 Aaron Powell Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus And I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell Joining us today is John Glazer. He's the Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies here at the Cato Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts, John. Trevor Burrus Thanks. Aaron Powell What is America's forward deployed military posture? Trevor Burrus So that's a fancy Pentagon way of saying that we have a lot of overseas military bases. We have about 800 of them of varying sizes in about 70 countries abroad. It's a massive presence. Some of these bases have people for years and years and years permanently stationed there with their families. They kind of like build little cities inside these military bases to sustain life. And others are really small with only a few troops. But you know, just to get a sense of the size of it, it has roughly 250,000 troops at all times all around the world. And you know, in comparison, Russia, our geopolitical competitor has only about nine overseas bases. China has just one in Djibouti. So it's a uniquely American preoccupation, this forward deployed presence. Has that number 800 changed much in the last 20 years or so? Or maybe 50 years? Aaron Burrus Sure. So since the Cold War, the number of troops deployed abroad has definitely gone down. The number of bases has gone down as well, but they went back up with regard to the Middle East. So we took a lot of troops and bases out of Europe at the end of the Cold War and reduced some bases that we had in Asia. But our presence and activity in the Middle East increased. So since the end of the Cold War, we've actually increased our presence there. Aaron Burrus Where are these, I mean, you said they're in 70 countries and we have more in the Middle East than we used to. But in general, where are these located? Are they highly concentrated in specific parts of the world or are we pretty much covering everything? Aaron Burrus They're highly concentrated, especially the major ones with lots of troops in them. In Europe, the Middle East and Northeast Asia. So Japan and South Korea have very large numbers of US troops. Germany has a lot of US troops. We have them scattered throughout the rest of Europe as well. And then in the Middle East, we have roughly 50,000 troops. We have major, 13,000 to 14,000 in Kuwait. We have 7,000 roughly rotating in and out of Iraq right now. We have, of course, the major presence still in Afghanistan. We're still fighting a war there. Major air bases in Qatar. And about 6,000 or 7,000 troops permanently stationed in the Navy's fifth fleet in Bahrain, which is right in the Persian Gulf. Aaron Burrus Now you argue that we shouldn't have as many. I mean, we could cut that in half and we would still have substantially more. We could have 400 bases and we would still have substantially more than any other country. But that would definitely be a significant change in US foreign policy if we were not so, as we say, forward deployed out there. And so is it asking too much, first of all, to not be able to put our force abroad at any sort of five minutes from being able to bomb Iran? That's the way we kind of think about American foreign policy. Stepping back from that is really rethinking the entirety of American foreign policy. Yeah. I will reveal my own bias here. I think, yes, our foreign policy needs a fundamental rethink. We shouldn't be playing the global policeman. I think the purpose of American foreign policy ought to be what it used to be, which is essentially protecting the physical security of the United States territory and its citizens. Managing local disputes in remote regions of the world that don't have all that much impact for our security or our economic interest. I don't think it's in our interest. I don't think that makes sense for us. Part of the problem with having lots of bases in lots of different countries around the world is that it tends to suck us into conflicts that we otherwise might not be engaged in. For example, after the Second World War in 1945, we established what was supposed to be a temporary presence in South Korea. We were supposed to work with the Russians to develop some kind of situation in which the Korean peninsula could operate on its own and have its own government. In 1947, 48, and 49, three successive years, the top military strategists in the Truman administration recommended full withdrawal. They did so because they said Korea is of little strategic importance to us. The fact is that we had a presence there, and then when the North Koreans invaded in 1950, it obligated the United States to continue to be involved. This is the case with our current commitments. For example, we have bases in the Philippines and Japan. Japan and the Philippines both have maritime and territorial disputes with China. If it's the case that they end up getting into some kind of dispute, our forces act as a tripwire. They obligate the United States to make it politically costly for us not to get involved in optional elective conflicts. I think that's one of the major problems with it. But doesn't this get to the argument in part for these bases is precisely that that's the sort of stuff we should be doing, that if we don't want the North Koreans taking over the Korean peninsula, we don't want China destroying Japan. If we've got these bases there, they act as a deterrent in the first place. If they don't, they make us more capable