Beware Americans bearing gifts
JD Vance says Europe's threat isn't Russia, but the leftist enemy within. On Friday he will force a visit upon Greenland, by going to the US military base there. Are these bases the real enemy within?
In historical memory, the Iron Curtain is often simplified as a divide between two economic systems: Capitalism and Communism. The truth is that this was a military division - the armistice line between the United States and the Soviet Union based on their zones of occupation following World War II. One side came from the East, one side came from the West. They divided Europe between them based on the previous agreements made at the Yalta Conference.
Growing up in the West, we understand the Eastern side of that line as a zone of occupation by the Soviet Union until 1989. But the Western side of that line is never presented in the same way. The Warsaw Pact countries, we’re told (rightly), were puppet states of the Soviet Union. But the Western side, we’re told, were all free countries benefitting from the strength through unity of a NATO alliance of equals. The truth is somewhere in between. It would be perverse to completely equate the situation of the Warsaw Pact countries, which were invaded by the Russians whenever they got out of line, with the situation of the NATO countries. And yet, even if the situations were not the same, these were both zones of occupation - even if one side was more willingly done than the other. That American CIA operations to keep their vassal states in line were more subtle than the Russian tanks doesn’t mean that they didn’t, in the end, achieve the same outcome.
The fact is that Western Europeans partly signed away their sovereignty to hand over territory to American military occupation for building bases, in exchange for the Americans’ military protection. Germany alone has consented to 260 US bases on its territory over the past 80 years, at least 40 of which remain (the ones we know about). Countries do not normally allow other countries to set up military bases inside their territory - there are no European military bases in America. Historically, we know what such arrangements are called: protectorates or vassal states.
For 80 years, most Europeans saw the United States as a benevolent occupier and therefor did not see it as the same situation as in the East. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Russian troops that had been occupying the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet countries for the previous 45 years were kicked out. But NATO countries did not do the same to the occupying American troops, even though there was some discussion about it in Western Europe at the time. The Cold War had ended, and the primary justification for the American military presence - deterring the Soviet threat - seemed to no longer be there. However, while politicians in France questioned the continued presence of US forces in Europe, politicians in the UK and Germany refused to even examine the question. This was mainly because even though the Soviet Union had collapsed, NATO remained in place, and both the Europeans and Americans decided they wanted to maintain and expand the protectorate system in which the US was the guarantor of European security. This feeling was only solidified by the Europeans’ failure to respond to the Balkan conflicts later in the 1990s, when the Americans had to step in and save the day through a NATO mission.
The desire to maintain the American protectorate wasn’t just about security. The presence of US military bases brought economic benefits to the local communities in the regions they were located, and local governments (especially lander in Germany) did not want to see them go. On the national level, the bases reinforced military-industrial ties between the US and European nations. As NATO then expanded to the East and the US base presence became more widespread, it was clear there was no going back. Eastern Europe may have ended their Soviet protectorate system, but they were replacing it with an American one - and Western Europe was doubling down on it. In the ensuing three decades, sporadic protests by European citizens would break out at particularly controversial bases such as Ramstein Air Base in Germany or the Italian bases where US soldiers had a habit of committing crimes against Italians and facing no consequences. But these did not lead to any policy changes.
During the Iraq War, Germany’s refusal to participate seemed laughably hypocritical when they were letting the Americans use their territory as an essential staging ground to launch the war (and as a location for the renditions in which people were tortured during the War on Terror). While France could claim clean hands because it has never tolerated American bases on its territory, Germany’s stance on the Iraq War was entirely hypocritical because they were cooperating not only in hosting the war’s staging but also in the American torture programs of the time. And they weren’t the only ones. A handful of European countries could have their performative rejection of the Iraq War, but the fact remained that as long as they had US bases occupying their territory, they were complicit in what the US did. But as countries under an American protectorate, what choice did they have?
The Cold War may have ended three decades ago, but today the US is still operating bases across Europe. The precise number of bases is a surprisingly hard figure to nail down because they come in so many different sizes. Depending on how you define it, the number can be well over 100. But if we’re just talking about the large bases occupying over 10 acres with a value of at least $10 million, Newsweek puts the number at 66,000 active-duty troops across the US European Command on 38 mega-bases. The largest one is Ramstein in Southern Germany, which at 60,000 personnel and civilians is actually the largest community of Americans outside the United States.
