Part Two

excerpted from the book

Full Spectrum Dominance

Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order

by F. William Engdahl

Third Millennium Press, 2009, paperback

p89
Allen Weinstein, who helped create the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.

p89
A major application of Washington's new human rights offensive against China focused on Myanmar, on Tibet, and on Darfur in oil-rich southern Sudan.

... The tragedy of Myanmar/Burma ... was being used as a human stage prop in a drama that had been scripted in Washington. The spectacle unfolding on CNN had been written and produced by the combined efforts of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros's Open Society Institute, Freedom House, and Gene Sharp's Albert Einstein Institution. These NGOs functioned as US military and intelligence-connected assets. They were used to train cadre in 'non-violent' regime change around the world on behalf of the US strategic agenda. They were the same NGOs and organizations that had been used in the Color Revolutions surrounding Russia - in Georgia, Ukraine, and Serbia.

Burma's 'Saffron Revolution,' like Ukraine's 'Orange Revolution' or Georgia's 'Rose Revolution,' was a well-orchestrated exercise in Washington-run regime change. It replicated the methods and gimmicks of prior Color Revolution.

p90
The NED was a US Government-funded 'private' entity whose activities were designed to support US foreign policy objectives. The idea was to accomplish what the CIA had done during the Cold War, but under the cover of a seemingly innocent NGO.

On October 30, 2003 the State Department issued a formal Press Release stating:

The restoration of democracy in Burma is a priority US policy objective in Southeast Asia. To achieve this objective, the United States has consistently supported democracy activists and their efforts both inside and outside Burma... The United States also supports organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the Open Society Institute and Internews, working inside and outside the region on a broad range of democracy promotion activities.

p91
The US State Department had recruited and trained key opposition leaders from numerous antigovernment organizations in Myanmar... The US regime change operation, its 'Saffron Revolution,' was run - according to the State Department's own admission - primarily out of the US Consulate in nearby Chiang Mai, Thailand.

The State Department and the NED funded key opposition media, including the New Era Journal, Irrawaddy and the Democratic Voice of Burma radio.'

The concert-master - or more correctly perhaps, theoretician - of the non-violent regime change by Saffron-clad monks was Gene Sharp, founder of the deceptively-named Albert Einstein Institution in Cambridge Massachusetts. [Gene] Sharp's Albert Einstein Institution was... funded by an arm of the US Congress' NED; its purpose was to foster US-friendly regime change in key spots around the world.

p94
Once it became clear to China that the US was embarked on a unilateral militarization of Middle East oil fields beginning in 2003, Beijing quite lawfully stepped up its engagement in Myanmar. Chinese energy and military security, not human rights concerns, drove their policy.

Beijing poured billions of dollars of military assistance into Myanmar, including fighter and transport aircraft, tanks and armored personnel carriers, naval vessels and surface-to-air missiles. China built up Myanmar's railroads and roads and won permission to station its troops in Myanmar.

... Myanmar was an integral part of what some in the Pentagon referred to as China's 'string of pearls,' its strategic design of establishing military bases in Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia in order to counter US control over the Strait of Malacca chokepoint. There was also energy on and offshore Myanmar, and lots of it.

p97
Pentagon Office of Net Assessments ... report called "The India-US Military Relationship: Expectations and Perceptions." It was released in October 2003. Approximately forty senior officials and around the same number of serving and retired Indian officials were interviewed for the study. Among the report's observations was that Indian armed forces could be used "for low-end operations in Asia such as peacekeeping operations, search and rescue operations ...." The study concluded:

We want a friend in 2020 that will be capable of assisting the US military to deal with a Chinese threat. We cannot deny that India will create a countervailing force to China.

That October 2002 Pentagon report stated further that the reason for the India-USA defense alliance would be to have a "capable partner who can take on more responsibility for low-end operations" in Asia, i.e. low-end operations directed at China, and to "ultimately provide basing and access for US power projection," also aimed at China. Washington was quietly negotiating a base on Indian territory as part of the new deal, a severe violation of India's traditional non-aligned status.

