American desire for Pacific power projection comes at cost of imperalized control over Guam – empirics prove

[Van, “Trapped By Empire,” Dissent, February 8th 2023, , Accessed 6/20/23, JCP – PL]

U.S. law designates Guam as “foreign in a domestic sense” and “domestic in a foreign sense.” That is, while Guam is geopolitically important enough to make U.S. influence there worthwhile, U.S. legislators have neither permitted self-governance in the territory nor extended to the Chamorro full democratic enfranchisement as part of the U.S. federal system. In American history, white supremacy has been both an excuse to colonize new lands and a reason not to expand the frontier of American federalism. Guam’s situation is an enduring legacy of that duality. Unlike Hawai’i, with its large U.S. settler colonial population and entrenched U.S. corporate interests, Guam was not granted statehood.

Since the Organic Act of 1950, Guamanians have been granted U.S. citizenship. That enables them to enlist in the U.S. military, which they do at a rate higher than people in almost any other part of the United States, and to move to other parts of the country. But as part of an “unincorporated organized territory” without statehood, they do not have representation in Congress. And Guam has no head of state. Prior to the 1968 Guam Elective Governor Act, Guamanians could not even elect their own governor—an intermediary who oversees not just Guam’s local laws but America’s laws in Guam, and who must issue an annual report to the Secretary of the Interior detailing all of the “transactions of the government of Guam.”

American defense officials are convinced that this mundane administrative colonialism benefits them immensely. Guam is optimally situated as a base for U.S. power projection into East Asia, the conceptual core of U.S. Asia strategy. U.S. policymakers believe that the credibility of their alliance commitments and their ability to maintain primacy depend on America’s readiness to prevail in hypothetical wars—and every conceivable warfighting scenario in East Asia would require the large-scale mobilization of U.S. forces from outside the region through the Pacific. The large basing infrastructure the United States maintains on Guam would facilitate that mobilization.

U.S. control of Guam also makes its forward-basing in East Asia more politically sustainable by easing the burden on sovereign allies. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s “Guam Doctrine,” which sought to downsize America’s East Asian military outposts by retrenching U.S. forces along the Pacific periphery in places that were seen as more controllable and less politically unpredictable.

That strategy continued into the twenty-first century. The George W. Bush White House reached an agreement with the Japanese government to relocate the Okinawa-based III Marine Expeditionary Force to Guam as part of a “United States-Japan Roadmap for Realignment Implementation.” By moving thousands of Marines and their dependents to Guam, that deal was supposed to alleviate some of the sociopolitical burdens that Japan endures as a U.S. ally, such as protests by Okinawa residents who see the U.S. military as an occupying presence and the source of crimes and accidents committed by Marines.

Unlike Australia, Japan, and South Korea, Guam has no Status of Forces Agreement constraining the terms of the U.S. military presence on their territory. Accordingly, there was little recourse for Guamanians to oppose the base-building required to house the influx of troops from Japan.

The move from Okinawa to Guam was delayed partly because Washington and Tokyo haggled over who would pay for which parts of the shift. The Environmental Protection Agency had also judged in 2010 that the project would “significantly exacerbate substandard environmental conditions on Guam.” Nevertheless, construction on a fifty-nine-acre live-fire training range complex is already underway. The expansion of the U.S. military’s footprint promises to destroy hundreds of acres of forests and coral reefs. And because a version of these relocation plans is still scheduled (updated figures project 5,000 Marines and 2,400 dependents arriving around 2024), Guamanians have no political framework to challenge the preferences of the Pentagon. From the U.S. perspective, this is the point.

Washington’s relationship with Guam remains incontrovertibly imperial—an arrangement it exploits to manage the frictions that inevitably arise in America’s security alliances with sovereign nations.