and make those countries more capable of defending themselves. Indeed. So as we deter adversaries and reassure allies, this has the effect of, according to advocates of forward deployment, pacifying the international system. Sometimes it's called the American pacifier. We basically prevent spirals of conflict happening around the world because this major hegemonic power has troops everywhere. And that's an argument, but I think you have to consider the other plausible causal explanations for the dramatic decline in international conflict and violence over the past 70 years. So it is true that our forward presence was established after World War II. And it's also true that since then there's a correlation between the establishment of those bases and the decline of overall interstate violence. But there's other factors as well. So for example, the fact that most great powers and some not so great powers have nuclear weapons, this creates a situation of mutually assured destruction, and it makes people really not want to go to war because that means the destruction of your society. Some people, that's called the nuclear peace theory. Very honorable and respected theorists like Kenneth Waltz in the international relations field have proffered that one. Some people look at the nuclear peace theory and say, well, sure, but that's probably redundant. The conventional power that modern militaries have, as we saw in World War I and World War II, are so destructive. They can destroy empires. They can kill people almost as effectively as nuclear weapons. And so that acts as enough of a deterrent. The modern capacity of industrialized militaries is too great. And then some people look at economic interdependence, which of course has proliferated in the post-war era. If you trade with someone and you have economic interdependence, you're much less likely to go to war with them. Some other people still look further and they look—so John Mueller, for example, who you guys know, he's a political scientist out of Ohio State University, and he's a senior fellow here at Cato. He's one of the foremost proponents that there have been dramatic normative shifts in the way most civilized people see war in this era. So it's something—if you go back to the World War I era, you can hear people in Germany and even our own leaders like Teddy Roosevelt at the time talking about war as something to aspire to. It was a cleansing national experience that made people strong and glorious and masculine. And that's different from today. Even the warmongers among us tend to talk about war as something of a last resort. And then, of course, lastly, there's democratic peace theory. There are more democracies these days and democracies, for some reason or another, tend not to go to war with each other. And so you have all of these different trends, all of these different trend lines that have various support in the academic community. And they all point in the direction of less war and less violence. And so under those conditions, I think it's worth scrutinizing the American pacifier theory. I'll turn to history briefly. So we're talking that prompt for this conversation today is a paper you recently published with Cato, which we'll put a link to in the show notes about these overseas bases. And you have a section on how the motivations for having them have changed over time. Can you tell us a bit about that? They've got a long history of putting troops in places that aren't your own territory. Sure. I don't know how much of the long history I can go into detail about, but the things that I talk about in my... I'm going to interject a little bit. We did have before World War II, we did have the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. When was the first sort of forward deployment? I mean, we had Guam. We had Philippines starting in the early 20th century. We did have troops abroad, correct? Yeah. So 1898 after the Spanish-American War, we did adopt some pretty major overseas bases that also ended up... We sort of annexed territory. We still own Guam, for example, and lots of other pieces of territory. It's hard to say when our first overseas military base was sometimes in the mid 1800s and actually early 1800s, we had some outposts in China to try to facilitate trade between the United States and China, but I wouldn't really count that as a full military base in the sense that we're currently talking about. The 1898-style discussion, some people sometimes call that the saltwater fallacy because we were still an expanding continent here in the contiguous United States, and we had all sorts of military bases out west, and so when it got past the saltwater, people talk about that being sort of more imperial inclinations. With regard to the history, overseas military bases are not all that new. You had Athens and Sparta building military bases throughout Greece. You had Rome building military bases from Britannia all the way to the other end of the Mediterranean. Empires of old used to build military bases to colonize distant lands with their own people. They used to build them for mercantilist reasons to gain economic advantage over their other competitors. It was only in the start of the Cold War, the end of World War II, that overseas bases started to develop this current justification, which is to, number one, deter adversaries, number two, reassure allies, and number three, make it really easy for us to get places quickly if we decide