Few in the United States know that the United States possesses some 1,000 military bases and installations outside the fifty states and Washington, DC, on the sovereign land of other nations. Let me repeat that number again because it’s hard to take in: 1,000 bases. On other people’s sovereign territory. 1,000 bases. More than half a century after the end of World War II and the Korean War, the United States retains 287 bases in Germany, 130 in Japan, and 106 in South Korea. There are some 89 in Italy, 57 in the British Isles, 21 in Portugal, and nineteen in Turkey. Other bases are scattered around the globe in places like Aruba and Australia, Djibouti, Egypt, and Israel, Singapore and Thailand, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, Crete, Sicily, and Iceland, Romania and Bulgaria, Honduras, Colombia, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—just to name a few. Some can still be found in Saudi Arabia and others have re- cently returned to the Philippines and Uzbekistan, where locals previously forced the closure of U.S. bases. In total, the U.S. military has troops in some 150 foreign nations. Around the world the Defense Department re- ports having more than 577,519 separate buildings, structures, and utilities at its bases, conservatively valuing its facilities at more than $712 billion.

While occupying the islands, the American soldiers referred to the Filipinas as ‘little brown fucking machines powered by rice.’ A sex industry sprang up to cater the U.S. military men, offering ‘a girl for the price of a burger.’ It was the imperialistic conquest of the islands by the Americans that jump-started the sex entertainment industry in the Philippines. During the Vietnam War, five U.S. military bases stationed in Thailand sheltered 40,000 to 50,000 American GIs at any given time. Between 1966 and 1969, as many as 70,000 U.S. soldiers came to Thailand for ‘Rest and Recreation’ (R&R) and ignited a sex industry. R&R facilities have been, and continue to be, a vital component of the U.S. military policy. With pervasive disrgard for human rights, the military accepts access to indigenous women’s bodies as a ‘necessity’ for American GIs stationed overseas. After the Vietnam War ended, ‘there was a major campaign on tourism’ targeting White men to sustain Thailand’s sex industry. By the early 1990s, several million tourists from Europe and the United States visited Thailand annually, many of them specifically for its sex and entertainment industry. In 1995, for example, a study reported that sixty-five percent of tourists to Thailand 'were reported single men on vacation.’ The White conquest of Asia is 'far from being a thing of the past but is a lived experience of many.’