The Pentagon Report echoed the September 2002 Bush Administration National Security Strategy document declaring that the US would not allow any other country to equal or surpass its military strength. It announced that the US would use its military power to dissuade any potential aspirant. The strategic review pointed to China as the potential power that could threaten US hegemony in the region.

As far as India was concerned, the report stated:

The United States has undertaken a transformation in its bilateral relationship with India based on a conviction that US interests require a strong relationship with India. We are the two largest democracies, committed to political freedom protected by representative governments. India is moving towards greater economic freedom as well.

To sweeten the military ties, the Bush Administration offered India to N end its 30 year nuclear sanctions and to sell advanced US nuclear technology, legitimizing India's open violation of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. This, at the same time Washington accused Iran of violating the same, an exercise in political hypocrisy to say the least.

p99
A curious thing about the human rights campaign against what Secretary of State, Cohn Powell termed 'genocide' in the southern Sudan province of Darfur, near the border with Chad, was its timing. The massive, Hollywood-backed 'human rights' campaign began soon after the Sudanese Government in Khartoum announced it had discovered huge potential new oil reserves in that region. Chinese oil companies had been involved in the discovery.

Prior to that oil discovery, the United States had been arming and training anti-Khartoum rebels in southern Sudan, including the late John Garang, trained at the notorious School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia." It was that region where, in 1999, the Chinese state oil company began building a major pipeline to bring oil to a new harbor at Port Sudan. From Port Sudan it was destined to fuel China's economic growth.

Neither the discovery of huge oil reserves in Darfur nor the fact that Khartoum had granted major exploration rights to China's state oil company were ever mentioned in US Government pronouncements or US mainstream media.

p100
By 2007 China was drawing an estimated 30% of its crude oil imports from Africa.

p100
The Beijing Government began using no-strings-attached dollar credits to gain access to Africa's vast raw material wealth, leaving Washington's typical control game via the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) out in the cold. Who needed the painful medicine of the IMF Len China would give easy terms, and build roads and schools to boot?

... China was very generous in dispensing its aid to some of the poorest debtor states of Africa; it did so via soft loans at no interest, or as outright grants. The loans went into infrastructure, including highways, hospitals, and schools - in stark contrast to the brutal austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank. In 2006 China committed more than $8 billion to Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique. Meanwhile, Ghana was negotiating a $1.2 billion Chinese electrification loan.

By contrast, the World Bank loaned just $2.3 billion to all of sub-Saharan Africa. Unlike the World Bank, a de facto arm of US foreign economic policy, China wisely attached no strings to its loans.

China's oil-related diplomacy in Africa led to the bizarre accusation from Washington that Beijing was trying to "secure oil at the sources," something Washington foreign policy had itself been preoccupied with for at least a century. No source of oil was more the focus of China-US oil conflict than Sudan, home of Darfur's vast reserves.

p101
The [Sudan] oil fields were concentrated in the south, site of a long-simmering civil war - a civil war covertly financed, in part, by the United States to divide the oil-rich south Sudan from the Islamic Khartoum-centered north.

... By 2006, Sudan had become China's fourth largest foreign oil source; by 2007, 8% of China's oil came from southern Sudan. China took 65-80% of Sudan's 500,000 barrels/day production

In 2006 China surpassed Japan as the world's second largest importer of oil after the United States, importing 6.5 million barrels a day of the black gold. With its oil demand growing by an estimated 30% a year, China would clearly pass the US in oil import demand in a few years. That reality was the driving force behind Beijing's foreign policy in Africa, as well as the Pentagon's AFRICOM counter strategy, and the State Department's 'genocide' campaign in Darfur.

p102
Failing in its attempt to pressure Sudan to break its ties with China, Washington turned its human rights and other guns on Khartoum directly. They launched a massive campaign to save Darfur.

p104
The Pentagon had been busy training African military officers in the US, much as it had trained Latin American officers and their death squads for decades. Its International Military Education and - Training program recruited military officers from Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.