we want to go to war. If we take the arguments, we accept the arguments of people who think that there should be overseas bases, those arguments would seem to apply to other countries as well. The United States has a bigger military than Russia and a bigger military than China, but the difference in the number of bases we have versus the number of bases they have can't be explained just by the ratios there. If these bases are valuable, why don't other countries have so many? Why are they all sitting in the same digits? Because the United States is unique in its definition of its national interests. We have truly expansive definition of what our national interests are, what our global responsibilities are. China doesn't have within its own national security strategy what kind of military intervention they would engage in if there's a humanitarian conflict in Latin America or something. No other country has such an expansive definition of its national interest as the United States does. The other thing that's important in that context is that the United States is safer than most other great powers. We have weak and pliant neighbors to our north and south. We have vast oceans to our east and west which act as a defensive barrier to most conventional kinds of threats. We spend roughly 38% of the global military spending is our own. We could cut our military spending in half and still outspend China right now. We have a nuclear deterrent which prevents anyone from attacking our own territory. This situation puts us in a really secure place. When you're really secure, unfortunately, and you're the unipolar power, the hegemon in the world, you start to think about what you can do elsewhere as opposed to just protecting your own borders. You said we conceptualize our interests very broadly, but do you think that other countries also do that to us, that they expect us to do the right thing and that we're the benevolent hegemon? That's actually the entire point that it's not that big a deal that we're in Germany because we are a generally good country. What is Winston Churchill's line? We will do the right thing after we've exhausted all other options. People know that about us, but I think that Germany probably wants us there. They're not scared at least that we're going to up and decide to take them over. No one's afraid of that. No one's thinking that we're Rome and we're trying to take over the whole world. Maybe in some of these places like Bahrain or a place where we might engender conflict and put our people in danger because there are people there who want to get them, that's a totally different analysis than say Germany, which is probably creating good relations between America and Germany and allowing us to do what they're asking us to do, which is to be the benevolent hegemon, which I think we've done a pretty good job of that. First of all, it's totally true that Germany is not worried about the United States taking over Germany. That's not our MO. But if you're talking about the perception of our military posture abroad, you also have to take into account people that aren't benefiting off American largesse, that aren't having their defense subsidized by the United States and our presence there. For example, one of the most dangerous points in the entirety of the Cold War was, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only a matter of months prior to that crisis, the Kennedy administration put Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union. Of course, Moscow perceived this as deeply threatening. The leadership at the time in Russia and the Soviet Union discussed in papers that have since been declassified that we feel we're being surrounded by military bases from the United States. We're going to give them a taste of their own medicine and put one in Cuba. That precipitated literally the closest we've come to nuclear war. That was obviously not a good thing. That translates to today. For example, the expansion of NATO and the establishment of US military bases further and further east towards Russia and even up to the Russian border in some cases is the source of profound and lingering anxiety and resentment in Russia. They don't like the perception that they're being encircled. You can also compare this in Asia. The United States has roughly 50,000 troops in Japan right at the end of the Japanese archipelago, which is pointed like a dagger at the center of China. We have about 30,000 troops in Korea, which of course is very close to China. We guarantee the security of the Philippines. We have 60% of our naval presence in the Asia Pacific region. This is perceived in China as deeply threatening. Every country and its allies tends to view themselves as benevolent and wonderful and non-threatening. The problem is when you get into other people's heads, they see it much differently. Just to conclude this part, one of the foremost grievances cited for the 9-11 attacks was the US military presence in Saudi Arabia. It was something that Al Qaeda cited in order to rally Muslim support against the United States. It was one of the foremost reasons and justifications that they used to attack us. Our presence abroad can create all kinds of resentment. That's not just in countries in the Middle East. Just a year or so ago, there was a protest of 65,000 Okinawans in Japan in opposition to the US military-based presence there. This can happen all over the world, even among allies. I want to talk