Not a Republic But an Empire

We're not a republic, but an empire:

Just as Hadrian succeeded Trajan, Domitian succeeded Titus, Nero succeeded Claudius, and Caligula succeeded Tiberius, so Kennedy replaced Eisenhower, Nixon replaced Johnson, Reagan replaced Carter, and Obama replaced Bush.

Same empire, different emperor.

The extent of the U.S. global empire is almost incalculable. We know enough, however, about foreign bases, physical assets, military spending, and foreign troop levels to know that we have an empire in everything but the name.

There are, according to the Department of Defense’s "Base Structure Report" for FY 2009, 716 U.S. military bases on foreign soil in thirty-eight countries. Yet, according to the expert on this subject, Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, that number is far too low: "The official figures omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude – e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan." Johnson places the real number of foreign bases closer to 1,000.

This same Base Structure Report states that the DOD’s physical assets consist of "more than 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures and linear structures) located on more than 5,570 sites, on approximately 29 million acres." The 307,295 buildings occupied by the DOD comprise over 2.1 billion square feet. The DOD manages almost 30 million acres of land worldwide.

The latest defense budget (Obama’s first) is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined. The U.S. military is the single-largest consumer of oil in the world, officially using 320,000 barrels of oil a day. The U.S. Navy’s battle fleet is larger than the next 13 foreign navies combined. And thanks to the work of economist Robert Higgs, we know that total spending for all defense-related purposes is actually about a trillion dollars. And then there are the supplemental appropriation bills not in the Pentagon’s budget.

According to the latest DOD quarterly report titled "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country," there are U.S. troops stationed in 148 countries and 11 territories in every corner of the globe. This the greatest number of countries that the United States has ever had troops in. This also means that U.S. troops occupy over 75 percent of the world’s countries.

President Obama has been in office a year now and the United States is "the world’s sole military superpower" with an inventory of weapons measured in the trillions and a defense budget and global empire of troops and bases that are larger than ever. We are engaged, either openly or covertly, in five fronts in the war on terror (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia), plus possible future military action against Iran. Additionally, the president maintains that "the struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan." He also announced plans to increase spending on America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons – despite saying in his State of the Union speech that he seeks "a world without them." Under commander in chief Obama we have also seen a dramatic escalation of Predator drone strikes, increased arrests and secret detentions of suspected terrorists on the slightest suspicion, and the continuation of the presidential license to order, without judicial oversight, the murder of foreigners and American citizens anywhere in the world based on dubious claims that they are a terrorism threat. And now it has come out that the Army Corps of Engineers has spent more than $4.5 billion on construction projects in Afghanistan, most of it building the nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases scattered throughout the country.

Presidential administrations come and go, but the empire remains the same.