... US development aid for all Sub-Saharan Africa, including Chad, had been cut sharply in recent years while its military aid rose. Oil and the scramble for strategic raw materials were clearly the reason. It turned out that the enormous oil reserves of southern Sudan, from the Upper Nile to the Chad border, had been known to American oil executives long before they were known to the Sudanese government.

US oil majors had known about Sudan's vast oil wealth at least since the early 1970s.

... Chevron, had moved to neighboring Chad, across the border from the Darfur region of Sudan. Early in 2007, together with ExxonMobil, Chevron completed a $3.7 billion oil pipeline that would carry 160,000 barrels per day from Doba in central Chad, near Darfur, via Cameroon to Kribi on the Atlantic Ocean. The oil was destined for US refineries.

To accomplish the pipeline, the US oil giants worked with Chad's 'President for life' Idriss Deby, a corrupt despot who had been accused of feeding US-supplied arms to the Darfur rebels. Deby joined Washington's Pan Sahel Initiative run by the Pentagon's US-European Command, to train his troops to fight 'Islamic terrorism.' The Pan Sahel Initiative, a precursor of the AFRICOM command, used US Army Special Forces to train military units from Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad.

Supplied with US military aid, training and weapons, and using his elite Presidential Guards recruited from Darfur, Deby launched the initial assault in 2004 that triggered the major conflict in Darfur. Borders between Chad and Darfur are virtually non-existent. Deby provided the elite troops with all-terrain vehicles, arms and anti-aircraft guns to aid Darfur rebels fighting the Khartoum government in southwestern Sudan. Thus, US military support to Deby had been the trigger for the Darfur bloodbath. Khartoum retaliated, and the ensuing debacle was unleashed with full, tragic force.

Washington and its NGOs then swung into full action, charging Khartoum with genocide, as a pretext for bringing UN/NATO troops into the oil fields of Darfur and southern Sudan. Oil, not human misery, was behind Washington's new interest in Darfur.

The 'Darfur genocide' campaign began, significantly, the same time Chevron's Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline began to flow. The US now had a military base in Chad from which to go after Darfur oil and, potentially, to take over China's new oil sources if NATO 'peacekeeper troops' could be brought in.

US military objectives in Darfur-and the Horn of Africa more widely-were being served by US and NATO backing for African Union (AU) troops in Darfur, the successor organization to the Organization of African Unity that included more than 50 African states as members. NATO provided ground and air support for AU troops who were categorized as 'neutral' and 'peacekeepers.'

By early 2008 Sudan was at war on three fronts-against Uganda, Chad, and Ethiopia. Each had a significant US military presence and ongoing US military programs. The war in Sudan involved both US covert operations and US trained 'rebel' factions coming in from south Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia and Uganda.

p107
The US and World Bank-financed oil pipeline from Chad to the Cameroon coast was one part of a far grander Washington scheme to control the oil riches of Central Africa from Sudan to the Gulf of Guinea. The geological belt was rumored to hold oil reserves on a scale that would rival the oil-rich region of the Persian Gulf.

p108
Chad and Darfur were part of a significant Chinese effort to secure oil at the source, all across Africa. Oil - or, more precisely, control of oil at its sources - was also the prime factor determining US-Africa policy as China's activity expanded.

p108
US actions in Darfur and Chad were extensions of US Iraq policy, but with other means- instead of direct military assault, a callous enflaming of internal violence. But the control of oil - all oil, everywhere - was the goal. China was challenging that control 'everywhere,' especially in Africa. It was an undeclared, but very real, New Cold War-over oil.

p109
By early 2008, the US establishment had determined that it was time for] major escalation of pressure on China, this time unleashing destabilization within Chinese territory, in the Tibet Autonomous Province.