on the 9-11 point. Do you believe it is the case that but for American military bases, the one cited in the Al Qaeda letter in Saudi Arabia in particular, I believe, but for those, 9-11 wouldn't have happened? Well, there was a number of grievances that Al Qaeda- We still would have been attacked. I guess I'll clarify my question too. If we just flew sorties from Germany and attacked them, so how much are the bases and how much is it the military action? If we were bombing places but flying from Germany or we were still treating the Muslim world, that seems like a bigger thing than just the presence of a base that we're discussing right now. That's true. In general, of course, lots of Muslims, particularly the extremist ones, oppose aggressive military action in the Middle East. But the presence of US military forces inside Saudi Arabia, which is the site of the two holiest places in Islam, was the source of particular concern to very religious Muslims because they felt that the Saudi government was inviting infidels and crusaders to the holiest place in Islam. That was the source of a particular and unique sort of religious concern. It's also the case that Robert Pape, one of the foremost scholars on terrorism, has said in his studies that foreign occupation is the foremost determinant of terrorism, the motivator for terrorism. If you go back in history, for example, when we had our massive military presence in Lebanon in the 1980s, 1983, that's when Hezbollah committed an attack that killed something like 241, I might get that number wrong, US service personnel. This is also in 2000, the USS Cole was attacked out of Yemen. These foreign military bases are symbols of American power in the region. All the other stuff, whether it's Israel-Palestine, the sanctions regime on Iraq, which ended up killing lots of people, all kinds of other more tangible elements of US influence in the region, the bases themselves, as I say, operate as a kind of symbol of American power that can generate a lot of resentment. Okay, but I can put on my rah-rah war hat for a moment. It doesn't fit you very well. It's been in the closet for a long time. But I guess so what? Russia, they're the bad guys, pro-farm military run by a madman. There, China is the bad guys. The Islamic extremists are the bad guys. So yeah, having super powerful good guys next to them makes them uncomfortable and they don't like it and it makes them resent that we're more powerful than they are. So why should that factor in? Like why should we just kind of give in to the psychological pain of the bad guys and not protect our interests? Yeah, if we hadn't been Hitler with a bunch of military bases that had made Hitler uncomfortable, you'd be like, yeah, that's the point. So it depends on what kind of results you want. So if you believe in the power of American deterrence and that everywhere we put bases that's going to keep bad guys in check, then that's one reason to further the argument that you just made. But the problem is that there are reactions to our overseas military presence, what's called counterbalancing in the IR literature. So for example, it's hard to find someone in Moscow or in the Kremlin that describes the motivations for their military actions in Georgia and Ukraine in ways that doesn't cite NATO expansion. It's hard to, lots of analysts point to Chinese aggressive and assertive actions in the South China Sea as being motivated by a fear that the United States is the largest naval presence there and therefore that's where they get all their oil through the straits of Malacca come through the Persian Gulf in the strait of Malacca and we could possibly interdict Chinese shipments. So when you make foreign powers nervous unnecessarily, you tend to get unintended consequences that result from that and usually those aren't too pretty. Now the problem is that people see these things very differently. So people that advocate for a foreign deployed presence, they don't like to admit that Russia has taken aggressive actions in Eastern Europe as a result of the expansion of our military presence. Instead, they say, well, that's proof that we don't have enough of a military presence there, which is an argument for always having military bases everywhere forever. And I think that gets so far from what the purpose of American foreign policy should be that it creates all kinds of problems. There's cost problems, which I think we can talk about a little bit, but more to the point, if you are like me and I again be clear about my biases here, I think the United States government should be limited in its powers and its role in domestic society should be somewhat limited, especially compared with the role that it's currently conceived as. And I think that translates as well to the foreign realm. So I think it ought to be the role of American foreign policy, the purpose of American foreign policy to protect the United States and managing global affairs and trying to prevent conflict in various regions, etc., getting ourselves drawn into conflicts, incentivizing counterbalancing, all these other negative unintended consequences. That doesn't meld with my conception of what US foreign policy ought to be about. The world is a relatively safe place compared to where it's been. We don't have a lot of wars between nations. And living in a dangerous world, even if we're across oceans from it, is still worse than living in a safe world. And so wouldn't us focusing only