The pivot from Republic to Empire circa 1949 remains evident even today – fully one-third of a century after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Empire was swept into the dustbin of history. As depicted in the chart below, the War Capital of the World still deploys 173,000 troops in 159 countries and maintains upwards of 750 bases in 80 countries.
Indeed, in some sense it’s as if WWII never ended. As of 2020, Washington still had large military forces in places where they had arrived 75 years ago during the final span of WWII:
- 119 bases and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
- 44 bases and 12,250 troops in Italy.
- 25 bases and 9,275 troops in the UK.
- 120 bases and 53,700 troops in Japan.
- 73 bases and 26,400 troops in South Korea
As we indicated in Part 2, the traditional post-war demobilization after 1945 would have wiped clean the above slate of Empire. But it was reversed in 1948-1949 when the Soviet Union got the A-bomb and Mao won the civil war in China. Thereafter, the spread of bases, troops, alliances, interventions and Forever Wars proceeded relentlessly on the grounds that the rickety communist states domiciled in Moscow and Beijing posed an existential threat to America’s survival.
Hellbound and Down 