IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID VINE
A ‘Declassified Australia Conversation’ between Jorgen Doyle, community researcher on US and Australian military plans across northern Australia, and David Vine, author of two books on the modern empire of the United States, Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, and United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts.
Part 1: How the US is building its empire and what a public movement can do.
DA: You lay out a conceptual framing for US global basing presence in your book‘ ‘Base Nation’ and your more recent book, ‘United States of War’.
In both of those books, you suggest a historical through-line from nineteenth‑century forts on Indigenous land on what is now continental United States, or Turtle Island, built during westward expansion (on land that you note was very much ‘abroad’ at the time) to twentieth and twenty‑first‑century military bases, noting that some present US bases occupy the same territory as 19th century forts.
What is the continuity as you see it between the US settler-colonial doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’ and US imperial incursions globally throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century?
VINE: Great big question. I think you hit on it at the end: imperialism is the through line. Most people in the United States and around the world don’t think of the United States as an empire. The United States, since the turn of the 19th to 20th century, hasn’t particularly advertised itself as an empire, the way the British Empire did, for example.
But from independence, the leaders of the United States, the powers that be at the time, conceived of the country as a rising empire in the model of the European empires like the British Empire and the French Empire.
US imperialism has taken on various forms and looked different at different times. It began like European empires did, or at least some of them, as a territorially-based imperialism focused on conquering and colonising territory across the North American continent. And that is indeed what the United States did across the course of the late 18th and 19th century.
In the 20th century, the United States empire increasingly focused on US military bases, dotted around the globe as a way to exercise not just military power, but economic and political power as well. That process began in the 19th century with the creation of US bases in the Pacific in particular, as well as in the Caribbean, bases that are in some cases now being used, for example, to menace Venezuela and threaten a regime change war against it.
But it was during World War II that the United States created a truly global network of military bases that was larger than that of any empire in world history – a collection of thousands of bases worldwide during World War II.
The base network shrunk at the end of the war, but the basic infrastructure of bases around the world stayed in place and has been a major lever and tool of US power. Power over other countries where the bases are located and power over other countries near bases, including those in Australia which have been increasing in number and size in recent decades.
DA: Over the 85 years of formal alliance between Australia and the US, the Australian government has gone to great lengths to demonstrate its loyalty to the US, from consistently entering US-led wars, to siting numerous US military installations on this continent.
Northern Australia is increasingly the place where Australia makes itself ‘useful’ to the US (critical minerals mines, military training fields) in order to retain the US’ so-called security umbrella. As the US is becoming steadily more unpredictable and unreliable, our government is doubling down on the alliance, offering more inducements for the US to remain our primary security partner.
Have you seen this elsewhere? Have you seen elites in countries allied with the US offering more and more incentives to the US to retain the alliance and military cooperation as the US is becoming increasingly fascistic and belligerent under the Trump administration? And do you think those efforts by those elites will work?
VINE: It’s early, but certainly the short answer is yes.
We saw it under the first Trump administration as well. Places like Poland wanted a US military base, and they’d name it Camp Trump. So there are a range of ways in which leaders around the world have been kissing Trump’s ass, if I’m allowed to say that.
Foreign leaders are desperate to hold onto the US security umbrella, for a whole variety of reasons, I think beginning with economic reasons. They are concerned about being shut out of economic deals or being punished economically in the United States.
While the US is a declining power in many ways, it still has very considerable economic and political as well as military power to wield, and people are afraid of getting on Trump’s bad side.
I’m sure leaders learn that this is the way you have to deal with Trump. You have to give him shiny things and gifts and play to his ego. It fuels itself in many ways, giving him yet more power at a time when leaders and people in other countries should be doing precisely the opposite, questioning the alliance with the United States, questioning the direction in which the United States is going.
I do think this is a great opportunity to raise deeper and more profound questions about the alliance with the United States because Trump represents the United States and is so erratic and so dangerous.
