On September 5, 1995, three United States military personnel abducted and raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl on Okinawa, an island in the Pacific that houses roughly 75% of the U.S. military facilities in Japan. After a month and a half of smaller rallies, more than 85,000 demonstrators gathered in late October that year to protest not only the crime itself but also the presence of the U.S. bases on this string of islands that sit a thousand miles south of mainland Japan. Despite the enormous tragedy of this incident, the widespread international attention it received, and the Okinawan governor's refusal afterwards to renew land to the bases, more than 48,000 U.S. military personnel, their dependents, and civilians remain today on the island, which is roughly the size of Los Angeles. Tragedies at other U.S. bases overseas have similarly not altered the bilateral contracts with the host nation. In 1998, for example, a marine airplane accidentally severed a ski-lift cable for a gondola in Cavalese, Italy, killing all 20 passengers aboard, but this incident did not negatively impact the presence of the U.S. military in that nation.

Yet only a few years earlier in 1990, Philippines President Corazon (Cory) Aquino completed negotiations that required all U.S. forces to pull out of that nation within a year (although the actual withdrawal was not completed until November 1992). There had been no well-publicized crimes committed by U.S. personnel, nor were there strong strands of anti-Americanism among nearby residents. Further, the United States had maintained a military presence in the Philippines since soon after World War II. In 2005, American forces were evicted from Uzbekistan despite the absence of any major international incidents. What forced Americans out of Subic Bay and Uzbekistan, but kept them in Okinawa and Italy? This well-written, extensively researched book focuses on the conditions under which host nations contest or honor U.S. military base agreements. Given the current North American military presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the book provides some uncomfortable predictions for planners hoping to both democratize these nations and maintain U.S. military bases in them.

To explain whether bases in foreign nations will be accepted, politicized, contested, or ignored, Alexander Cooley focuses on the role of two domestic political factors: the regime's political dependence on the security contract with the United States and the contractual credibility of the nation's political institutions. Where both factors are high, he predicts that foreign governments will accept U.S. military bases; where they are both low, political elites contest bases. High credibility combined with low dependence results in indifference, while low credibility with high dependence creates politicized base politics. The conditions within a nation can shift over time; in the Philippines, for example, the issue of bases moved from accepted in the 1960s (under U.S. occupation) to politicized in the late 1960s, then to contested in the late 1980s, with acceptance coming after 2000 (p. 90). South Korean base politics evolved through the same pattern between 1946 and 2007 (p. 135), while Japanese politics has stayed mostly within the accepted and depoliticized categories because of the high credibility of its institutions since the occupation that followed World War II.

A core message of this book is that contestation against and evictions of U.S. bases have “little to do with the conduct or policy of the United States” (p. xii); rather, “[i]nternal, not external, political calculations drove the changing politics of the base issue” (p. 256). While calamities such as the rape case in Okinawa and the cable car incident in Italy anger local residents, they have little impact on broader policy in nations where base issues have been depoliticized.

Cooley proposes three hypotheses linking base politics to domestic political institutions and finds strong evidence to support them. First, authoritarian hosts use U.S. military bases to extract private goods from the American government and will support bases in their countries only when they calculate that the gains from doing so offset any costs (p. 23). Francisco Franco, Islam Karimov, Park Chung Hee, Ferdinand Marcos, and Chun Doo Hwan partially populate the long list of autocrats who leveraged rent, legitimacy, and private goods from the presence of U.S. bases in their nations. Along the way, as Cooley points out, the United States government has regularly sacrificed official norms and values—democracy and human rights among others—when maintaining relationships with such dictators in order to keep bases abroad. Second, democratizing regimes demonstrate low contractual credibility because “deals were initially signed with authoritarian rulers and never ratified by democratic institutions” (p. 251), and therefore new decision makers in these regimes regularly contest bilateral contracts. Cases of such base politics include post-Marcos Philippines, Spain, Korea, and Turkey. Finally, consolidated democracies, such as mainland Japan, Italy, and Britain, maintain prevailing bilateral contracts despite incidents that inflame tensions between countries.

Cooley raises four alternative hypotheses to his theory of the interaction between dependency and credibility that often are used to explain “base politics” around the world. Those alternatives include realist theories about external threat levels, the size of the base and the number of troops stationed there, the functions and use of the base, and social characteristics such as anti-Americanism and a political culture. He dismisses these theories as unable to systematically account for patterns of contestation and acceptance abroad (pp. 255–62).

As evidence, Cooley uses case studies of U.S. military bases in the Azores, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Turkey, mainland Japan, Okinawa, Korea, and the Philippines. Some scholars may be surprised that he separates his studies of the island bases on Okinawa and the Azores from the cases involving the mainlands of Japan and Portugal, but his explanation of the qualitatively “different political logics and institutional changes [that] have driven the base issue” in these archipelagos (p. 55) resonates with past research. During his case studies, he also briefly mentions a number of other examples, including Greece, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. He justifies his case selection by arguing that these nations were the recipients of the heaviest deployments, that this cross section controls for regional peculiarities, and that these cases involve variation in both timing and sequence (pp. 50–54). His research is based not only on archival work but also on numerous interviews with relevant parties, including U.S. military bureaucrats, local politicians, journalists, and anti-base activists in the host nations under study.