on our own interests narrowly defined and pulling back make the world in general a more dangerous place? Because then we wouldn't have the US protecting countries or deterring countries, even if there are these occasional pushbacks and an aggression that's provoked by it, which would then, I mean, just aside from being bad for the world, would ultimately be bad for America. Well, this gets back to the American pacifier thesis. If you believe that the world is a safer place these days because America has scores of military bases and scores of countries, then that's a really powerful argument. But I think there are solid reasons to think that the world is a safer place these days for reasons other than American pacifier. But I guess the question is how does it cost benefit kind of? So you could say you've got the American pacifier theory and then there's the other theories that you're more inclined to endorse. But given the state of the world right now and how relatively good it is compared to where it could be and where it's been, it's a profound risk to test those theories. We can't test them on the small scale and say, oh, it turns out maybe the American pacifier theory is a little bit better than I thought or maybe these other ones aren't quite as right and then kind of roll it back. And so are the current costs that we are incurring at the moment, both in terms of just how much expensive it is and the danger that it puts American people, American troops in high enough to warrant that risk of testing John's theory about global stability? Yes, because I don't think it's actually that much of a risk. And it might help to narrow this down to a specific context as opposed to thinking about the entire world. So if you can remember it in the 2016 campaign, one of the main things Donald Trump kept saying was that China's responsibility to pressure North Korea to behave better and stop its nuclear development and missile development, et cetera. One of the main reasons that China continues to be a patron of North Korea is that one of the main things that China fears is a unified Korean peninsula under the American military umbrella with U.S. troops there. If you go back in the study of international relations, especially this is very popular in sort of the great game era and the sort of European politics in the 1800s, buffer states are really important. Buffer states make states feel secure from their enemies. If there's a piece of territory there, it's a measure of protection. If China is mostly concerned about a unified North Korean peninsula with American military forces there, because it doesn't want U.S. military forces on its border, one thing that we could do in terms of negotiating a settlement to the North Korean issue or leveraging China to get more involved in a constructive way on Pyongyang, we could offer a change to the U.S.-South Korean alliance and perhaps pulling away from our military presence there. That's a situation in which we could reach a more peaceful situation, some kind of peace agreement, some kind of grand bargain between the United States, North Korea, South Korea and China, but it's being held back because China's main hangup is that U.S. forces are in the region. That's just one example. There are others though. We don't need forward-employed military bases to keep us safe, and we don't need them to make the world more peaceful. Kind of dovetailing on Aaron's question a little bit. Some of—I was reading your paper trying to be a neocon-ish person as I read it, and I could see the lines that they thought were laughable. One of your lines is, the rise of expansionist European power bent on a continental domination is nowhere on the horizon. Isn't that what they would have said in, say, 1930? Isn't that one of these famous last words, things that when we're talking about Europe pulling out of Germany, for example, as I said, and I know we can get later like you think some bases are worse than others, so maybe Germany's on top of your list, but if you're totally against the forward deployment that we're talking about getting out of Germany too, and I think history has shown that it's generally a bad idea to let European powers grow. There are militaries and figure out in fight a war that is total destruction, and we shouldn't just be sort of widely saying, this is not a concern. We'll get out of there. Yeah, I don't think today is comparable to the era in the lead-up to World War I or in the era in the lead-up to World War II. Europe is one of the most stable and peaceful continents in the world. It's a really safe and rich bit of territory. Since World War II, European countries have developed all kinds of institutional elements of cooperation, economic integration. They have close political and diplomatic overlaps in terms of how they perceive their interests. It really is a demonstration of how things can become pacified in a political and cultural way after the devastation of the cataclysms of the first and second World War. I don't think there's really anyone that I'm aware of in the literature who points out that Germany is a risk of a growing power that's going to gobble up its neighbors and start to gain a hegemonic influence on the European continent. I think today people would more likely to be pointing to Russia as a concern, as a power that wants to expand and gobble up other countries. The problem with that is that their GDP is about 1.3 trillion, which is roughly like