The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State

by David Vine

2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History

A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life.

The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In  The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Politics, United States, American History, American

461 pages, Hardcover

First published October 13, 2020

About the author

David Vine is Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. David’s newest book, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, will launch in October. The United States of War is the third in a trilogy of books about U.S. wars and struggles to make the United States and the world less violent and more peaceful. The other books in the trilogy are Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia and Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.

David’s other writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Mother Jones, Boston Globe, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. With the Network for Concerned Anthropologists, David has helped write and compile The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society and Militarization: A Reader. David is honored to be a board member of the Costs of War Project, a co-founder of the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition (OBRACC) and the COVID-19 Global Solidarity Coalition, and a contributor to TomDispatch.com and Foreign Policy in Focus. As a believer in the importance of public education systems (apologies to American University), David is proud to have received his PhD and MA degrees from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. There, David developed an approach to a holistic anthropology that combines the best of anthropology, history, political science, economics, sociology, and psychology.

All royalties from David’s books and all speaker honoraria are donated to the exiled Chagossian people and to non-profit organizations serving victims of war. David feels at home in many places but has lived for much of his life in New York City, Oakland, and the Washington, DC area, where he was briefly a dancing waiter.

See davidvine.net and basenation.us for more information.

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since the US illegally invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the US government has sent 2.7 million people to fight in its forever wars. In that time the US has brought war to 22 countries. According to David, the US has been aggressively at war in foreign lands in all but 11 years of its existence. Japan’s crime was not attacking the US but US colonies (Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Alaska). For the bombing of Pearl Harbor to become a day of infamy, Hawaii being only US colony at the time, would have to be conveniently forgotten. US colonialism in the Philippines gets a total free pass, but Japanese colonialism in response to European white colonialism? How dare they! Did you know that the invasion happy US has even invaded Canada eleven times? Or as Canadians call it: eleven miserable failures. Conveniently hidden in the Revolutionary War was the war between colonists and the Iroquois nation for their land. As of 2018, 1.7 million veterans have reported a disability from service. One third of Iraqis have earned a PTSD diagnosis, a lovely parting gift from Our Land of Freedom and Liberty.

Army forts illegally on native land was U.S. foreign policy; those forts were on foreign soil. We all know that Patrick Henry got his panties in a bunch because of British troops on US soil (“Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”), but good luck finding his concern for fellow colonial troops on Native soil. Tons of US places named Fort remind us of centuries of theft by US foreign policy. These forts were built on the land of others to better take their stuff. They were in effect, all foreign bases. In 1850, the US already had 138 forts and posts on other people’s land, so it’s not new having bases and projecting violence outward towards one’s neighbors today. In 1853, an Indian agent referred to the Indian removals and resultant starvation as “the legalized murder of a whole nation”. Tecumseh nailed it when he said, “We gave them forest-clad mountains and valleys full of game. And in return what did they give our warriors and our women? Rum and trinkets and a grave.” One fourth of marchers died on the Navajo Long March of 1864.

The Civil War hid a second war against Native Americans and the Sand Creek Massacre was part of this. For more just on the whole hidden war, I personally recommend, The Three-Cornered War”, by Megan Kate Nelson. Study the mini-colony of the Shanghai International Settlement of 1863 that lasted until WWII. In it, foreign white powers could boldly own a piece of foreign territory in China without consequences. After the Civil War the US went bat shit over bat & bird shit. Guano, harvested from colonized Pacific islands reached $76 per pound. The verbal guano parroted by today’s US politicians however is worth considerably less. The US/Philippine War was fought by US men fresh from the killing fields of the US West, half of the officers had been involved in US Massacres. The U.S. invaded just the country of Panama 24 times between 1856 and 1989. Go ahead, tell me they deserved it. Top Marine Smedley Butler said it best when he said that US foreign policy was organized crime without punishment, because unlike Al Capone, he could operate “on three continents.” Honduras was the original banana republic. President Taft actually said, “The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact, by virtue of our superiority as a race, it is already ours morally.” Superiority as a race? To test Taft’s superiority theory let’s just envision him naked.

