Base effect: US power projection and the danger of dispersion
Before the US and Israeli attacks against Iran and Iran’s retaliation, you’d be excused if you didn’t know that the US has a plethora of military bases in the Middle East – that have now been targeted by Tehran – and around the world. As it is highly topical, today we explore the history, rationale…
Before the US and Israeli attacks against Iran and Iran’s retaliation, you’d be excused if you didn’t know that the US has a plethora of military bases in the Middle East – that have now been targeted by Tehran – and around the world. As it is highly topical, today we explore the history, rationale and breadth of the US military presence overseas.
Early history
Before the end of the 19thcentury, the US was largely isolationist and still heeding George Washington’s warning not to become entangled in overseas wars. But, after it fought its own Civil War in the 1860s, finally uniting the country, and wiping out the Native Americans in the West in its quest for Manifest Destiny in the 1870s, the US started to become another expansionist power.
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26thPresident, was one of the central figures in the story. He almost single-handedly started the Spanish-American War (1898) as a mere Assistant Secretary of the Navy, before resigning to become a Lt Col in the “Rough Riders,” a voluntary cavalry unit he founded so he could fight in the war he helped start.
The US quickly defeated the declining Spanish empire and got its first real taste of imperialism, with Spain ceding the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In addition, Cuba, another Spanish territory, was put under US occupation before independence in 1902, with the US holding onto a slice of the island that is its oldest and perhaps most continuous military base, Guantanamo Bay. It also established bases in Guam and the Philippines to protect its newly acquired territory.
Despite entering the imperialist scramble, the US still mostly maintained its isolationist streak until the start of WWII. In 1940, with the British in desperate need of supplies, President Roosevelt (Franklin, not Teddy this time) negotiated the Destroyers-for-Bases agreement. In exchange for some old ships, the US gained 99-year leases of British bases in the Western hemisphere, including Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua and British Guiana (now known as Guyana).
Having a US military presence in the Caribbean ensured the US could protect the Panama Canal (vital to its West coast trade), its Eastern seaboard and the Mississippi River Delta at New Orleans, where vast quantities of goods from the US heartland were shipped abroad via the Gulf of Mexico.
In mid-1941, despite not having entered the war, the US also took over the British occupation of Iceland (with consent from Iceland) to monitor and combat Nazi forces in the North Atlantic.
The Cold War
Following the end of WWII and the onset of the Cold War, the US, as a newly minted superpower, went on a shopping spree searching for overseas bases. It retained existing bases and dramatically expanded its overseas presence, both in NATO countries and with its Japanese and South Korean allies in Asia.
The US’s strategy largely reflected the thinking of the Dutch-American author Nicholas Spykman. He took early 20th-century British thinker Halford Mackinder’s argument of “he who controls the world island controls the world” and updated it to needing to control the Rimland.
Here, the Heartland is essentially the USSR, and Spykman wanted to use US power to box it in on all sides, trapping it as a mere landlocked power with no way to reach the open ocean and the world beyond. To do that, the US needed a large number of forward-deployed military personnel and assets, including overseas bases.
During the Cold War, the US at one point had over 1,000 overseas installations, mostly through mutual defense treaty countries. With a notable exception like Guantanamo, the US has legal permission to have these bases on foreign soil through what are called Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA).
These legal documents state the terms of the US presence, and when they expire, the US does leave – like in Iraq at the end of 2011.
In 1988 and through the mid-2000s, with the Soviet threat waning, the US did a major drawdown of its overseas presence through the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process.
It closed 424 military installations, though not all of these were overseas. This drawdown did not last long. After 9/11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars made the Middle East the newest area where the US needed bases to position equipment and manpower close to the theaters of engagement.
Of course, US engagement in the Middle East long predated the Global War on Terror. With so much of the world’s oil flowing from that region, the US had ongoing strategic interests in uninterrupted oil exports. Some countries already had US bases prior to 9/11, like Turkey (a longtime NATO ally) and Qatar.
In others, such as Saudi Arabia, bases were established or expanded during the First Gulf War (1990-91). Osama bin Laden’s hatred of America was partially based on the U.S. having troops in Saudi Arabia, the home to Islam’s two most holy sites in Mecca and Medina.
Other bases, called FOBs (forward operating bases), mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, were small and only temporary. Some of the key bases in the Middle East include Al Udeid, Qatar, the forward headquarters of US CENTCOM (US Central Command responsible for the area of operation of Egypt to Kazakhstan), Naval Station Bahrain, which hosts the US Navy’s Fifth fleet, and Al Arifjan in Kuwait, hosting the US Army Central.
Israel and US attack Iran
This brings us back to the present and the strikes of the US and Israel against Iran and the subsequent Iranian response. Operating these US bases allows naval ships quick access to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and Air Force planes access to the entire region.