One of those bases is the Thule Air Base in Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark. It is in the far Northeast in the Arctic, the northernmost American military installation in the world. The United States made a territorial claim to this part of Greenland in the early 20th century but abandoned it in 1917 in an agreement in which Denmark had its authority recognised over all of Greenland in exchange for giving what is now called the US Virgin Islands to America. But the US never lost its interest in the area. After occupying Greenland in World War II while the Nazis occupied Denmark, they suggested buying the island from Denmark but were rebuffed. Instead, in 1951 once Denmark had joined NATO, Denmark gave the Americans permission to build a base there - forcibly relocating the Thule area’s inuit inhabitants somewhere else in order to do so. During Trump’s first term it was converted to being a base for the new US Space Force, and was renamed as the Pituffik Space Base.
On Tuesday, US Vice President JD Vance announced he will be visiting this base against the wishes of the Greenland and Danish governments. It’s a major escalation in a conflict which had already started when his wife Usha Vance was planning an uninvited visit. The US government has doubled down on the controversy by having Vance announce he will join his wife. Though Vance and Trump have claimed that the American visitors are being greeted as liberators, Greenland's regional Prime Minister Mute Egede called the visit "foreign interference" and said the Greenlandic regional government has not "sent out any invitations for visits, private or official". Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called it an "unacceptable pressure" campaign being put on Greenland and Denmark, and vowed "to resist".
Vance appears to have partially backed down. Though the original trip was supposed to visit the Greenlandic capital of Nuuk in addition to the US base, they have now scaled back to just visiting the base (perhaps to avoid the awkward sceptical of Greenlanders protesting the visit). Today the luxury cars that had been flown to Nuuk to carry around the vice president and his wife have been flown back to America. Greenland and Denmark’s leaders have both welcomed the change in plans. But the fact remains that Vance can make just as much pressure in a visit to America’s Greenland base as he can in Nuuk. "I think it's very positive that the Americans have cancelled their visit among Greenlandic society - they will only visit their own base, Pituffik, and we have nothing against that," Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told public broadcaster DR on Wednesday. But this highlights the fact that the Danes are near-powerless as to what goes on on this part of their territory. The US vice president can visit this section of Northeast Greenland because the Americans already manage it. And that’s because Denmark gave it to them.
When Denmark welcomed the US military onto their territory, they probably didn’t imagine in their wildest dreams that America could one day become an enemy that would use the base as a tool to forcibly take the entire territory of Greenland from them. The extensive US military footprint in Europe has traditionally been viewed as a pillar of regional stability and a deterrent against potential adversaries. But what if the adversary is the US itself? What if the call is coming from inside the house?
Europe is currently in a major debate about how to develop its own sovereign and self-reliant military defence that is not reliant on the United States. But there is an elephant in the room that no politician on this continent wants to talk about: how can Europe be militarily independent as long as it is still partially occupied by American military bases spread across the continent? As US-Europe relations deteriorate rapidly, the presence of American bases will pose strategic and operational challenges for host nations. As noted by George Monbiot in The Guardian last month, the deep integration of US military systems within European defence frameworks means that any shift in alliances could complicate Europe's ability to act independently.
“So much of our intelligence and military systems are shared or reliant on the US – if it becomes the enemy, it is already inside the gates,” he writes. “Depending on whose definitions you accept, the US has either 11 or 13 military bases and listening stations in the UK…If the US now sides with Russia against the UK and Europe, these could just as well be Russian bases and listening stations.”
Military experts say that the presence of the US military bases alone would not guarantee the success of an American military invasion of the European Union (or an American-assisted Russian invasion). While the bases give the US the capability to project military power rapidly, the logistics of launching an attack against fellow NATO member states from established bases within them would face operational challenges. For starters, as big and widespread as these bases are the troop presence is always (except during certain periods in Germany) smaller than the host nation’s military. If war were to break out with the US, the host nation could in theory quickly overtake and occupy the American bases.
But depending on the country in question, that could still be a difficult and lengthy process that couldn’t be done before the external attack arrives. It could take a very long time to overtake and occupy those bases - eating up resources that would otherwise be spent building rapid defence against an American attack or a Russian attack with American assistance. While the bases themselves might not doom the European resistance to failure, they certainly wouldn’t help. It is a no-brainer that if country A attacks county B, and country A has military bases and personnel already in country B, then it looks like country B made some pretty bad decisions. Just asked the Trojans. How much longer is Europe going to avoid this conversation?