Let’s read George Washington’s orders to his Major-General, “Lay waste all settlements around, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed. …You will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.” There’s our #1 hero, GW as a violence inciting settler-colonial slave-holding shill. Charming. Killing natives was part of “a shared American identity” says John Grenier. Who knew the Bible means “invade your neighbors” and blame them for the invasion? Forts only “emboldened” these immigrant thieves. The White House only became painted white in order to cover over the burn marks left by the British. John Quincy Adams warned us about moving the country “from liberty to force” but voices like his were few. What Andrew Jackson did with the natives was nothing less than ethnic cleansing. Few “patriots” know that the “US state department acknowledges that US troops started the (US/Mexican) war that ensued.”

Don’t forget the US invaded Russia too. We occupied Vladivostok from 8/1918 to 4/1920. US citizens are quaintly told to call their colonies “territories” which hides the intent. During WWII, the Philippines suffered more than double the casualties of the US. During WWII, Britain still “ruled more than 350 million people as colonial subjects in India alone.” Picture Greenland. Not much land, right? Doesn’t belong to us, right? Yea, well we have 13 Army and 4 Navy bases there.

David then mentions my grandfather Henry Wallace’s MSG speech after being VP where he said that “The United Nations should have control of the strategically located air bases with which the United States and Britain have circled the globe.” But of course, if you are a bully like Truman, you won’t give your unfair base advantage to a neutral third party that wants EVERYONE to win. Assholes never play well with others. David writes, “As early as 1942, Wallace wrote in his diary that the future of air bases “is one of the most important of all peace problems.” Grandpa wrote to Truman in 1946, “How would it look to us if Russia had 10,000-mile bombers and air bases within a thousand miles and we did not?” He warned an arms race would be more likely to bring war than peace. He warned Truman that “we are trying to build up a preponderance of force to intimidate the rest of mankind.”

I wish there was a book on the US subversion of Italy’s 1948 Election. The CIA, state department and military went to town on Italy to make sure communists and socialists lost which of course only empowered the Italian Right. Did you know the US “military stationed warships off Italy’s coasts to demonstrate its concern about and opposition to a left-wing victory”? Between 1949 and 1952, “The CIA’s budget increased from $4.7 million to $82 million.” A lot of that went to “strengthening the repressive capacity” in undemocratic countries. The Sermon on the Mount is jettisoned for the Sermon on the Rack with the CIA supporting “right wing military juntas in South America”. I have a liberal friend who adores Eisenhower. “President Eisenhower authorized 170 major covert operations in forty-eight nations.” Evidently Nancy Reagan never told Dwight, “Just Say No”. What a moral role model. I think he was just compensating for male pattern baldness. Dwight made US secret intervention “an accepted practice”. The US kept a base in Spain to protect fascist Franco, and because US soldiers liked the weather.

Re: Revolutionary War: “The list of Redcoats’ crimes that locals kept in Boston resemble those of Okinawan activists today.” “By the time of France’s final defeat in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu, the U.S. government was providing 75 percent of the funding for France’s War.” “For two more than two millennia, leaders of empires and other powers saw Malta as the key to controlling the Mediterranean.” Okinawa is actually a colony of the Japanese and one US ambassador to Japan openly called Okinawa “a colony of one million Japanese.”

All 1,000 Chagossians living on Diego Garcia since the American Revolution were removed from their perfect island homeland and left to live a life of squalor elsewhere while the island now serves the ever-thoughtful US military. One US document referred to the Chagossians as to be “swept” and “sanitized”. Those lucky chosen 1,000 Chagossians were herded onto “overcrowded cargo ships”. “As Chagossians awaited their deportation, British agents and U.S. Navy personnel herded the Chagossians’ pet dogs into sealed sheds, gassed them with exhaust from U.S. Navy jeeps, and burned the dog’s carcasses.” What a wonderful recruitment poster for the Navy that would have been. Take a tripoded 4x5 photo from a nice scissor lift of those Jeeps still hooked up to those sheds with Sailors enjoying a smoke in the foreground while the aghast pets owners look on in the background in anguish from the ship’s gangways. I’m thinkin’ Tri-X for an overcast day with the Navy’s “Semper Fortis” [ALWAYS Courageous] in the lower right. An Entertainment Tonight “Where Are They Now Segment” looked in the those lovely Chagossians to see how they were doing later; just kidding, it was actually The Washington Post in 1975 but it found Chagossians in Mauritius living “in abject poverty.” Its editorial page called the Chagossian expulsion an “act of mass kidnapping.” Give me time to wave my US flag made in China and I’ll continue with the paragraph’s punchline: Today when anyone lands at Diego Garcia, they see a sign that actually says, “Welcome to the Footprint of Freedom.” Chagossians living in poverty will also be delighted to know the Navy presently calls Diego Garcia “Fantasy Island”. The hits keep on coming…