... The Tibet operation clearly got the green light in October 2007, when George Bush agreed to meet the Dalai Lama for the first time publicly in Washington. The President of the United States was well aware of the enormity of such an insult to China, its largest trading partner. Bush then deepened the affront to Beijing, by attending Washington's ceremony awarding the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal.

The decision by Bush, son of a former US Ambassador to Beijing, was deliberate. He would have been well aware that the presence of the President of the United States at an official US Government ceremony honoring the Dalai Lama would be seen as a signal of growing US backing for the Tibetan independence movement.

p110
As the Chinese government itself was quick to point out, the sudden eruption of anti-Chinese violence in Tibet, a new phase in the movement led by the exiled Dalai Lama, was suspiciously timed. It was clearly an attempt to try to put the spotlight on Beijing's human rights record on the eve of the August 2008 Olympics, an event seen in China as a major affirmation of the arrival of a newly prosperous China on the world stage.

The background actors in Tibet's attempted 'Crimson Revolution' confirmed that Washington had been preparing another of its infamous Color Revolutions, this time fanning public protests designed to inflict maximum embarrassment on Beijing.

The actors on the ground in and outside Tibet were the usual agencies involved in US-sponsored regime destabilizations, including the State Department's proxy, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In the case of Tibet, the CIA's Freedom House was also involved. Its chairman, Bette Bao Lord - wife of Winston Lord, former US Ambassador to China and President of the Council on Foreign Relations played a role in the International Committee for Tibet.

p113
It had been revealed in official US Government documents that since 1959, the Dalai Lama had been surrounded and financed, in significant part, by various US and Western intelligence services and their gaggle of NGOs.

p113
author Michael Parenti noted in his study, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth

During the 1950s and 60s, the CIA actively backed the Tibetan cause with arms, military training, money, air support and all sorts of other help.

According to Parenti, the US-based American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA front, publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance by enlisting the Dalai Lama's eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, to play an active role in the group. The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation together with the CIA in 1951. It was later upgraded into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.

p113
Declassified US intelligence documents released in the late 1990s revealed that:

For much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of $186,000 for the Dalai Lama."

p113
In 1959, the CIA helped the Dalai Lama to flee to Dharamsala, India where he has lived ever since. He continued to receive millions of dollars in backing up to 2008, not from the CIA but from the more innocuous-sounding CIA front organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded by the US Congress.

p114
The NED [National Endowment for Democracy] had been founded by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s... The NED was designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step removed from the CIA and Government agencies, so as to be less conspicuous

p114
William Blum

The NED played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's shadowy and illegal ''Project Democracy.' That network privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally illegal activities.

p114
The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organization in the destabilization attempt of 2008 was the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), founded in Washington in 1988. Since at least 1994 the ICT had been receiving funds from the NED [National Endowment for Democracy] .

p114
[A] very active anti-Beijing organization was the US-based Students for a Free Tibet (SFT), founded in 1994 in New York City as a project of the US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed ICT.

... The SFT was among five organizations which on January 4, 2008 proclaimed the start of a 'Tibetan people's uprising' and set up a special temporary office in charge of coordinating and financing the uprising.

... Among related projects,[-the US Government-financed NED also supported the Tibet Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lama's base in exile at Dharamsala, India. The NED also funded the Tibet Multimedia Center for what they described as, "information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in Tibet." They were also based in Dharamsala. NED also financed the Tibetan Center J for Human Rights and Democracy."

p116
Tibet was of strategic import to China not only for its geographical location astride the border with India - Washington's newest anti-China ally in Asia - but also because Tibet was a treasure of minerals and oil. Tibet contained some of the world's largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world's lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000 gold mines. Tibet's forests contained the largest timber reserve at China's disposal. As of 1980, an estimated $54 billion worth of trees had been felled there. Tibet also contained some of the largest oil reserves in the region.

