This was a headline in the New York Times on Tuesday: “With Threats to Greenland, Trump Sets America on the Road to Conquest: After a century of defending other countries against foreign aggression, the United States is now positioned as an imperial power trying to seize another nation’s land.” Here is a sentence from the article that followed: “Never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other countries’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will.”

Setting aside Alaska and Hawaii where, respectively, the people were never asked, and the people had been violently taken over years earlier against the will of most of them, it’s true that straightforward conquest went out of fashion around the time of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which became law 98 years ago. But to state so simply the popular wisdom that the United States has supposedly not seized any land in 100 years, one has to pretend that military bases do not exist. Here’s a small sampling of the problems with believing that lie:

During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye. Portions and the entirety of numerous islands were not given freely:

Image from this map of U.S. bases.

On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and — in 2003 — to stop bombing the island. On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s.

Beginning during World War II but continuing right through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia — where land and money were promised but not delivered.

In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland — GREENLAND!– giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, rounding people up and forcing them onto boats while killing their dogs in a gas chamber and seizing possession of their entire homeland for the use of the U.S. military.

The South Korean government, which evicted people for U.S. base expansion on the mainland in 2006, has, at the behest of the U.S. Navy, in recent years been devastating a village, its coast, and 130 acres of farmland on Jeju Island in order to provide the United States with another massive military base.

So, it is true that between 125 and 75 years ago the U.S. government transitioned from traditional conquest to coups, threats, sanctions, blockades, election-rigging, and the imposition of military bases. But those bases required, and still require, land — often land stolen from the least powerful and most easily forgotten.

The people from whom the land was taken for the current U.S. base in Greenland, and other bases in Greenland that were used for years, are erased so thoroughly that the New York Times can report on a threat to take over Greenland as the first threat to steal land in a century.

The sad truth is that the U.S. government has not spent the past century refraining from stealing any land. Nor has it devoted itself entirely to “defending other countries against foreign aggression.” The United States is holding onto various pieces of Iraq for military bases that it created during one of the twenty-first century’s most famous wars of aggression, that of the United States against Iraq. We call that war over. Yet the bases remain — not secret, but not integrated into our knowledge of how the world works.

Since World War II, during a supposed golden age of peace, the United States military has killed or helped kill some 20 million people, overthrown at least 36 governments, interfered in at least 86 foreign elections, attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, and dropped bombs on people in over 30 countries. The United States is responsible for the deaths of 5 million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and over 1 million just since 2003 in Iraq.

Since 2001, the United States has been systematically destroying a region of the globe, bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, not to mention the Philippines. The United States has “special forces” operating in two-thirds of the world’s countries and non-special forces in three-quarters of them.

Just in the past year, Trump has threatened or attacked: Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and China. Depicted the war in Ukraine as defensive requires pretending that the U.S. government hasn’t prevented ending it. Depicting the Gulf War as defensive required lies about babies in incubators. Depicting the later wars on Afghanistan and Iraq required a catalogue of infamous lies. Depicting the current war on Venezuela as defensive requires depicting fictional drug dealing and/or immigration by people with the wrong skin tone as a military attack.

This behavior is made possible by an empire of nearly 900 U.S. military bases outside the United States. The U.S. government calls attacks on its bases and troops agression, no matter what those bases and troops were doing. Thus all of its wars are pseudo-defensive. Trying to make Greenland a formal part of the United States is an interesting twist, but cannot be best understood while avoiding the reality that leads people in dozens of other countries to call themselves “the fifty-first state.”

Nor can we solve problems we bury. That’s why some of us are organizing for February 21-23, 2026, Global Days of Action to #CloseBases. See https://daytoclosebases.org

Original at World Beyond War:  https://worldbeyondwar.org/military-bases-prove-new-york-times-to-be-lyi...