“The Contras had no political platform. They were almost exclusively a military force run by the CIA.” Look at this fact, “By 2020 the US military had been bombing Iraq for twenty-nine consecutive years.” NPR said Balad Air base at night looks “resembles Las Vegas”; meanwhile the surrounding countryside averages 10 hours of electricity per day. Oops… On any given day, there are more than 6,000 U.S. troops in Africa “more than anywhere outside the United States” said General Darryl Williams in 2016. Nick Turse found in 2018 that the military had at least thirty-four bases in Africa. Peace is bad for business. When someone said, “What if peace breaks out?” at a major London Arms Conference, US Major Tim Elliot quickly responded, “God forbid.” I feel so relieved that Tim brought his Christian God into promoting vile endless war making. Emperor Constantine would have said, “Good boy!”

How successful is the United States in its comic intentionally impossible War on Terror? Well, Afghanistan had one significant militant group in the country called al-Qaeda in 2001 when Bush/Cheney launched their war. And now billions of dollars later there more than twenty significant militant groups, including the Islamic State. Progress American style. “Some will respond that the system creates jobs. It does. But the U.S. military should not be a jobs program.” That same money put in education creates “120% more jobs”. Among David’s solutions are that the US military should de-privatize all its contracted services. And we should “decolonize the United States” by acknowledging Native American land and treaty rights. Very good book on a critical subject, while I’m waiting for Walter Hixson to finish his killer book on this same subject. Walter will be proving exactly how many years has the U.S. not been at war since its inception. The perfect question few US history teachers strangely neither ask or answer.

[Steve]

Professor Vine does an excellent job documenting the historical threads firmly woven through the fabric of American military bases. He uses bases to describe one foundational pillar for American military behaviors through the centuries. He asserts that American war making and the addiction to foreign bases are inextricably linked, further, that our reliance on bases goes back to the prerevolutionary era, where forts were constructed to manage our continental conquests. America may be unique in this respect. But for Canada, I can’t think of another country that witnessed a similar sea-to-sea expansion, though I imagine several important differences between our respective experiences. Once America completed its westward expansion, achieving its manifest destiny, we carried similar strategies forward into the global expansion of our economic and political interests. It seems our global base network is here to stay because that network is rooted in our essence as a nation, however deleterious the consequences for us and the world.

To be clear, America is not alone with its unpleasant past; doesn’t every country have uncomfortable, repressed memories? And many countries have relied on bases through history. However, in this one respect, the consequence of a long-term reliance on diverse military bases, America appears primus inter pares. I suspect there’s a link between our bases and militarism similar to the self-reinforcing prison system Michel Foucault described in Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison; another system where America regrettably leads the world. This dynamic suggests future American military conflicts are inevitable, the locations, anyone’s guess.

Professor Vine’s effort is important because I feel that for this nation to move beyond its past transgressions, we first must acknowledge the great waste laid, heretofore hidden behind extensive mythologies. The United States of America remains endowed with the resources to create great good within its borders and beyond. I hope I live to see our energies so directed without objection.

[Esteban Vega · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an odious book to read, I even had to make month-long pauses because I couldn't take just how genocidal the United States of America is.

Of course we all know their warring tendencies, and as a Mexican we are taught some in school, but just how far and at what degree they have taken their European killer ways simply goes beyond all humanity and sanity.

A must read to understand the lengths the US will go to maintain its hegemony and unfortunately the book leads us to the almost inevitable conclusion many of us already know: The US will not stop on its own, it can't! It has demonstrated to be utterly unable to be at peace and collaborate with the rest of the world, instead it relies on war and genocide, on lies and hypocrisy and manipulation. So, the US will not stop, but it will be made to stop, thermonuclearly most likely, to the detriment of humanity.

What a hideous country and way of government and foreign policy they have, war IS their policy!

