America Still Has Hundreds of Military Bases Worldwide. Have They Made Us Any Safer?
In the
Persian Gulf alone, the US has major bases in every country save Iran. There is an increasingly important, increasingly large base in
Djibouti, just miles across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula. There are bases in Pakistan on one end of the region and in the Balkans on the other, as well as on the strategically located Indian Ocean islands of Diego Garcia and the Seychelles. In Afghanistan and Iraq, there were once as many as
800 and
505 bases, respectively. Recently, the Obama administration
inked an agreement with new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to maintain around 10,000 troops and at least nine major bases in his country beyond the official end of combat operations later this year. US forces, which never fully departed Iraq after 2011, are now returning to a
growing number of bases there in
ever larger numbers.
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America still has hundreds of military bases worldwide. Have they made us any safer?