Strikes against Iran would have come from US Navy carriers and destroyers currently stationed in the area. Anti-missile defense batteries are deployed to protect strategic locations and bases, while a multitude of fighters, bombers and reconnaissance planes can operate from the many bases in the region.
Even in this era of high-tech weapons, some with global reach, proximity still matters. Shorter distances mean planes don’t need to refuel, missiles don’t have to travel as far (less time for intercept and less chance of error), and there are more options for weapons systems rather than just long-range missiles.
In response to the US and Israeli attacks that have killed Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, multiple members of his family, other regime leaders, as well an unconfirmed deaths of over one hundred civilians, Iran has attacked Al Udeid (Qatar), Naval Station Bahrain, Al Dhafra Air Base (UAE), Ali Al-Salem Air Base (Kuwait), and Muwaffaq Al-Salti Air Base (Jordan), among others.
The US reported its first casualties in this conflict as three soldiers, with officials speaking on the condition of anonymity stating they were stationed in Kuwait. This, of course, is an inherent danger of these Middle Eastern bases: while they help project power in the region, they are also obvious targets in the event of hostilities due to their proximity to hostile nations.
As military installations, these bases are fair game as targets in war. While no US administration wants US casualties, it is unlikely that small numbers will result in the pullback of forces and closure of bases. These bases are extremely valuable for US power projection in the region, and they are situated in close proximity to other areas of interest in Southern Europe, Africa and South Asia.
Trump’s great gamble
The decision to attack Iran was justified in Washington on the basis that the Islamic Republic has long represented a persistent threat to both Israel and the US.
For decades, Iran has been widely regarded as the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, providing financial, logistical, and military support to groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Assad regime in Syria and various proxy militias in Iraq.
The revolutionary system established by Ayatollah Khomeini was explicitly built around opposition to the US, meaning that successive American presidents would undoubtedly have preferred to neutralize the threat posed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regime’s network of militant partners.
The risk, however, has always been the same: the potentially catastrophic consequences of a protracted conflict with a large, militarily capable state of nearly 90 million people.
Operationally, however, Iran appears to have been at one of its weakest moments since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Over the past year, many of its regional proxy networks have been severely degraded following the escalation triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel — a strategic miscalculation that ultimately brought sustained military pressure onto the broader Iranian network. Domestically, the regime has also faced rising unrest.
Large-scale protests were met with an extremely violent crackdown in January, with reports suggesting thousands of protesters may have been killed as authorities attempted to suppress dissent. The scale of repression itself reflects a regime increasingly reliant on coercion to maintain control.
The military operation began with coordinated strikes against Iran’s remaining air-defense infrastructure, naval assets capable of threatening US carrier groups, and key command nodes. The campaign formed part of the broader US-Israeli offensive launched on 28 February 2026, targeting missile systems, military infrastructure and leadership elements across multiple Iranian cities.
In a dramatic escalation, strikes reportedly killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and numerous senior figures within the regime’s security establishment. For planners in Washington and Tel Aviv, the gathering of senior officials in central Tehran presented an opportunity that was simply too significant to ignore.
Iran’s response has centered on large-scale missile and drone attacks against US, Israeli, and allied targets across the region. Many of these have been intercepted by American and allied air-defense systems, while Iran’s capacity to sustain such barrages appears to be diminishing as stockpiles are depleted and launch infrastructure is destroyed. The conflict has already spread beyond Iran itself, with strikes against US bases and regional infrastructure highlighting the risk of broader escalation.
Reactions have been mixed. Among many Iranian expatriates — and some within Iran itself — there have been expressions of relief or celebration at the death of the Supreme Leader. Others remain deeply wary of what comes next, fearing instability, retaliation, or civil conflict. At the same time, segments of the Shia world have mourned the loss of a figure who, despite his brutality, symbolized resistance to Western influence.
Unlike cases such as Venezuela, however, regime change from the air is far from straightforward. The IRGC is not simply a military organization but an ideological movement built explicitly around regime survival. While the White House may hope that sustained military pressure will trigger mass protests, the fundamental problem remains unchanged: the regime holds the weapons, while the population largely does not.
Ultimately, few outside Iran will mourn the passing of a deeply authoritarian ruler. The real question is what follows. The pressures now bearing down on the Islamic Republic — internal unrest, the loss of key leadership and sustained external military pressure — may prove too great for the system created by the 1979 revolution to withstand.
Yet Iran, once a major center of education, culture and development in the Middle East, faces an extremely narrow path if it is to navigate a transition without descending into further instability.
This article first appeared on thePickle Gazette, a publication from The Geopolitical Pickle, and is republished with kind permission. Read the original here.
