By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 21, 2026

Dear European governments, look at the map of U.S. military bases above and tell us again about your self-respect, about how you’re going to fight Trump in Greenland (where he also has a military base), about all the military violence metaphors in your newspapers’ columns about trade policies, but understand that we know about the thing you’ve never mentioned: the empire of bases. You don’t even issue self-respecting threats to evict foreign bases like the president of Honduras has done.

Pieces of your land are not yours. You cannot know what is in them. You cannot ask what flows out of them into your poisoned water and soil. You cannot enforce your laws against the people who emerge from the bases, drunk and disturbed. You can let your people do menial jobs there, as second-class citizens in their own countries, but you cannot decide where new bases are built. You cannot complain about the targets the bases place on you, about the weapons of mass destruction they contain, or about their use in distant acts of evil. You cannot even suggest that the use of U.S. bases in Europe for distant wars is gratuitous, because we all know that you know that it is, that the point of keeping the U.S. military in Europe is not to protect you but to control you.

Dear European governments, I say this as a U.S. resident who has lived in Europe and loves Europe, regarding the topic of democracy, please for godsake shut the hell up. None of you has ever once asked the people of your country or any subregion thereof whether they wanted a military base built  — not in the case of a single one of the bases you see on the map above. The Czech Republic was once compelled to let people vote — as the people of Ecuador just voted — but we know how that tends to go, so you carefully avoid it. You let the U.S. government avoid its own people and the basic rule of law by providing it off-the-books secret sites on which it can do what evil it pleases to whom it pleases. Do you serve the CIA or the people of Europe? You let the U.S. violate the Nonproliferation Treaty by putting nuclear weapons in your countries and justify it through the legalistic legerdemain of suggesting that it is not really your land. It’s Donald Trump’s. You can blame the U.S. public all you want for him — we richly deserve it — but you cannot pretend he acts in our name — nobody believes that.

In February, people across Europe and the world will be participating in Global Days of Action to #CloseBases. But protests of these bases is, as you know, nothing new. I’ve visited Europe and taken part in huge demonstrations against bases in Ireland, Germany, Italy, and England, that are much like those in other parts of Europe. In Ireland there is endless protest of the use of Shannon Airport by the U.S. military, while the government of Ireland is more focused on stripping itself of neutrality and making itself more formally Trump’s servant. Last summer, I joined an annual peace camp outside the nightmare disneyland city that is the Ramstein U.S. base in Germany: a resort with athletic fields, golf course, shopping mall, and top-of-the-line services like a new hospital paid for in part by Germans who can’t use it, not to mention immunity for petty crimes and major crimes like crashing planes, permanently poisoning groundwater, guiding drone murders, and refueling bombers on their way to bomb various countries.

While the most U.S. troops are in South Korea, the most U.S. bases, anywhere in the world outside the United States, are in Germany. The bases try to go unnoticed. They hide behind trees. They blend in with the German military. But these bases make Germany a target, one its chosen enemies know the United States would sacrifice sooner than it would the United States itself. They also make Germany’s government a U.S. colony, willing to have its laws and Constitution — and pipelines — destroyed, willing to have nuclear weapons illegally kept in Germany — possibly not at Ramstein anymore, but who knows? Who is even thought of as deserving to know? You solemn, serious European governments bow and scrape at the whim of a petty sociopathic child and will as long as his toys are stored all over your fields.

In England, the people have held huge protests against bringing U.S. nuclear weapons back into their country, but the British government has sided with its master. In Italy, the people stood strongly and passionately against the base expansion at Vicenza, but the Italian government bowed low and licked the U.S. boot.

Your fantasy of Trump as enemy of NATO loses credibility the minute you imagine NATO as something other than a tool through which you do the bidding of Trump. Your dreams of fighting off the Imperial Idiot in Greenland lose any substance when you make clear your ultimate loyalty to the military industrial complex. You are stripping Europe of all it did right in order to shovel public resources into the war machine. You are aping all the errors of the U.S. government, rather than insisting that the U.S. government learn from your successes. Your pseudo-nationalistic pride in slaving for Lockheed Martin is not the pride your people would ask of you if you ever paid the slightest attention to what they want.

Your own bases are being kicked out of Africa because you’ve treated Africans the way the U.S. Army treats you. You are supposed to be a place of law and enlightenment. Why do you not have a law against foreign military occupations? Why have you not studied the benefits of converting bases to positive pursuits? Why not replace each military base with a field of windmills in the shape of Trump’s face? Then I might believe you really sincerely gave a damn.

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