We saw something similar in George W. Bush’s administration with the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which, of course, Australia played important roles in. That was a moment where people around the world were questioning the presence of the US military on their soil, and were questioning their alliances with the United States.
This is indeed a moment where we need more of that questioning and more countries to be pursuing an independent foreign policy that can play a constructive and peace-building role in the world.
The Chinese government is also playing a very unproductive role in the world in many ways, particularly in East Asia, of course, and the South China Sea, making things yet more dangerous on top of a situation where the US government has been militarising the region and making war between the United States and China and their respective allies more likely rather than less, which is all to say it’s an incredibly dangerous moment.
We need countries like Australia to be choosing a different path rather than just marching down the road toward what should be an unthinkable war between the United States and China and their allies.
We need sane voices and sane minds coming from outside the binary of the United States and China to encourage the two countries to choose a path of diplomacy and peace building and resolving territorial disputes in East Asia and beyond, collaborating and cooperating to solve the real problems facing people around the world, like global heating, poverty, global pandemics, and far beyond.
DA: The new US national security strategy released late last year has been described as a manifesto for the global far right, ‘a straightforward theory for how to use foreign policy to advance a global counter-revolutionary agenda from the standpoint of one of the world’s major military and economic powers’. It announces that the US national security state will act against Europe’s ruling political parties in support of far-right movements and parties.
The US State Department has recently ordered US embassies in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and throughout Europe, to collect data and report “on migrant-related crimes and human rights abuses” in the country they’re based in.
What do you think we are likely to see in terms of opposition to US bases as it becomes clearer to global populations that the US is the world’s leading far right actor?
VINE: It’s a very complicated document and it’s always difficult to know what to do with any sort of official announcements and how much to trust what it says, especially with Trump and his erratic behaviour. I don’t think we should assume that he and his administration will follow this new national security strategy much at all. But it does articulate a very different vision of the US role in the world in mostly extremely troubling and disturbing ways.
There is a degree to which there are some encouraging words critiquing the longstanding US strategy of trying to dominate the globe militarily. Instead, it replaces that with saying the United States will dominate the Western Hemisphere, a big chunk of the globe, as well as playing a clearly aggressive military role in Asia and basically elsewhere.
In many ways, it’s contradictory. But there’s an opportunity at least, and Trump provides this opportunity more broadly, to, here in the United States, question US foreign policy. I hope this provides opportunities for people in places like Australia to question why their nations would go along with a country and a leader who is embracing 19th century imperialism.
This is only a path that will lead us toward what 19th century imperialism led us to, which is to world wars that killed tens of millions of people. Any kind of war between the great powers of this era, the United States and China and potentially Russia, as well as their allies, could kill tens upon tens of millions of people. It literally could take the lives of billions of people if a full-scale nuclear war broke out.
That’s what people in Australia and the United States and China and beyond need to see. These are the stakes. This is why this moment is so dangerous. It’s dangerous for many reasons, but any conflict could easily spiral out of control into a nuclear war, and places like Australia would be among the first targets, in addition to, of course, places in the United States and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region.
DA: I wonder whether you’ve also seen the series of op-eds the New York Times has started putting out, which variously catastrophise about the US military being in crisis, and about Trump’s national security strategy and the Trump administration’s apparent new reluctance to defend the ‘free world’, to engage in this missionary liberal interventionism that has defined US foreign policy for at least three generations and throughout the Cold War as well.
They’re panicking about US military-industrial capacity. They believe that the US needs to arm up massively. Every article offers the caveat that their recommendations are all about deterring conflict rather than domination of the globe, but clearly that’s not true. They seem at least as dangerous as the fascists in the White House.
VINE: Oh, absolutely. They represent the kind of status quo that President Biden and any sort of Kamala Harris presidency would have brought, continuing from President Biden a status quo that was also leading us down the road to war with China.