[Chris Tolve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is more of a history of US bases than of foreign conflicts, but it is nevertheless informative. Vine takes an alternative approach to US foreign policy, analyzing not the motivating forces behind military operations but their conditions of possibility, namely the global network of bases, be they main operating bases, forward operating sites or cooperative security locations, that make the maintenance of American empire logistically feasible. His crucial insight is that the basing system is not only the effect of imperial expansion, but its cause as well.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Military leaders famously protest that they love peace, not war. But the evidence suggests otherwise, as David Vine’s explosive book, The United States of War, makes abundantly clear. His book updates and sets in historical context the case laid out nearly twenty years ago in Blowback by former Cold Warrior Chalmers Johnson. That earlier book, and two that followed, popularized the CIA term that highlights the unintended consequences of US military operations abroad. And those consequences have been abundant—not just since World War II, as Johnson argued so persuasively, but since the earliest days of the republic. America’s permanent war, Vine maintains, has profoundly distorted our national priorities and threatens our country’s prospects for the future.

PERMANENT WAR SINCE THE EARLIEST DAYS OF SETTLEMENT IN AMERICA
“Some tend to think that [the recent] period of forever war is exceptional,” Vine writes at the outset. “To the contrary, this state of war is the norm in U.S history. According to the government’s own Congressional Research Service and other sources, the U.S. military has waged war, engaged in combat, or otherwise employed its forces aggressively in foreign lands in all but eleven years of its existence.” Only eleven years at peace out of two hundred forty-seven since the Declaration of Independence. “The total list of U.S. wars and other combat actions extends into the hundreds. A small fraction appears in most U.S. history textbooks.” And Vine, a social anthropologist who teaches at American University in Washington, DC, proves his case with specific, documented examples from our country’s history.

A LONG, SHAMEFUL HISTORY OF PERMANENT WAR
If you’re puzzled by this portrayal of war as a permanent fixture in American history, as I was when I began reading this book, think about the innumerable wars undertaken by the US Army against the Native societies that inhabited the lands we now call home. They were, after all, foreign nations at the time. History textbooks typically gloss over the subject by aggregating them as “American Indian wars” or some similarly dismissive term. To gain a clear picture of just how numerous and long-lasting these conflicts were, I suggest you take a look at the Wikipedia entry that encompasses the years 1609 to 1924. You might also check out the long, long list of US invasions in Latin American and Caribbean countries.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE THAT MAKES THE WARS POSSIBLE
Why? Why does the United States engage so very frequently in armed action against other nations? Vine explains. “This book offers a new way to think about why the U.S. military seems to fight wars without end. The approach I take is simple but somewhat unusual. Rather than looking primarily at the wars themselves, this book looks at the infrastructure that made the wars possible. Rather than being a book about battles, this book uses military bases as windows to understand the patterns of endless U.S. wars.” And the author is on solid ground in doing so.

Unbeknownst to the pubic, the US military currently maintains thousands of military bases around the world. Some 450 to 500 of them are located within the United States, according to the Pentagon and other sources. And the author’s research reveals that the US has about 750 overseas military bases in more than 80 countries. But the Pentagon distinguishes between major “bases” and the several thousand other military facilities and installations that go by other names such as “lily pads.” And Vine convincingly demonstrates with concrete examples how the existence of so many bases has proven to offer the Pentagon an incentive to launch military action around the world.

“Research funded by none other than the U.S. Army indicates that since the 1950s a U.S. military presence abroad is correlated with U.S. forces initiating military conflicts,” Vine reports. “Bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.” Put another way, “Bases abroad became a tempting policy solution to problems that generally had no military solutions.”

THE UNITED STATES HAS BEEN AN EMPIRE SINCE OUR EARLIEST DAYS
Most history textbooks as well as accounts of popular history date the dawn of US imperialism to the Spanish-American War. Vine disagrees. “The 1898 U.S. war with Spain and the seizure of colonies outside the continent was no accident, nor was it the emergence of a new form of U.S. Empire. Rather, the war was the culmination of the first period of U.S. imperialism post independence, which saw the country expand across the continent with the help of U.S. Army forts and near-continuous war.”

In fact, as Daniel Immerwahr reveals in his earlier book, How to Hide an Empire, the United States had long since seized islands in both the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean to secure guano as fertilizer for American farms. As Wikipedia notes in an article about the Guano Islands Act of 1856, “Under the act the US gained control of around 94 islands. By 1903, 66 of these islands were recognized as territories of the US.”

THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF PERMANENT WAR
Why? Why does the United States maintain such a massive military presence around the world? Vine explains. “Bases would help safeguard alliances, profit-making opportunities for U.S. corporations, and access to natural resources, such as the petroleum supplies that were critical to the daily functioning of capitalism and the military itself.” In other words, though the pattern may be different from the colonial system maintained for so long by the British Empire, the United States is nonetheless an imperialist power despite protestations to the contrary. And, like the British, French, and other empires around the world, ours ultimately is grounded in economics.

