they identify are not yet publicly available. As such, this report has only accessed summary data from the publication ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’ (2023) and could not produce a map based on MIP.
As seen in Figure 13, as of June 2023, the acknowledged data from the US Congressional Research Service shows that the US Armed Forces have been deployed to 101 countries between 1798 and 2023.37Salazar Torreon and Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023.
Figure 14 exposes the UK who has militarily invaded 170 countries and territories between 1169 and 2012.
According to MIP, between 1776 and 2019, the US carried out over 392 military interventions worldwide.38Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 67, no. 4 (2023): 752–779. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.117 ... articles.1.
Half of these operations were undertaken between 1950 and 2019, and 25% of them occurred in the post-Cold War period.39The Military Intervention Project (MIP) has a slightly lower estimate than the larger lists from sources such as the Congressional Research Services (CRS), whose figures are more frequently cited by researchers. MIP uses a range of all known published databases. However, due to its more comprehensive definition, their aggregation process results in a slightly lower total figure due to reclassification. MIP and CRS, therefore, have incomparable data sets and incomparable raw numbers based on the different way they treat dating, scale, duration, legality, and intent. MIP and CRS have incomparable methodological approaches. We use CRS as it is the largest published data available. See Kushi and Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’.
The pace of US military interventions has clearly accelerated since 1991.
On International Working Women’s Day in 1950, Claudia Jones, a black communist and immigrant woman, addressed a rally of activists in the US. In different circumstances but with the same spirit, we share this report with the aim, to quote Jones, of ‘heightening [our] consciousness of the need for militant united-front campaigns around the burning demands of the day, against monopoly oppression, against war and fascism’.40
(Much, much more at link. Sorry about those tables, view them at link.)
https://thetricontinental.org/studies-o ... perialism/