... Most strategically, it was perhaps the world's most valuable water source. Situated as it was on the 'roof of the world,' Tibet was the source of seven of Asia's greatest rivers that provided water for 2 billion people.

... The actions around Tibet were part of a well -orchestrated destabilization effort on the part of Washington. Repeating the same pattern as in earlier US-instigated and manipulated destabilizations, the mainstream media made no mention of the involvement of the ubiquitous NED.

p119
Washington's attempt at destabilizing China by using Tibet was part of a clear pattern. In addition to their efforts at a 'Saffron Revolution' in Myanmar and the attempt to get NATO to seize China's oilfields in Darfur and block China's access to strategically vital oil resources there and elsewhere in Africa, it included attempts to foment problems in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as to disrupt China's vital new energy pipeline to Kazakhstan.

... Geopolitical control of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan would enable the United States to control any potential pipeline routes between China and Central Asia, just as the encirclement of Russia was aimed at controlling pipeline and other ties between Russia and Western Europe.

Moreover, China depended on uninterrupted oil flows from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries. The US militarization of Iraq and threats to attack Iran militarily jeopardized China's access to oil. By late 2007 it was becoming evident that China, along with Russia, loomed high on the list of strategic targets for hostile operations by the US Pentagon, State Department, and Intelligence agencies.

p120
Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 article in Foreign Affairs

Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population; 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.

... A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two \ of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy..."

p121
China long ago had surpassed Japan as the world's largest holder of foreign currency reserves. By July 2008, China's US dollar reserves were estimated to be well over $1.8 trillions, most of it invested US Treasury debt instruments or bonds of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

p121
By the end of 2008 the global superpower, the United States of America, was looking more and more like the British Empire of the late 1930s - a global imperium in terminal decline. The US empire, however, despite spiraling into its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, still seemed determined to impose its will on a world increasingly moving away from such absolutist control.

The world - or at least its major players outside Washington, from Russia to China to Venezuela to Bolivia and beyond - was beginning to think of better alternatives. To the Pentagon, such stirrings made the work of Full Spectrum Dominance more urgent than ever. The declining power of the American Century depended increasingly on direct military control, a control the Pentagon tried to establish through a worldwide network of its military bases.

p127
Private memo from the Council on Foreign Relations to the US State Department, 1941, in CFR War & Peace Studies ~archives.

If war aims are stated which seem to be solely concerned with AngloAmerican imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed. This would have a better propaganda effect.

p127
Russia's Putin, February 2007 in Munich

NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders... (I/we?) think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?'

p128
Russian strategist and military expert, Yevgeny Primakov, former Prime Minister under Yeltsin and a close adviser to Vladimir Putin

NATO today is ... moving outside the European continent and conducting military operations far beyond its bounds.

p129
From the Russian point of view, NATO's eastward expansion since the end of the cold war had been in clear breach of an agreement between former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H.W. Bush, which had opened the way for a peaceful unification of Germany in 1990. NATO's expansion policy was a continuation of a Cold War attempt to surround and isolate Russia.

p130
In June 1999, the expansion of US bases around the world took on a qualitatively new dimension. Following the bombing of Yugoslavia, US forces began construction of Camp Bondsteel, on the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. It was the lynchpin in what was to be a new global network of US bases.

Bondsteel put US air power within easy striking distance of the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian Sea, as well as of Russia. Camp Bondsteel, at the time it was installed, was the largest US military base built since the Vietnam War.

... Camp Bondsteel was but the first in a vast chain of US bases that would be built during the decade. The US military went on to build military bases in Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and Macedonia, in addition to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, then still legally part of Yugoslavia.

p131
On August 16, 2004, President Bush announced what was described as the most comprehensive restructuring of US military forces overseas since the end of the Korean War.