There are ways in which President Trump has signalled some greater reluctance to escalate tensions with China. He has also escalated economic tensions with China through his foolish trade war that quickly caused him to retreat. But there are some ways in which Trump has signalled and to some extent pursued greater efforts to bring down military tensions between the United States and China and the United States and Russia, which is encouraging. But the New York Times editorial board is only fuelling the march toward, again, what should be an unthinkable war between the United States and China.
What is at the heart of the march to war which they are cheering on is a gift to the weapons makers, a gift to the war profiteers, the people who are making billions of dollars off of war and preparations for war. They made billions off the genocide in Gaza just as they did from the more than two decades of endless war beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq. So the New York Times is playing an extraordinarily harmful role in fueling this march towards more war.
DA: One thing that caught my eye in one of the articles was that they were catastrophising about US military industrial capacity and saying that the US could only conceivably go to war with China if the military industrial capacity of US-allied countries increased, and if the US was able to rely on that capacity as well. Australia is one of those places. A 2024 New York Times article described Australia as “the 51st state for weapons production”.
As I was reading that line, I thought about the incredible amount of upskilling and knowledge-sharing that activist groups on this continent have undertaken in the last couple of years, how they’ve gotten to know where the weapons factories in their neighbourhoods and cities and regions are. Some groups and individuals have undertaken consistent direct action to block those facilities and to occupy roofs. I’m curious how damaging those sorts of blockades, occupations, and going forward, perhaps property destruction, can be to the US and allied countries’ collective effort to have the military-industrial base to go to war with China.
VINE: I think those sorts of Palestine Action tactics and other actions to disrupt the weapons supply chain and weapons production are helpful for raising public awareness about the role of different places and companies in the global supply chain of war-making and genocide. But I’m not sure how much impact they have at a really practical level on disrupting the supply chain and the war-making capacity. I think to really interrupt the global supply chain of war, we need slightly different kinds of movements that will focus on redirecting where taxpayer money goes.
President Eisenhower was the person who effectively coined the term military-industrial complex, the term he used to describe the relationship between the military and the weapons makers and the legislature, Congress, and the corrupt, entrenched profit-making and the addiction to endless war that system has created. He described military spending, rightly, as a theft.
We need to show people the way in which their money is being systematically stolen from them in Australia, in the United States, and far beyond. Taxpayer money is being stolen from ordinary people and sucked up by weapons manufacturers and other military contractors who are making billions of dollars off war and preparations for war.
We need to force a redirection of those funds away from the war profiteers and toward building different kinds of infrastructure, building schools, hospitals, green energy infrastructure, affordable housing, and much more. In the United States, and elsewhere, we’re seeing a kind of populist anger building about the kind of profiteering that’s on display with the military industrial complex, with the war profiteers, as well as with the billionaires in this world increasingly controlling a massive amount of wealth while the vast majority of humanity suffers.
There’s this populist anger building that we really need to capitalise on. We need to demand that taxpayer money is used in a profoundly different way, and that government is directed in a profoundly different way, rather than just enriching billionaires and war profiteers.
DA: Do you see any groups in the US or elsewhere that are doing a good job of harnessing that popular anger and discontent or that have done so historically?
VINE: Trump and his movement are one unfortunate example. His populist promises are almost entirely a set of lies, but they have been very effective in building a movement because he has spoken a language that has appealed to people, talking about the ways in which people have been ripped off, as they have, talking about the ways in which the system is rigged, which it is, talking about improving people’s daily lives, which he has not done.
I think there’s something to be learned from Trump’s movement and the kind of framing and language he’s used while actually building a movement that will deliver on the kinds of promises he’s made, building a movement that is not built on a set of lies.
As many of your readers surely know, the recent mayoral campaign by Zohran Mamdani in New York City is a prime example of a kind of left populist movement overcoming the transnational power of the Democratic Party establishment, which has incredible entrenched power. It bears underlining just how significant that victory is for building a movement capable of directing funds away from war profiteers and towards the things we desperately need.
Next month Part Two of ‘In Conversation with David Vine’ will take a closer look at implications of US and Australian military expansion across northern Australia.
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