Spain's. The main thing that you need to build up military power is economic power, and Russia just doesn't have it. There are declining power in a lot of ways. They have an aging population. They have all kinds of internal problems that prevent them from being able to project power in distant regions. Their actions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria lately have actually bogged them down in problematic conflicts that they don't quite see a way out of. They have nuclear weapons, and that protects them, but they don't really have the power right now to start gobbling up and become a European hegemon. The main thing you have to look at if you're concerned about a rising hegemon is the nature of the regime, the balance of power, because the Western Europe checks Russia's power because they're more powerful and richer, and the economic power and military power of the states in question. I think if you look at that, it's pretty clear that we don't need to have a permanent presence there to prevent that kind of contingency. It's like we had in the past. Basically, we served as a balancer of last resort. When other powers, European powers in particular, found that they couldn't manage a rogue nation on their own, then we would come in in balance. But that was a very wise and strategic and cost-efficient way to manage the balance of power. Instead, now the dominant theory is we have to always be there to prevent this from ever happening again. If it happens, we'll have plenty of lead time, and I think we can easily deploy quickly if we think we need to. If you were making the case to a person who did not accept, I think, a pretty mainstream foreign policy view right now, even amongst some conservatives, they don't accept the fullness of your critique of American involvement abroad, but they think we've done too much. They weren't a fan of Iraq. Maybe they think we should get out of Afghanistan. When Trump said we've been doing too much abroad, that resonated with them, but then saying, okay, therefore, we should take every military base away is like, okay, that's too strong. If we're going for a compromised position, when you do this in your paper, you say you talk about other technologies, maybe we do need to get there in three days, but we have aircraft carriers. We have planes that can fly from Missouri to the Middle East and back. So if you were making the case for dramatically lessening how many bases we have and still being able to accomplish the military objectives that a lot of people think that we should have the capabilities, even if we shouldn't use it as much, how would you make that case for, say, 400 bases rather than 800? Which ones would you first say we got to get out of because they're not worth it? What technologies can still let us be somewhat of a military hegemon, but without making other people mad, without putting our troops in danger? How would you rank the bases? How would you adjust our military capability to still behave in the world? Well, we just talked about Europe. I think Europe is one of the most stable, peaceful, and rich places in the world. That makes it a very good candidate to pull U.S. military bases out of. We see eye to eye with most Europeans on how things ought to be, on domestic liberal reforms and foreign policy and stuff like that, and they're really rich and powerful and can defend themselves. So they can uphold the role that the United States now upholds in the region if we were to leave, and that's a good test case. There are less stable areas. I talked about the Korean Peninsula, for example, and, of course, the Middle East. But I think reducing overall our military bases and maintaining a few, like the major ones that we have in, say, Japan, would allow us rapid contingency response to deal with any operational contingency that might come our way. The other important thing is what you were saying is that the technology that we have these days to travel really quickly and bomb from great distances really allow us to engage in any type of mission that we think is necessary. The only thing that really prevents rapid deployment of massive mobilization of military forces, withdrawing from all bases would make that quite difficult. But the argument there I would make is that it's not necessarily a bad thing to rob the executive branch of the ability to quickly intervene in any conflict in which they think they ought to intervene. It kind of counter to constitutional ideas about checks and balances and giving the executive branch more options to deploy more quickly does violence, so to speak, to constitutional principles. If I get a few times that one of the effects that our bases have is kind of subsidizing the defense of other nations because they don't have to then pour their own money into defending themselves, do we know how much nations would react to us taking away those subsidies? Can we just assume that if we pulled our bases out of Europe, the Europeans would build up their militaries an equal amount or the South Koreans would? It's hard to say. I think you have to look at discrete examples. Certainly, it's the case I think that Eastern European countries, ones that are really close to the Russian border would start to boost military spending. I mean, the Baltics already spend more as a percentage of their economy than a lot of Western European countries do. It's hard to say whether or not places like Germany, France, Britain would boost military