“Bases have safeguarded U.S. political and economic dominance,” Vine asserts, “supported U.S. corporate interests, opened markets, helped maintain alliances, and kept as many countries as possible within a U.S. sphere of influence.”

Dig a little deeper into US history, and that reality will become inescapably clear. Vine ascribes it to the “Military Industrial Congressional Complex.” The additional word in Eisenhower’s formulation is telling. And it locates the ultimate responsibility for permanent war not on the generals and admirals who carry out orders but on the United States Congress, which so often showers even more money on the Pentagon than it asks for. Which helps make the system it funds self-perpetuating. “The establishment of overseas bases has created entire social worlds with corporations and thousands of people economically, socially, institutionally, and psychologically dependent on the continued operation of those worlds. Bases abroad are a perfect, if horrifying, microcosm of how the Military Industrial Congressional Complex can be like Frankenstein’s monster, taking on a life of its own thanks to the spending it commands.”

THE TRAGIC COST OF PERMANENT WAR
Vine laments the domestic consequences of such a single-minded reliance on US military power. We all should. “While other wealthy industrialized nations created welfare states after World War II with investments in universal health care, education, child care, housing, and other social benefits, U.S. leaders and elites created a warfare state built around the construction and maintenance of military bases, the world’s largest arms industry, a large standing military, and the wars that followed in their wake.” And this overindulgence in the military leaves an enormous amount of room to address the country’s massive domestic challenges.

As Vine notes, “Cutting half of the total $1.25 trillion annual military budget would still leave the United States with the largest military budget in the world—larger than the budgets of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea combined.” And with even less money shifted to meet domestic needs, we could end poverty and homelessness and ensure that every American gains access to free healthcare as a right.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
According to his author website, David Vine is professor of political anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. He is a board member of the Costs of War Project and a co-founder of the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition. The United States of War is the third in a trilogy of books about war and peace. He is also a contributor to TomDispatch.com and Foreign Policy in Focus. David holds PhD and MA degrees from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

[Thomas Ray]

E181 .V65 2020 Historical Society Library

[Mark Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq seemed a fitting time to review this impressive examination of how the U.S. military has impacted the entire world and the prominence of violence at home. 32,000 Americans were injured, and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians died at the cost of $806 billion. To grasp the scope of U.S. wars and other combat actions abroad, one should reference the list provided in the appendix—eight pages long with some 30 battles or actions listed on each page! One of its many maps is filled with symbols of U.S. Wars and other U.S. combat actions from 1776-2020, which didn’t include the conflicts between U.S. forces and Native American peoples due to “space limitations.”

Another graph sums up the scope of death and destruction in recent wars like Afghanistan, 150,000 deaths and 5.7 million displaced people; Syria, 179,000 deaths and 2.1 million displaced people and Yemen, 90,000 deaths and 2.4 million displaced. The author estimates the cost of post-2001 wars at a mind-boggling $6.4 trillion.

David Vine concludes that the United States has been fighting wars constantly since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and has been at war, or invaded other countries, every year since its independence. Instead of focusing on wars and battles, Vine looks at the infrastructure that makes this multiplicity of wars possible. He says that since independence, the U.S. government has built the most extensive collection of military bases occupying foreign lands in world history and goes on to say that the military control around 800 military bases in some eighty-five countries outside the U.S. This infrastructure results in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war - a global matrix, which has made offensive interventionist wars more likely.

