Treading Lightly

Since the end of World War II, the United States has amassed a sizable network of foreign military bases. Over the past twenty years, scholars have devoted an increasing amount of attention to this network and the two-level games that host nations—i.e., countries that have convened a basing agreement with the United States—play to manage their bilateral security relationship. Much of this literature explores well-known host nations in East Asia (e.g., Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines) and Europe (e.g., Germany, Italy, and Spain), but few outside those regions. Gresh's Gulf Security and the U.S. Military offers an exception—perhaps the only work to examine the Gulf host nations of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Oman. Gresh's contribution not only fills an important descriptive gap in the US basing politics literature, but also challenges its conventional wisdom. He takes aim at the “democratization hypothesis” (Calder 2008; Cooley 2008), which argues that basing agreements between the United States and host nations are more volatile and subject to termination during the latter's democratization. This theoretically occurs because leaders of a newly democratized host nation may, in the tide of nationalism that often accompanies democratization, pledge to reduce or oust a foreign military presence in the hopes of winning votes. Gresh, however, finds that democratization is not the only time when US overseas basing agreements are subject to termination; the maintenance of these agreements depends on the balance between external security threats and internal threats to regime survival. Gresh argues that a Gulf host nation is more likely to maintain a US military presence when external security concerns outweigh internal ones, as these host nations lack the capacity to protect themselves from outside attacks. When domestic opposition poses a comparatively greater threat to regime survival than external security concerns, however, a Gulf host nation is more likely to terminate its basing agreement with the United States. This eviction serves as a “pressure valve” for the regime, since opposition groups depict the US military presence as evidence of the regime's weakness and/or subservience to the West (p. 8.). In some cases, when the host nation relies heavily on US economic and military aid, the US military presence may be converted to a “light footprint,” a small and inconspicuous presence. Shifts in US basing agreements in Gulf host nations therefore depend greatly on a host nation's domestic conditions, US aid, and external security threats, something overlooked in the US basing literature

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