The presence of US military bases across the globe is a key component of the expansion and extension of US military power. This has everything to do with the pursuit of resources around the world, which is a very important issue. What often gets missed is that the question of resources is the issue of control, not access. For example, take oil in Iraq: the issue is not that the US is worried that they won't get the oil; oil on the global market can go anywhere. If they want it they will buy it. What they want is control of the oil process: the production, the pricing, and they want to be the guarantors of access to oil for their competitors and their allies: Japan, Germany; Brazil and India increasingly, and other countries.

So control also implies military control, which is why they need bases all around the world. The US now has bases in about 140 countries, some quite small, some huge. This means that the US can operate on a daily basis as a global power controlling resources and controlling access to strategic space around the world. So, for example, to be sure that they're in control of any possibility of a political challenge in the Persian gulf, they have just sent a second carrier group, which acts as a floating base for US fliers. Or for the invasion of Afghanistan, it was not only a question of the attack on that country itself, it also meant building new relations with terribly repressive regimes in all the countries surrounding Afghanistan; new alliances with countries like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kurdistan, on the basis that those countries would allow US military bases to operate in their countries as a starting point for US attacks on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on Somalia. It is for that reason that they want the flexibility to go anywhere and attack anyone at any time.

In essence, this policy has been common to both Democrat and Republican administrations. There are serious differences between the parties, but there are many commonalities as well, and in this question of the international role of the US as a global military power, the differences are not very significant. What is quite different is how they operate militarily. The Bush administration has operated on the basis of a reckless expansionist unchallengeable militarized foreign policy. Democratic administrations have been more cautious, have used international justifications, real or false, but have not deliberately claimed the right to violate international law, for instance, as the Bush administration has.

The Bush policy is actually proving counterproductive in many ways, among other things it creates much more massive opposition. It's like the phenomenon of having John Bolton as the US ambassador with the United Nations. He was a bully, and because he was a bully it was easier for other countries to unite against him and be antagonistic to him. He had a hard time getting people to talk to him. The problem was, he was a very good representative of a bullying foreign policy. So it was very clear that having a smoother, softer diplomatic type would make things much easier.

Domestic repercussions

The strategy of the neoconservatives, particularly, within the Republican Party, - which is a decreasing component but a very powerful wing of the Party -, is very much rooted in the call for militarizing foreign policy as a principle, asserting the legitimacy of militarism above diplomacy, so that their policies call, for example, for privileging the Pentagon above the State Department. Also escalating the budget allocations to military forces and decreasing the budget allocations to support for civil society initiatives, public diplomacy and those sorts of things. So it is a very specific and public view that that's the way to defend American interests and they have used the ideological claims about the so-called war against terrorism, playing on the fear of North Americans as a result of the September 11 attacks, as a basis for this, saying we have been attacked and we must launch a war which we are now going to claim is a self-defense war. That becomes the foreign policy: the global war on terror which is an endless war.

So that is where the militarism comes in, it becomes the shape of everything. In the US, for instance, the military's role domestically is vastly increasing now. There was always a very strict political culture in the US -not just laws- which said that the military plays no political role and no civil role in the US territory. That is no longer the case. There is now cooperation between the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI in terms of intelligence gathering, so it's a very dangerous blurring of lines between the military and the civilians. One of the ironies right now for George Bush is that the military leadership are among his harshest critics, because they recognize that his version of a military war is doomed to failure.

At the legislative level, the Patriot Act is essentially an act to militarize civil society in the US, to strip us of many civil liberties. Very recently the Military Commissions Act -MCA- was passed, which gives the military the right to put on trial so-called "enemy combatants". This Act is essentially a way of putting at risk anyone who is not a US citizen, and is identified as an "enemy combatant", who could be put on trail on terms which deny that person all the guarantees that the US Constitution says everyone on trial in the US deserves. So we are paying in the US a very high price for the so-called war on terror, with the stripping of our own civil liberties.

A return to the Latin American "back-yard" policy?

In the case of Latin America, the rise of a political challenge to the US in that region from progressive governments -with differences among them, certainly, but basically challenging US-led neoliberal policy, challenging US hegemony in the region-, has emerged in the context of the US strategic attention being very being very focused on the Middle East and Central Asia. So it has essentially happened while Washington "wasn't looking"; not completely, of course, but in a certain sense. What we're seeing now is a growing unease in Washington that these processes that are very democratic and rooted in the grass-roots in all these Latin American countries could be very dangerous for the US in the long term because it's a way of mobilizing popular opposition to US control of those governments.

In that context the threat always remains of the US retuning to its gunboat diplomacy in Latin American in particular. The view that Latin America is "our back-yard" is still very prevalent in Washington, as we saw, for example, with the coup in Venezuela, when the US jumped at the opportunity to support this illegal coup. So although the US policy towards Latin America in the recent period has not been primarily a military policy, the danger is very much there that a militarized version of opposition to these progressive governments could become a much more serious threat.

- Phyllis Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. This article was based on an interview with ALAI.