Another impressive two-page map includes all the U.S. army forts, which enabled the expansion of the U.S. empire across North America. It depicts all the principal forts and lands controlled by indigenous nations and the peoples at the time of U.S. independence in 1776. Some of these land grabs were extensive, like the treaty Major General Jackson offered the Muskogee representatives in which half their land - twenty-two million acres - was ceded, basically today’s Alabama and Georgia.
The construction of bases outside the U.S. has been linked to promoting economic interests, and entrepreneurs, businesses, and industries have taken advantage of this to access markets, natural resources, land, and investment opportunities.
Another form of military bases included CIA “stations,” which expanded from seven to 42 from 1949-1952. The CIA’s budget increased from $4.7 million to $82 million, and personnel jumped from 302 to over 6,000. The CIA used a Honduran banana plantation belonging to United Fruit (Chiquita Brands) as a military base to help overthrow the democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954.
Vine unpacks the impact of U.S.-based wars in Honduras, which saw a decade of death squads, extrajudicial killings, and torture. The toll of the killings in Nicaragua alone was 50,000, with 75,000 dead in El Salvador and 200,000 in Guatemala. All of which provide insights into some of the underlying causes of violence and poverty in the region today.
The phenomenal growth of this military complex wouldn’t have been possible without getting around the Pentagon’s “base” budgets, made possible by using contractors to do the work and millions in campaign contributions to members of Congress. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, individuals and Political Action Committees (PACS linked to military contractors gave over $30 million in elections in 2018 alone. And in 1993 alone, 45% of three-and four-star Army generals took jobs as consultants or executives, inspiring the author to refer to the “Military Industrial Military Congressional Complex.”
Although former President Eisenhower described war spending as a “theft,” Vine considers the $6.4 trillion spent to fund post-2001 wards a “horror” when one considers how many have died because the U.S. government did not spend even a tiny portion of this sum for universal health care.
He asks how many children and adults have gone hungry and how many millions of preventable deaths could have been avoided worldwide with “comparably small investments to stop epidemics of disease, malnutrition, and gender-based violence.” The author quotes Martin Luther King to summarize this horror, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Vine reflects that little had changed since 1967, when King declared his government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
Here's one of many notable reviews of this book: "Provides a comprehensive history of Washington’s quest for empire. . . . The United States of War is a unique history text. Convincing in its portrayal of U.S. military bases as both the outposts of empire and the remote supplier to the troops whose mission is to maintain and expand that empire, the timeline the author constructs argues the U.S. has always been an imperial nation—and not by some accident or circumstance of history."
― CounterPunch

Product details
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press; First edition (October 13, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0520300874
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0520300873
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #426,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
o #529 in General Anthropology
o #3,076 in American Military History
o #5,145 in Sociology (Books)
• Customer Reviews:
4.7 out of 5 stars 85 ratings

The Author

David Vine is a Professor of political anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. David’s newest book, "The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State," launched with the University of California Press. "The United States of War" is the third in a trilogy of books about U.S. wars and struggles to make the United States and the world less violent and more peaceful. The other books in the trilogy are "Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia" and "Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World."
David is proud to have received his Ph.D. and MA degrees from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. There, David developed an approach to holistic anthropology that combines the best of anthropology, history, political science, economics, sociology, and psychology.

The Reviewer
Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala (1971-1973) and spent over forty years helping disadvantaged people in the developing world. His memoir, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, his first book, was followed by My Saddest Pleasures: 50 Years on the Road.

He’s a contributing writer for The Authors Show, Revue Magazine, Literary Traveler, and the Wanderlust Journal. His “The Million Mile Walker Review: What We’re Reading and Why” is part of the Arizona Authors Association Newsletter. One of his 28 articles was awarded a “Bronze” by the Solas Literary Award for Best Travel Writing. He founded Million Mile Walker LLC in 2016. His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. He can be found at www.MillionMileWalker.com

[Kelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly ambitious and frankly important book to read on US history and it's foreign/military relations. This book demonstrate how passive and direct war-making is core to the US, how racism and the maintenance of white supremacy legitimizes war-making, and how all institutions of power are aligned to maintain it. It centers the historical narratives of groups of people targeted by US war-making throughout history like Indigenous communities and Native nations, Muslims and Arabs, Pacific Islanders, and the many many peoples displaced by the US foreign bases strategy.

The pre-WWII parts of the book were the most eye-opening to me. I didn't consider before how the US expansion into the "American West" is a type of war-making, especially how the US imperial strategy was built off it. This strategy exploded after WWII and set up for the insane driven towards military conflicts we experience today. Viewing US history through this path dependence approach was an illustrative exercise. The books ending is prophetic. At the very least, everyone should read the last chapter and conclusions.