Cooley rightly envisions U.S. military installations as potential “public bads,” that is, facilities that generate focused externalities on local communities but provide diffuse benefits to the larger population. He points out that, where possible, planners site bases in relatively isolated locations far from densely populated urban areas (p. 111), presumably due to the noise, crime, and pollution that result from the U.S. military presence. Both Spain and Greece, for example, insisted that bases in Torrejón and Hellenikon, respectively, “be closed and remaining U.S. forces be moved to more remote locations” (p. 35). As James Q. Wilson argued in The Politics of Regulation (1980), bases are an example of projects that “confer general (though perhaps small) benefits at a cost to be borne chiefly by a small segment of society,” and in handling the often deep-rooted resistance to them, decision makers moved away from coercive strategies, such as land expropriation and threats, to build more varied toolkits. Cooley illuminates the variety of “soft” policy tools used not only by host nations but also by the U.S. military in attempts at creating compliance in resistant communities. North American planners created myriad tools, including aid guarantees, promises of economic development, jobs and employment, fuel contracts, military hardware, export credits, and debt write-offs. The Japanese government similarly targets compensation and burden payments to Okinawan residents, many of whom are farmers or landowners whose land has been used for the bases (p. 159), in much the same way that it does for hosts of nuclear power plants throughout the nation.

With approximately eight hundred overseas military bases, the United States has been accused of engaging in a quiet new “American Empire” based on these holdings, which regularly involve a waiving of local rules for military personnel accused of crimes and de facto extraterritoriality. But more importantly for students of current American foreign policy, Cooley argues that “[a]fter toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. military may well be ousted by the very democratic institutions and competitive processes that it helped to install” (p. 270). More specifically, because he finds evidence that basing contracts sealed before periods of democratization are precisely the agreements most likely to be contested, the push for democratization may jeopardize the ability of the United States to maintain a troop presence there (p. 248).

This fascinating study raises a number of questions that bear further scrutiny. First, although the author focuses on contestation against the presence of U.S. military bases, is contestation itself an important outcome to be explained by theory, or should our focus instead be on expulsion? Expulsion may serve as a better signal of domestic political conditions, while contestation may arise from unpredictable accidents and crimes and therefore shorter time horizons for involved parties.

Next, despite the subtitle of the book, which indicates a primary focus on U.S. garrisons, Cooley raises the issue of applying his domestic-politics-based theory of base politics to other nations with bases overseas, including Britain, France, and Russia (p. 262). While this comparative application section is quite brief, he seems confident that his findings would apply to the military garrisons of these nations as well. But Kent Calder in Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (2007) finds that the democratization hypothesis—which he subsumes under the “regime shift” hypothesis—does not fully explain the variation in non-U.S. military base cases. A regime shift, according to Calder, results in an 80% chance that foreign forces will withdraw—and he includes populist military coups and decolonization along with democratization in the category of regime shifts. Calder argues that population density (that is, military contact with local civilians), a history of colonization, and alliance politics are also critical factors in predicting base closures. While domestic politics are critical factors in many cases, they may not be necessary and sufficient variables for explaining change in all cases.

Is the “dependence” ascribed by Cooley as one of the two core domestic political variables an economic factor or a political one? On page 20, for example, he references “economically dependent authoritarian regimes,” while on page 268 he refers more typically to the “Iraq state's dependence on the presence of U.S. forces for security.” In other cases, as in his description of Marcos, this relationship seems more focused on legitimacy and international recognition.

Do all of his cases fit well within the categories assigned to them? Okinawa after 1972, for example, does not seem to rest well within the categories of “high dependence on security contract” with “low contractual credibility of political institutions.” In what ways did the island of Okinawa have need for the protection of the United States during this period?

Finally, has Cooley selected a wide enough variety of cases from which he can draw accurate conclusions? For example Morocco, France, Libya, Taiwan, South Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Libya all closed U.S. bases since the end of World War II, while Denmark and Iceland have rejected U.S. bases, and the navy gunnery base on Vieques, Puerto Rico, was shut down due to the pressure of citizens and nongovernmental organizations. Does Cooley's theory of domestic politics successfully predict the outcomes of most of these cases?

Base Politics is necessary reading not only for scholars of international relations and comparative politics but also for decision makers and military planners. It sheds new light on the intersection of regime shift with basing contracts and opens our eyes to the often internally conflicted drives of American foreign policy. On the basis of Cooley's book, the future of newly placed American bases in the Middle East and Eurasia may be a short one indeed.