On Monday 17 March 2008, Professor Kent Calder (Director, Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at SAIS/Johns Hopkins University) will lead a discussion meeting, based on his latest book Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism from 2-3 pm.
The overseas basing of troops has been a central and controversial pillar of American military strategy since World War II. Are these bases truly essential to protecting the United States at home and securing its interests abroad or do they needlessly provoke anti-Americanism and entangle us in the domestic woes of host countries? Embattled Garrisons takes up this question and examines the strategic, political, and social forces that will determine the future of American overseas basing in key regions around the world.
Kent Calder traces the history of overseas bases from their beginnings in World War II through the Cold War to the present day, comparing the different challenges the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union have confronted. Providing the broad historical and comparative context needed to understand what is at stake in overseas basing, Calder gives detailed case studies of American bases in Japan, Italy, Turkey, the Philippines, Spain, South Korea, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He highlights the vulnerability of American bases to political shifts in their host nations--in emerging democracies especially--but finds that an American presence can generally be tolerated when identified with political liberation rather than imperial succession.
Embattled Garrisons shows how the origins of basing relationships crucially shape long-term prospects for success, and it offers a means to assess America's prospects for a sustained global presence in the future.
Kent Calder currently serves as director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at SAIS/Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. Previously a member of the Princeton University faculty for twenty years (1983-2003), he also served as Special Advisor to the US Ambassador to Japan, Visiting Professor at Seoul National University, Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Lecturer on Government at Harvard University. Calder is the author of numerous books and articles on East Asian as well as global political economy and security-policy formation, including Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton University Press, 2007); Pacific Defense: Arms, Energy, and America's Future in Asia (William Morrow & Co, 1996), Strategic Capitalism, Private Business and Public Purpose in Japanese Industrial Finance (Princeton University Press, 1993), Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan (Princeton University Press, 1991), and The East Asia Edge (Basic Books, 1981).
This meeting will be Chaired by Dana Allin (IISS Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Affairs and Editor, Survival) and will be held on the Fourth Floor at Arundel House, 13-15 Arundel Street, Temple Place, London WC2R 3DX.
If you would like to attend, please RSVP Raffaello Pantucci on pantucci@iiss.org or tel. 020 7395 9128