I'm taking a few concepts from this book to apply forward: the Military Industrial Congressional Complex and the welfare vs warfare state (OG Lutz contribution)

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible history book that goes great in tandem with Daniel Immerwahr’s “How to Hide an Empire”, which is cited here a few times while building on the idea of the U.S. acting as a pointillist empire. The U.S. of War dives deeper into the dynamic consequences and nefarious motives behind foreign fort and base development, and the rise of the military-industrial-congressional-complex. The desensitized pessimist in me finds it easy enough to soak up copious amounts of depressing information and case studies explaining why everything is fucked (this stuff is still enlightening and makes you more well-rounded), but I do love a final chapter that provides at least a sliver of hope along with realistic alternatives that are just as well articulated and examined as all the research into the bad stuff. This does both extremely well. An important book with important perspectives that I hope becomes more mainstream.

[雷 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn. What a read. Very well researched, imo necessary read as the US continues to instigate war after war in perpetuity that so few of the US populace even knows about. The author also does a good job of explicitly and repeatedly tying US military aggression to the protection of US corporate/elite interests abroad: that is, access and control of important land, resources, and cheap labor to exploit for profit.

Overall, an eyes wide open, unflinching and honest account of the horrors the US has inflicted across the globe since Europeans first landed on the American continent, and how that foundation of genocide and land seizure/theft has played a fundamental and ongoing role in foreign policy since.

[Andrew Sternisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded to 4. Overall, Vine repeats himself often, but his knowledge of the scholarship on US empire is clear. I didn't learn much from this book, but it is well written and readers less familiar with US empire and war-making history will likely learn a lot that may change their perspective. I enjoyed his final section, as it drove home how wasteful US military spending is and how the fact that US bases abroad are likely making other countries feel insecure rather than more secure, which is even more pertinent at this moment given that NATO and the US pushed Russia and now they put all blame on Russia for pushing back.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

US has waged endless war since 1776. The US has over 800 military bases, globally. Bases make war an easy solution to choose to a range of global perturbations. Industrial-military-congressional complex is basically a malignant virus. Vine gives us much to ponder, and this book could be (should be) convincing to conservatives too. Looking for government waste, corruption, and fraud? It’s right here! (Historiographically creative, but this is not my area so I don’t mind)

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

A telling history of the United States and it’s history of war going back to its founding. For all but 11 years of its existence, the United States has been at war. The military industrial complex is very real and every gun, bomb, vehicle of war bought is THEFT from the people. The military makes everyone less safe and causes immense amounts of harm every day.

Listened to on Hoopla
Read by Laural Merlington

[Kedar · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5+, I read this as a companion to America's War Machine, and the two books together do a decent job of explaining everything wrong with the MICC. However, this book could easily have been a hundred or more pages shorter since the later chapters turn into a rehashing of themes explored earlier. The number of incisive comments as well as revelatory insights slowed down as the book progressed, but that is perhaps apt for the subject matter

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vine performs the Herculean equivalent of cleaning King Augea's stables, wading in the muck, blood, and filth of US's global empire, uncovering the multifarious ways the US maintains an omnipresent surveillance of the world, with the logistical and tactical capabilities to strike anywhere at anytime.

This is an important contribution to the anti-war left.

[Ben Wheeler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this did a good job of overviewing the constant state of war the US has instigated since its creation in a way that many americans are unfamiliar with. Im not sure how convincing I found the central argument but it is at least compelling and coherent

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great perspective on subject which is not discussed much. Based covering the globe is not something the US Gov or military communicates much to citizens whom are funding this.

[Alan Eyre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good argument, tho somewhat emotional at times. Good history of extra-territorial military bases

[Joshua Ehrsam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A detailed and straightforward account of US Imperialism on domestic and foreign soil.

[Nick Harriss · Rating 1 out of 5]

A boring book - I gave up after about half an hour. Appears to be an academic trying to put across a point of view rather than an author writing a book to educate and entertain readers.

[Ryan Mahon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hey folks, did you know humans engage in warfare? A Pollyanna critique of the perpetual, monolithic US military. It has sort of a dystopian scarecrow take on US military forces, which have actually decreased by about 1/3 since 1980. This is the third book of David's on the same topic, and repeats the same few points over and over again for hundreds of pages. The book is littered with maps that violate basic principles of visual presentations of data using maps, as well as principles of map making. But I don't think it matters, it really reads more like a propaganda piece than an argument. This is part of a broader international propaganda project to aid Mauritius in adding about 500,000 square km to their EEZ by 'advocating' on behalf of a indigenous group that left the island fifty years ago, and have been paid compensation. Their PM wants to take the disputed islands legally (as opposed to the use of military force) from the UK so they can get the lease money for the US military installation at Diego Garcia.