David Vine on Diego Garcia and American Empire

Though Guantánamo Bay is often in the spotlight, David Vine’s Island of Shame chronicles the story of a lesser-known U.S. island military base. Diego Garcia sits in the distant Indian Ocean, and before it was home to a key American base and a top-secret CIA prison, it was home to indigenous people known as Chagossians, who were exiled to make way for the base. Today, the Chagossians still live in poverty, and are appealing to win the right of return and compensation from the European Court of Human Rights. “This is a group of a little more than 5,000 who’ve taken on the two major powers in the world,” Vine said, “and have won some amazing victories although they still have not seen the justice they demand.” Below, Vine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University who plans to donate proceeds from his book to the Chagossians, discusses how American officials claimed Diego Garcia, exactly what kind of empire the U.S. is, and whether it’s time to scale back our military presence abroad.

Q. How did the U.S. get this island, particularly at a time when they were publicly advocating decolonization?
A. At the moment where the U.S. was portraying itself as an anticolonial power, the members of the U.S. Navy and others in the Pentagon developed a plan to identify and acquire small islands to build military bases on, and very quickly Diego Garcia became a prime target for acquisition. The idea from the beginning was that they would find small, strategically located islands that had small populations living on them, and that they would remove the populations one way or another. U.S. military and State Department officials began secret negotiations with the British government in 1960, because Britain controlled Diego Garcia. Over a series of years and ongoing negotiations, U.S. officials convinced the British to give them access to Diego Garcia and to forcibly remove all the Chagossians.

Q. This is very recent history. Why has it been forgotten? Are there other instances of displacing populations for bases?
A. Sadly the Chagossians aren’t alone. The U.S. military has a long history of forcibly displacing people to build military bases, especially outside the U.S. I’ve been able to document at least 16 cases in addition to Diego Garcia where this has taken place just in the last century. And of course this follows the 19th century in which the U.S., with the help of the military, expropriated the land of and displaced Native American peoples across the North American continent.
But there are other examples in the 20th century – ones like the Bikini Atoll, where we conducted nuclear testing, Vieques, an island that is part of Puerto Rico, which many know about, and others that are less well known, including displacement that took place on Okinawa, where thousands of Okinawans were displaced to of all places Bolivia, an ocean away. Some others include Thule, Greenland. But Diego Garcia is basically the most recent, though in South Korea there have been some recent displacements going on that South Korea has carried out on our behalf.

Q. Is the U.S. an empire? Can you characterize the ways in which it is and isn’t?
A. The U.S. is widely considered now to be an empire. The U.S. is an empire and has been an empire since its independence, expanding across North America and conquering lands and people there. In the 20th century it has become something of a different kind of empire. My research about Diego Garcia led me to take a look at all the military bases that the U.S. has outside its own territory, which I and others agree now number around 1,000 bases. This has pointed me and others to see the ways in which the U.S. has become an empire that depends very importantly on military bases, rather than on colonies like the 19th century and early 20th century European empires. The military bases have become a major way that the U.S. exerts its power and control in the world, and maintains its dominance over other nations in ways that intersect with or work in tandem with forms of economic and political power.

David VineQ. How does the rest of the world react to our bases? Do they notice?
A. Many people notice and are quite angry about bases on their territory. Most recently, the base in Kyrgyzstan was told that it would have to leave. But there [have been movements around the world and] there are movements around the world against foreign military bases of all kinds, against whatever nation has them. It just so happens that the U.S. possesses 95% of the world’s foreign military bases.
Another prominent example is the base in Manta, Ecuador, where the relatively new president, Rafael Correa, upon entering office, told the U.S. that Ecuador would not renew the lease on the base. That base will now be closing at the end of this year. He famously said that he would renew the base on one condition – that the U.S. allow Ecuador to build a base in Miami…. He of course understood it to be sarcastic. It’s so jarring to U.S. ears because we can’t conceive of having a foreign base on our territory – an Ecuadorian base or Chinese base or Russian base or Mexican base.
But people around the world are living with U.S. bases next to their homes and communities every day, and in many cases, unfortunately, have been suffering all sorts of damaging effects from the bases – health damage, environmental damage,  increased crime, displacement, of course, and, in too many cases, U.S. service personnel murdering or raping local people living next to bases, which has often generated the most opposition.

