The US Has a Ramstein Problem
David Swanson / World BEYOND War
Remarks at demonstration near Ramstein Air Base in Germany

(June 28, 2025) — Where I live in the United States, if you watch a sports game on television, the announcers will sometimes thank the U.S. military for watching from 175 countries. But few people watching will stop and ask themselves what in the name of the holy dollar is one military doing in 175 countries. Almost all countries that have militaries have them in 1 country.

In fact the U.S. has, not just a few troops, but over 850 military bases in some 95 countries that are not the United States, and while 17 other countries now have bases outside their borders, all of those combined are a small fraction of the U.S. foreign bases.

And none of them resemble in size and content some of the major U.S. bases, like the one near here — a resort with athletic fields, golf course, shopping mall, and top-of-the-line services like a new hospital paid for in part by Germans who can’t use it, not to mention immunity for petty crimes and major crimes like crashing planes, permanently poisoning groundwater, guiding drone murders, and refueling bombers on their way to bomb various countries.

Then there’s the very largest crime: provoking a world war. U.S. bases stretch in a thick wall from the top of Scandinavia — where dozens of new bases have been created in the past few years — through those nations bordering Russia and Belarus, and all the way to Oman, dotting the Indian Ocean and South-East Asia, and squeezing most tightly of all into Okinawa, the rest of Japan, and South Korea, plus Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland. Why did Russia and China put their countries so close to so many innocent U.S. military bases?

While the most U.S. troops are in South Korea, the most U.S. bases are in Germany, and the biggest concentration of them right around here. Yet they can go unnoticed. They hide behind trees. They blend in with the German military. I saw some soldiers on a train yesterday wearing camouflage. I wonder if they thought I couldn’t see them.

But these bases make Germany a target, one its chosen enemies know the United States would sacrifice sooner than it would the United States itself. They also make Germany’s government a U.S. colony, willing to have its laws and Constitution — and pipelines — destroyed, willing to have nuclear weapons illegally kept in Germany — possibly not at Ramstein anymore, but who knows? Who is even thought of as deserving to know? Russia, the UK, and France are all now proposing to copy the U.S. model of spreading their nukes around. And let’s not forget that something has made the German government willing to take money out of everything good and decent and put it into wars because NATO says so.

If I were a European government, I would have paid Pakistan to nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, just so that someone could look more grotesquely subservient to this fascistic buffoon than does your average European government.

As I travel around Europe to wonderful peace rallies and conferences in The Hague, Brussels, Geneva, and here, I think to myself: here are millions of people, decent people, educated people — educated beyond the capacity of the U.S. school system that European schools will no doubt be copying — and every single one of these beautiful people is represented by a government that bows, scrapes, and does its best to do whatever it thinks the latest incoherent social media posts from the naked emperor might mean. This is not the role for governments, but for court jesters, or — as we call them in Washington — Congress Members.

Let’s face it, our governments are awful. Our people are fantastic. If democracy were a real thing rather than a slogan in a NATO video, money would be moving from weapons to schools, hospitals, trains, green energy, and — as a reverse arms race took hold — to the project of replacing all these military bases with affordable housing, solar energy arrays, and museums to explain to children the ancient rite of militarism.

You’re doing the right thing. You’re protesting. Your educating. You’re agitating. You’re shaking your neighbors a bit and telling them to wake up. I imagine you feel some shame at allowing your government to become a vassal to a convicted felon, former television host, who actually believes that you should stare at the sun and that bombs end wars.

The U.S. public is way behind you. People in the United States are allowing the U.S. military to steal land, establish mini-Aparthied communes, shuffle nuclear weapons around, prop up brutal dictatorships, and wage numerous wars, principally by avoiding knowing that any of this exists — by avoiding knowing and avoiding caring to know.

That’s one reason that the anti-bases movement is strongest when it is global. We should be doing simultaneous actions in Ramstein and Washington. We should be putting up billboards in Washington with messages from the people of Ramstein, if only so that people in Washington learn the word Ramstein and that the U.S. has foreign bases.

Another reason we’re stronger globally is because we can share lessons. How did the Czech Republic keep the bases out? How did Ecuador or the Philippines close bases? How did Colombia or Montenegro prevent a base? Those who are talking to each other know the answers to questions like these.

We’ve been holding global days of coordinated actions. Check out DayToCloseBases.org. We’ve been building up chapters of World BEYOND War, which has activists in 203 countries, so the Pentagon can brag all it likes about 175.

In the U.S. the situation is basically like that in Europe only more so. The liberal position is to support a minimal safety net plus massive unlimited military spending, to oppose war in Gaza, and to support massive war-making in Ukraine, to oppose Trump but not so much the things he does.

Recently there were rallies all over the United States on the day that Trump celebrated militarism with a weapons parade. The protest rallies were everywhere except Washington, so as to avoid appearing to actually oppose a weapons parade.

There’s potential to build a bigger peace movement out of opposition to new wars that Democrats don’t associate with Biden and that Trump promised his supporters he would not wage.

There’s also potential to find stronger activism in opposition to the massive shifting of resources from everything else to war — something being imposed on other NATO members even more harshly than on the United States itself. This is something we can all work on together.

There’s also potential in the growing support for neutrality — something Switzerland will hold a very flawed vote on next year. Recently Spain tried to claim it was an independent country entitled to decide for itself how to spend its money. The way to actually do that involves withdrawal from NATO.

There’s also potential in expanding the opposition to the war on Gaza to include opposition to the entire war industry.

But ultimately, to succeed, we will have to overcome the belief that war can ever be justified, and the fear that particular foreign nations want war because they’re not quite human. You know who else has awful governments and fantastic people? Russia and China. We have to work with those people toward the understanding that the enemy is not each other. The enemy is allowing oneself to be manipulated by fear.

I don’t see any fear here today. No to NATO. Yes to Peace. Stop Ramstein!