spending if they didn't have American protection. One of the main reasons is because they don't face any threats. In the United States, it's become a bit of a pathology to overspend on military assets. We need more weapons, more equipment, more troops, more bases, etc., because we have this expansive definition of our national interests. But if the Europeans don't spend a lot on their military, it might be because we subsidized their defense, or it might be because they don't really face any threats. Who's going to invade Germany right now? Who is the candidate that's going to bomb Berlin? It's not really in the cards in the policy relevant future. They might inch up slightly, but it's not a guarantee that they would boost spending. How does terrorism factor into this? Isis has threatened to invade Italy, but with their prophecies, right? Berlin, Germany has been attacked. I don't know if Berlin specifically has been attacked, but does that change the equation? Do we need, because there are threats in a way that they weren't from just troops marching across the border? Permanent peacetime overseas military bases are just about the worst tool imaginable to prevent some guy driving into a crowd of people in Nice, France. The operations and attacks that ISIS and other similar groups have taken in Europe in recent years are mostly lone wolf attacks. Sometimes there's some tenuous connection to some base in the Middle East that was directed from the official group, but mostly these are really low-level violence attacks. They kill a few people and it's very tragic, but there's literally no way to conceive of our permanent overseas military presence as preventing that or doing anything to mitigate it or responding to it. These are just low-level attacks. Of course, the question of terrorism at a bird's eye view, it should be noted, as has been noted on this podcast in previous episodes, it's a small threat that we face from terrorism. Every year since 9-11, I think the number of deaths in the United States from terrorism is about six. Every year since 9-11, the average number of deaths from being struck by lightning is roughly 50. So this is a manageable threat. It's not a war to be won. It's a problem to be managed. But in terms on the flip side, as opposed to trying to stop people driving trucks through crowds, which I agree is probably impossible unless they want to live in a police state, but if we want to hit terrorists in a strategic fashion, whether it's through drones or bringing in special forces and landing them and seeing a threat, maybe we see that they have nuclear material or something like this, it seems that we would want to be flying out of bases in Italy, bases in Germany, bases in Qatar. That would be better. So the Rand Corporation did a study on this and what they concluded is that the time benefit of doing a bombing mission from, say, Germany into the Middle East is so negligible as to not very much be worth it. It shouldn't be the justification that our bases in Europe need to be there so that we can quickly bomb the Middle East because the time benefit is just so negligible. So for example, during the First Gulf War in 1991, we flew bombing missions from Louisiana in round-trip missions that were refueled in the air in under 30 hours. So I mean, we can so quickly bomb targets in the Middle East really at a whim that the foreign military bases that logistically enable those missions oftentimes right now are just not necessary to complete the mission. I can picture someone with military experience listening to this and thinking that in your paper, you compare five days of response versus seven days if we were coming from mainland United States or you say that Guam and Diego Garcia, which Guam is a territory so we don't have destabilization concerns. So you're okay with Guam and you're okay with Diego Garcia, which is a British territory. But if you have a two-day difference between flying from Louisiana to the Middle East and what's the big deal? I could see someone in the military strategy being like, who does this guy think he is? Two days is an eternity in military speed. Two days is where Gettysburg Day 1 to Gettysburg Day 3. So it's important to make the distinction here. The couple of days difference is referring to a brigade combat team deploying to a foreign region. That amounts to roughly 5,000 troops, lots of heavy equipment and vehicles, etc. So that takes a little bit longer, but not long enough to prevent us from being able to head off some kind of major military conflict between militaries. The bombing missions don't take a couple of extra days. Bombing missions take an extra hour roughly, maybe a couple hours. So the time difference is negligible for bombing missions. If you want to get really technical, we have 11 or 12 aircraft carriers, which can be all over the world and all over the oceans, and we can fly bombing missions from them as well. Would you make a trade-off if you were trying to negotiate a bill and you were saying, okay, let's take 400 bases away. We still have 400, and let's build three more aircraft carriers. Would that be a trade-off you'd be willing to make in the sense of saying that, okay, I'll agree we need strike capability, but here are the 400 bases that are costing us the most in terms of our safety, anger towards the United States. I'll give you three aircraft carriers. I'm a man of compromise. I'm happy with that trade. I don't think we need the