... New bases would be established in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa.

p132
During the Vietnam War the CIA and special units of the US military worked with the Meo tribesmen in Laos to secure control over the heroin routes of South East Asia. The CIA then used the drug revenues, laundered through CIA bank (proprietary front companies like the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, to finance other covert operations and intelligence activities. Strong evidence emerged from Interpol and US surveys and reports that US forces in Afghanistan had more than a passing interest in the explosion of opium cultivation in Afghanistan after 2001. Along with the opium cultivation came an explosion in permanent US military bases as well.

In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The nine were in addition to the three major US military bases already installed in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 20012002, ostensibly to isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin Laden.

p132
Afghanistan had historically been the heartland for the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy then was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening Britain's imperial crown jewel, India.

Afghanistan was similarly regarded by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It was a platform from which US military power could directly threaten Russia and China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little had changed geopolitically over more than a century of wars.

Afghanistan was in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lay along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean.

p134
By 2006 the US had constructed no fewer than 14 permanent bases in Iraq ... making a mockery of Presidential pledges to plan a US troop withdrawal. Fourteen bases built in Iraq by the US after March 2003 suggested that the US 'liberation' of Iraq from Saddam Hussein ... seemed mainly to be freedom for Washington to build its military garrisons along Iraqi oil fields and on the Iraq border with Iran.

p135
[A] major US goal in the Philippines [was] to fully re-establish US military basing rights, which had ended when the Philippine Senate terminated US control of Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base after the Cold War ended, and after a volcanic eruption damaged both bases.

A US return to the Philippines, like Bush's threats against North Korea, was seen by many in the region as an effort to assert even greater US influence in East Asia, just when China was rising as a global power and other Asian economies were recovering from financial crises. A growing US military role throughout Asia could also raise fears in China of a US sphere of influence intruding on its borders. Additionally, the new US air base in the ex-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan was, for China, too close for comfort.

p135
Just as Cold War propaganda had recast leftist rebels in South Vietnam and El Salvador as puppets of North Vietnam or Cuba, US 'War on Terror' propaganda recast Colombian rebels as allies of neighboring oil-rich Venezuela. The Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, was described as 'sympathetic' to Bin Laden and Fidel Castro, and as possibly turning OPEC against the US. Chavez could serve as an ideal new US enemy if Bin Laden were ever eliminated.

p135
By 2007 it was becoming clear for much of the world that Washington was instigating wars or conflicts with nations all across the globe, and not merely to control oil - though strategic control of global oil flows had been at the heart of the American Century since the 1920's. The ultimate aim of the various conflicts and military actions was to control the economies of any and all of potential contenders for rival power, any nation or group of nations that might decide to challenge America's uncontested primary role as master in world affairs.

p137
The 1990s ended with US military intervention in the Balkans and extensive US support for counterinsurgency operations in South America as part of 'Plan Colombia'. Conveniently, Colombia gave US troops a base next door to another potential target: Venezuela.

p138
Through 'Plan Colombia'-aimed principally, or nominally at least, against guerrilla forces in Colombia but also against the Chavez government of Venezuela and the massively popular movement opposing neoliberalism in Ecuador-the United States was also in the process of expanding its base presence in the Latin American and Caribbean region.

Puerto Rico replaced Panama as the hub for the region. Meanwhile the United States had been busy establishing four new military bases in Manta, Ecuador; Aruba; Curaçao; and Comalapa, El Salvador-all characterized as forward operating locations (FOLs). Since September 11, 2001 the United States had set up military bases housing 60,000 troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, along with Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, and Bulgaria. Crucial in the operation was a major US naval base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In some ways the official number of bases abroad was deceptively low. All issues of jurisdiction and authority with respect to bases in host countries were spelled out in what are called Status of Forces Agreements. During the Cold War years those were normally public documents. But now they were often classified as secret-for example, those with Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and in certain respects Saudi Arabia.

According to Pentagon records, the United States by 2007 had formal agreements of that kind with 93 countries."

Full Spectrum Dominance

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