David Vine > Quotes

“In geopolitical terms,” writes historian Alfred McCoy, the United States “became history’s most powerful empire because it was the first, after a millennium of incessant struggle, to control ‘both ends of Eurasia,’ ” with bases from the British Isles through Southeast Asia to Japan. To guard the empire, the U.S. military had 2.6 million active duty troops; 2,650 ships and 7,195 Navy combat aircraft; 15,000 Air Force fighters, bombers, and transport aircraft; and nuclear weapons ready for launch from the air, the land, and the sea.”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“In Vietnam, after 1954, U.S. funding and U.S. military advisers replaced the French rulers. The U.S. government would soon dominate South Vietnam as a de facto colony, just as France had, but with far more destructive power. In another part of the former French Empire, Lebanon, thousands of U.S. troops invaded in 1958 to support a pro-Western government. U.S. forces saw almost no combat and stayed in and around Beirut for only a matter of months. The invasion, however, marked the first significant U.S. incursion into the Middle East, setting a precedent in the region and globally.”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“In contrast to the expansionist visions of Monroe and Jackson, who preceded and followed him in office, Adams proposed broad improvements to the nation’s infrastructure of roads and canals; investments to support science, invention, and enterprise; and global efforts toward improving humanity. He refused to sign a treaty that would have dispossessed the Muskogee Nation of its lands in Georgia.”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“Today’s collection of U.S. bases abroad has given military and other government leaders the ability to deploy and use military force almost anywhere in the world, whether it be with aerial bombing campaigns, ground troops, drone strikes, or proxy armies guided by special forces operators. This hyperinterventionist vision of deploying U.S. military power to strike in any and every “dark corner” of the world has shaped U.S. foreign policy and further entrenched the United States in a state of permanent, endless war.”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“U.S. leaders would lay claim to the Western Hemisphere. In 1823 President James Monroe claimed exclusive right to colonize and dominate affairs across the Americas, warning European powers from interfering. “The American continents,” the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed, “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The U.S. government would treat any European intervention as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” The Monroe administration was declaring the United States the leading power in the Western Hemisphere and that it was not to be messed with.33”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“Beginning in 1946, the Bikini Atoll and other atolls in the Marshall Islands became U.S. nuclear weapons test sites.”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“While there are now around eight hundred U.S. bases in some eighty-five countries and territories, the Chinese military has one foreign base, in Djibouti.”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“Just as Madison had previously feared, war became, over time, the “true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”6”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“Meanwhile, research has consistently shown that military action is rarely effective in shutting down militant “terrorist” groups; policing, intelligence gathering, and diplomacy tend to be far more effective tactics.80”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“By the end of the Obama presidency, there were nearly three contractors for every soldier.36”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“Today, when many in the United States have decried Russian interference in U.S. elections, few note that between just 1946 and 2000, the CIA intervened in an estimated eighty-one national elections, using cash and media disinformation campaigns, as well as paramilitary action in some cases. In this period the CIA intervened in at least five elections in Japan and eight in Italy, beginning in the latter country’s fateful 1948 election.31”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“How many have died because the U.S. government has not spent even a small portion of this sum to provide universal health care or to improve U.S. public health infrastructure and pandemic preparedness? How many children and adults have gone hungry? How many students suffer every day going to deteriorating, delapitated, unhealthy schools where they get a substandard education? How many college students have taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt because the country lacks free higher education? How many have suffered the pain of unemployment when the country could have put millions more to work in sectors such as education, housing, health care, and infrastructure that produce far more jobs per dollar spent than the military?24 How far could the country have gone to build a green-energy infrastructure to slow global warming and its catastrophic effects?”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“By 1969 U.S. troops in Vietnam would number almost 550,000.66”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: A modern brick school in more than 30 cities. . . . We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.22”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“Total costs for the post–October 7, 2001, wars, including obligated future spending on interest and veterans care, will soon reach $6.4 trillion.24”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“The electoral meddling is a reminder that bases were always an imperial tool used in tandem with other tools, including covert CIA efforts to influence elections and to encourage and support coups in Iran, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic in the 1950s alone. Underlining the paramilitary nature of the CIA and the military base–intelligence nexus, the CIA used a Honduran banana plantation belonging to United Fruit (today Chiquita Brands International) as a military base to help train and finance the rebel army that overthrew the democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954. The Guatemalan government became a U.S. target after President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán dared to threaten the near-monopoly powers of United Fruit in Guatemala.23”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“The idea of preemptive war became a key part of the justification for invading Iraq, which relied on soon-to-be-proven-false allegations that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed chemical, nuclear, or other weapons of mass destruction (there were none).”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)

“With almost no public awareness, the military has been involved in wars and combat since 2001 in Somalia, Libya, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, South Sudan, Tunisia, Uganda, and, across the Red Sea, Yemen. In Africa, war has been the mission.”
― David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 48)