America's overseas Garrisons: The leasehold empire. . - book review

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2001 by Charles B. Neu

Sandars, C. T. America's Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000. 345pp. $65

Christopher Sandars, a career civil servant at the British Ministry of Defence, has written a concise and judicious account, based on published sources, of the unique global security system developed by the United States in the years after World War II. Convinced that this American system was neither a traditional empire nor an attempt to gain worldwide hegemony, he describes it as a "leasehold empire," a novel security system necessitated by America's anticolonial tradition and by the surge of postwar nationalism, in which the United States negotiated a series of base agreements with largely sovereign states. His study traces the development of this system and the enormous variety within it, ranging from colonial relationships with Guam, Hawaii, Panama, and the Philippines to basing rights by virtue of conquest in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea, to the revival of wartime arrangements in Great Britain, and to the acquisition of heavily circumscribed rights in some Middle Eastern nations.

In dealing with these categories, Sandars provides a brief history of America's political relationship with each nation, a detailed account of the bases acquired, a shrewd analysis of the various quarrels that emerged, and a careful description of the changes that occurred over the fifty years covered by this book. With some nations, such as Japan, the security relationship displayed a remarkable continuity, while in others, such as Panama and the Philippines, growing nationalist tensions forced the United States eventually to close its bases. America's relationships with Greece, Spain, and Turkey, new allies in the Mediterranean, were always filled with difficulties, while the United States was never able to obtain access to permanent bases in the Middle East. In this area of the world it had to rely on mobile forces and the prepositioning of military equipment.

By the mid-1980s America's leasehold empire was under serious strain, beset by nationalist pressures and by what some scholars described as imperial overreach. Sandars believes that critics like Paul Kennedy overemphasized the gap between American resources and obligations, and failed to anticipate the end of the Cold War, the revival of the American economy in the 1990s, and the agility with which the United States adjusted to the new international environment and redefined its informal empire. Between 1989 and 1995 the number of U.S. troops permanently based overseas fell over 50 percent, from 510,000 to 238,000.

Sandars speculates that America's leasehold empire will last, on a reduced scale, far into the new century. "After a long period of mismatch," he writes, "the demands of the U.S. global security system and the resources to sustain it are now back in equilibrium." He is convinced that the benefits of this worldwide system of military bases far outweigh the costs, and he praises the accomplishments of American foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century. The United States, he concludes, "has emerged with credit and honor from this unique experiment of policing the world, not by imposing garrisons on occupied territory, but by agreement with her friends and allies."