extra aircraft carriers. They're just a destroyer to be named later in draft picks. Sure. You know, all those things. Yeah, name the destroyer after me. I'll be really happy to make that trade. No, I don't think we have more aircraft carriers than anyone else in the world, a lot more. We can put them in places all over the Earth's oceans to easily deploy. We don't need the extra, but if that's the compromise I'm faced with, I'm happy to do that. One thing about telling this to military people, I got the idea for keeping bases in just Guam and Diego Garcia from a friend of mine in the military. I think the hawks that really insist that we must maintain a global military presence at all times are frequently not from the military. For bureaucratic interests, military officials tend to insist that we don't shut down bases, but military people in general, people that serve in the military, I don't think are necessarily, by definition, insistent on the American pacifier thesis. Are there any or how many bases are there, I guess, that even if all of these arguments for why we should have the U.S. military spread over the place are true, are just like egregious examples of this base doesn't accomplish anything? Yeah, we give you a big red pin and a list of all the bases in American assets, and you say, okay, John, cross them off. Well, what I'll say is that there's a lot of tiny bases in strategically insignificant places that we could just easily do away with. These would be the first to go. So there's a lot of bases that we have in a couple dozen or just over a dozen African countries that are really small. They don't have that many personnel there. They're often sort of hubs to train militaries in those countries. We don't need those. They don't make us safer. They don't make Africa safer. We have bases in Central and South America. Those aren't needed. I mean, if you talk about getting places quickly, certainly we can deploy from bases in the United States to anywhere within our own hemisphere much quicker than we can from distances far and far away. So in the Americas and in Africa, I think those would be the first to go, at least significant. So going forward, a lot of people criticize libertarian foreign policy a lot. We get it from both the left and the right. And so we come in here, we say no more foreign forward deployment of the massive scale at least. And you made some very good points. But how do we start trying to convince people that this is generally a good idea and we can draw it down? We don't have to go all the way to our principal level, but draw it down. And what sort of impediments do you see coming in that makes that difficult, other than the obvious disagreement with you? I worry about how lengthy this answer will be. The first point I'd make is that there's something strange about the way foreign policy is handled in Washington, D.C. The debate in foreign policy in Washington, D.C. represents the merest sliver of the debate that occurs on foreign policy in the academic community more generally. So for example, the foremost proponents of our current strategy in academia are two guys named Stephen Brooks and William Woolforth. I had them here at the Cato Institute for a book forum in March. According to them, they feel that they're in the minority in the academic community. But let's just say at least 50% of academics in the international relations field are somewhat sympathetic to the Cato view of foreign policy. Now, the Cato view in foreign policy is like an alien spaceship in Washington, D.C. We are lone wolves. Nobody cares to hear about this. Both left and right is a rough consensus on what U.S. foreign policy ought to be. But it doesn't represent most of the other really solid academically inclined viewpoints on what the role of the United States should be. In terms of persuading people, I think that's a key point to make, that there's something weird about how foreign policy is done. That partly gets to this issue of what are the interests that are influencing people to disregard other valid points of view. There are all kinds. I found this really interesting. If you go back to 1970, there was a congressional investigation called Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad. It explained why the strategic use of U.S. military bases abroad is never seriously scrutinized. I'm going to quote from it if the listeners will forgive me. Quote, once an American overseas base is established, it takes on a life of its own. Original missions may become outdated, but new missions are developed, not only with the intent of keeping the facility going, but often actually to enlarge it. Within the government department's most directly concerned State Department and Defense Department, we found little initiative to reduce or eliminate any of these overseas facilities, which is only to be expected since they would be recommending a reduction in their own position. The same logic holds today. Entrenched interests both within government and outside it insist upon the current for deployed military strategy. That creates basically no political incentive to propose changes to it. I think it's something we need to consider. I know that this is a radical proposal. I did that partly to provoke people, but America's inherent safety at the very least should incentivize people to scrutinize our overseas military base presence. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us at www.libertarianism.org.