Q. We have 1,000 military bases, as you’ve written, and even hawkish types have suggested cutting back. What’s the feeling in Washington right now – will they be cut back? What would it take to get consensus around that issue?
A. I think encouragingly there is renewed interest in examining the overseas basing structure at a moment where the country is in the middle of an economic crisis. We are looking for ways to save money. People are beginning to recognize that this network of 1,000 military bases outside the 50 states and D.C. is way too expensive. It’s been estimated that it costs us taxpayers about $100 billion a year to maintain all these bases. Even, as you said, “hawkish types” like [former Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld are saying we don’t need all these bases – it’s a good sign that we should reexamine why we have them all and begin closing them in ways that will ultimately make us more secure, not less secure, both in the money we’ll save and in creating different kinds of relationships with other nations and people around the world, focused less on military force and more on diplomacy and economic and cultural forms of interaction.

Q. How do you answer those who say we need those bases for security, especially Diego Garcia as it relates to the war on terror?
A. During the Cold War [Diego Garcia] was part of a strategy to deploy U.S. forces as “far forward” as possible, to encircle the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent China with U.S. military force through as many military bases as possible, essentially, as well as air and naval forces. That was primarily the justification at the time. But I think it’s important to point out that with Diego Garcia – one of the stories or lessons that emerges is that the military in particular and other parts of the government are very good at creating and proliferating justifications for any project they seek to pursue. In about a five-year period there were five different justifications that the Pentagon offered for why the U.S. needed a base on Diego Garcia. Part of the reason that the bases have stayed around so long is not because of any national security justification, but because once a base comes into existence, it’s very hard to close it down. The military has a principle that the more bases the better. You can’t have too many, just in case you lose one or another. And now, I don’t think anyone is even forced to offer a justification or rationale for all the bases. They’re just there and have been largely since the Cold War, mostly unchanged.
But when pressed to, people will say that these bases are critical to ensuring global or regional peace and security. But it’s very much unclear that that is at all the case. It often appears that our bases help increase global and regional militarization, forcing other nations to build up their militaries in response to our presence. And for the most part, again Diego Garcia is a good example, our bases have allowed us to get into dangerous and deadly wars more than anything else. Diego Garcia has enabled three major wars – both Gulf wars, and the invasion and war in Afghanistan – more than ensuring any peace and security.

Q. What is humanpolitik? Is it a switch in emphasis to the cultural and diplomatic interaction that you mentioned?
A. In many ways, yes. It’s also an attempt to plot a different kind of foreign policy that gets away from realist and realpolitik foreign policy that allegedly works to promote U.S. “national interest,” but that so often becomes just a cover for promoting the interests of economic elites and bureaucratic elites within the Pentagon and State Department. So humanpolitik is an approach to foreign policy that puts human interests and human security above all else, that constantly asks, What are the effects on human beings of this foreign policy?… [Humanpolitik] makes human lives the first priority. And indeed that would then mean focusing on diplomacy, economic, social, political forms of engagement, and dramatically reigning in the power and scope of our military force, which is so out of proportion with our need to defend the nation…. Our military budget is about equal to the military budgets of every other nation in the world combined.

Q. President Barack Obama has signed an executive order closing secret prisons. Do you know the status of the Diego Garcia facility, and is this a good sign?
A. It’s a very good sign. For years the Bush administration denied that Diego Garcia was being used to hold suspected terrorists. But last year, they finally were forced to admit that it has been used to hold detainees. There’s been a growing body of evidence that shows that Diego Garcia has been a secret CIA black site. But the Obama administration’s announcement is very encouraging news…. The only caveat that I would add is that the Obama administration should open up these black sites to international investigators so that the world can know for sure that places like Diego Garcia aren’t being used to hold people secretly. They haven’t yet agreed to that.

*Photo courtesy David Vine.


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