America’s Empire of Bases Gets More Expensive

America’s Empire of Bases Gets More Expensive

John Glaser

In Foreign Affairs, Alexander Cooley writes about how a less unipolar world is prompting competition for foreign expansion among the great powers, particularly the US, Russia, and China in the Central Asian countries. And it means the American Empire is costing a lot more.

Most dramatically, in 2009, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan, host to the Manas Transit Center, initiated a bidding war between the United States and Russia by threatening to close the base. He extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from both sides, in the form of a Russian assistance package and a renewed lease at a higher rent with the United States. Since 2008, the United States also has paid transit fees, about $500 million annually, to the Uzbek and other Central Asian governments to ship equipment bound for Afghanistan through the Northern Distribution Network.