Stardate 20020928.0108

(On Screen): Having a significant American military presence in your nation is definitely a mixed blessing, and you nearly always find a love-hate relationship with the locals. You're going to get a certain number of crimes committed by American servicemen on leave: bar fights, the odd rape, some traffic accidents, drunken driving, an occasional hit-and-run. Not often, actually, but it will happen. When it does, you can expect that the locals will quite rightly be less than amused.

Over time, there will be an accumulation of people who wish the gringos would leave. But if that ever becomes a real plan, then suddenly a lot of people there will begin to realize just how much they depend on the gringos and how much their lives will degrade without them.

That happened in the Philippines. We used to have a major naval base and a major airbase there, and the government of the Philippines began to do some griping about it. There were speeches by legislators. Some demanded that the government negotiate an end to the lease. But no one really had any serious plan to try to kick us out, nor did we actually have any kind of plan to leave. It took a volcano to do it.

Pinatubo erupted, and covered the airfield with ash, making it useless, and also rather thoroughly lousing up the nearby naval base, and we decided afterwards that we didn't really need either of them and that the expense of repair was too great, so we pulled out.

And I remember seeing someone in the Philippine government whining that it wasn't their fault the volcano blew up, and why were they being punished for it by us? The government was used to getting a huge rent payment every year, and local business also began to suffer, and they were getting nostalgic for the good old days.

I think that overall the anti-American kvetching is usually pretty low level; the usual consensus will be that having an American military base around is a mighty fine thing, especially if you've got hostile neighbors. The Americans may not have promised to defend you, but the neighbors can never be sure and it tends to make them less aggressive.

Certainly there are a lot of countries out there who'd really like to host such facilities; we've even been getting some nations trying to talk us into building such bases in their nations. Last year after the attack, the government of Georgia made a serious attempt to try to get us to put a major airbase in their nation, in part as a deterrent to Russia. And I know that Poland has expressed mucho interest in hosting us. They, too, would like an anti-Russian deterrent and they'd most definitely like our money.

This article is about what's been happening down in Panama in the three years since we pulled our people out of the Canal Zone and turned it over to the Panamanian government. It's complicated but I think it can be most easily summarized this way: there is now a substantial and growing movement down there to beg us to return, and they've actually hired a lobbyist in Washington. Mostly it's that they miss our money, for one thing about an American military base is that it does a lot of business with the locals. A lot of people get jobs on the military base doing low level work like mowing lawns, and a lot of local businesses will sell food and other relatively mundane supplies to the base, and just in general it's worth millions of dollars, and I do mean dollars. It's not just that a base like that spends money; it's spending hard currency. In Panama it was good for $350 million per year, and now it's gone, and they notice it. They want it back.

Which, of course, makes me wonder about Germany. Don't y'all think that Poland deserves our business a lot more than Germany does? They've certainly been a lot more accommodating lately. It seems to me that by far our best way to express our opinion of Schröder is to permanently move a substantial part of our military northeast about 600 kilometers. We can do it; we moved a major airbase out of Saudi Arabia to Qatar this year because the government of Saudi Arabia was beginning to cause us trouble. Though Germany's economy is much larger than that of Panama, and the relative economic effect will be less, it will still be noticed in absolute terms, and I suspect that the next political candidate who thinks that demonizing us is a cheap and riskless way to get votes will think twice when he remembers thousands of German jobs that permanently went bye-bye.

There's no good reason for us to stay where we're not wanted, when so many other nations are so eager to have us as guests. The Germans seem to be taking us for granted. Perhaps it's time to show them the financial price of disrespect.

Pretentiousness can be an extremely expensive self-indulgence.