How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

(When Kennedy was elected president, J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI’s dossier on Arvad as blackmail to ensure his reappointment as FBI director.)

the guano islands must be actively colonized. And so, playing the part of one of history’s last conquistadors, Gruening set off to plant the flag in the soil and claim the islands in the name of his country. The plan, undertaken in secret starting in 1935, was to visit the Pacific guano islands, raise a flag, install a plaque, and drop off “colonies” of four or more Hawaiians on each.

They could focus instead on small pockets of control. The United States, in other words, did not abandon empire after the Second World War. Rather, it reshuffled its imperial portfolio, divesting itself of large colonies and investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe.

It’s telling that the guano islands were recolonized at the same time as the Philippine commonwealth was being established—i.e., just as the largest colony was put on track for independence. It’s as if the United States, standing before the world map, put down the imperialist’s paint roller and picked up the pointillist’s brush.

The same dynamic prevailed in Japan. The United States occupied the main islands until 1952 but continued to hold strategically useful outer islands for far longer. It kept Iwo Jima until 1968, Okinawa until 1972. Even today, with Okinawa back in Japanese hands, the U.S. military still dominates its landscape. “The military doesn’t have bases on Okinawa,” a naval officer has explained. “The island itself is the base.”

the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated sixty-six more nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and the next-door atoll of Enewetak.

al-Qaeda (“the Base”),

Bombs and planes were, in the end, not enough. More than 2.5 million U.S. service members cycled through Vietnam during the war. But they fared no better than the planes did. In 1973 the last combat troops left. The greatest military power on earth had fought a peasant army and lost.

On the face of it, this seemed an absurdly imbalanced war: an exile living in a cave complex in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, taking on the most powerful military in existence. Yet Bin Laden had absorbed the lessons of the revolution in military affairs. From his mountain base, he could, like some sort of Central Asian Doctor No, order pinpoint strikes without needing an army.

Bin Laden used his phone to coordinate the first attacks that we are certain were his doing: bombings, five minutes apart, of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than two hundred people died, and several thousand were wounded.

The climax came the next year, with what al-Qaeda called its “planes operation.” Nineteen hijackers, fifteen from Saudi Arabia, commandeered four commercial aircraft. One hit the Pentagon (“a military base,” Bin Laden explained). Two more struck the World Trade Center. (“It wasn’t a children’s school!”) The fourth, en route to the U.S. Capitol, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Bin Laden had found a way to make air strikes without an air force.

September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.

The Northern Marianas, in turn, were part of Micronesian islands that the United States seized from Japan after the Second World War.

There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised. As Guamanians and Puerto Ricans have recently seen, this disenfranchisement carries potentially lethal consequences.

But U.S. foreign policy, nearly uniquely, has a territorial component. Britain and France have some thirteen overseas bases between them, Russia has nine, and various other countries have one—in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non-U.S. countries. The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. Dozens of countries host U.S. bases. Those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them. The Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone’s backyard.