Great Power Competition for Overseas Bases. The Geopolitics of Access Diplomacy

369 Pages·1982·4.712 MB·English

by  Robert E. Harkavy (Auth.)

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Pergamon Titles of Related Interest
Douglass SOVIET MILITARY STRATEGY IN EUROPE
Keliher THE NEGOTIATIONS ON MUTUAL AND BALANCED
FORCE REDUCTIONS
Mroz INFLUENCE IN CONFLICT
Yost NATO'S STRATEGIC OPTIONS
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BRITISH DEFENCE DIRECTORY
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PERGAMON
POLICY ON SECURITY AFFAIRS
STUDIES
Great Power
Competition for
Overseas Bases
The Geopolitics of
Access Diplomacy
Robert E. Harkavy
PDearrgnarimmonnn PDrrenscsc
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Copyright © 1982 Pergamon Press Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Harkavy, Robert E.
Great power competition for overseas bases.
(Pergamon policy studies on security affairs)
Includes index.
1. Military bases, American. 2. Military bases,
Russian. I. Title. II. Series.
UA26.A354 1982 355.7 82-5374
ISBN 0-08-025089-0 AACR2
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means:
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recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Printed in the United States of America
To Jane and Mike
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to a number of persons and institutions whose contribu-
tions to this book were invaluable and who are, of course, excused from
its evident shortcomings.
First, I wish to thank the entire staff and collegial ensemble of the
Peace Studies Program (PSP), Center for International Studies, Cornell
University, where I spent an enjoyable and productive year in
1977/1978, on leave from the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, doing research for this work. Particular gratitude is expressed
to Franklin Long, then director (who was one of my undergraduate
teachers years ago), George Quester, Sean Killeen, Milton Leitenberg,
Nicole Ball, Milton Esman, Judith Reppy, David Mozingo, and Colonel
Sam Hall, all of whom were unfailingly helpful and encouraging in
numerous ways, including their wry tolerance of my peculiar nocturnal
working habits. Deborah Ostrander of the PSP was of great assistance
with typing and other administrative chores, and Deborah Van Galder
did an excellent job typing a first draft manuscript.
Bing West and Hugh Nott of the U.S. Naval War College were
helpful in critiquing the first draft of the manuscript, gently persuading
me that it needed wholesale revisions. Their reactions initially caused
me some anguish, but ultimately served, I hope, to produce an improved
version.
Richard Remnek, Robert Weinland, and others at the Center for
Naval Analyses were generous with their time in discussing some
aspects of my work; likewise, Marguerite King of the State Depart-
ment's Politico-Military Affairs Bureau, Cmdr. Thomas Mosher of the
Defense Department, and Richard Grimmett of the Congressional
Research Service. The staff of the Navy and Old Army Branch, National
Archives, was very helpful in assisting me to locate materials on basing
access in the interwar era in the military intelligence records for that
period.
In addition to the Cornell PSP, research and maintenance funds for
this project were also provided by the Institute for the Study of World
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Politics, and the Advanced Research Council of the U.S. Naval War
College (Contract No. N00140-77-M-7075). Typing and reproduction
money was provided by the Pennsylvania State University's Political
Science Department, headed by John Martz; and by its Liberal Arts
Research Office, under Dean Thomas Magner.
A number of my students at Penn State - Chandra Elgin, Randy
Dunn, Cathy Gees-Larue, John Messner, Randall Sones, and Alison Doon
- assisted me in gathering information and in constructing the tables
and bibliography. Donna Harpster did an excellent job of typing the
final draft manuscript; Barbara Hendershot and Sue Eberly gave added
help. No doubt, others deserve to be mentioned, and they are also
thanked, as I here beg forgiveness for the omissions.
During the course of my writing this book, I was also involved in
coediting other and related volumes on national security problems with
Edward Kolodziej and Stephanie Neuman. Both became close friends in
the process and each was of great encouragement and inspiration in
many ways felt but not easily measured or expressed.
Finally, love and gratitude are expressed to my wife Jane and son
Michael, who are no doubt relieved that this work is finally done, for
good or worse. The book is dedicated to them.
1
Introduction
Until very recently, surprisingly scant attention had been paid by
international relations scholars either to the policy implications of the
major powers' access to overseas facilities or to their theoretical
importance for description and analysis of the changing international
system itself. This gap has been most pronounced with respect to
comprehensive, global analysis and to long-range historical perspective.
Indeed, the subject of bases had long been treated as one of the more
mundane areas of diplomacy and strategy, visible mostly to readers of
dry congressional testimony concerning the minutiae of security agree-
ments, of occasional articles detailing the "legal" aspects of status of
forces arrangements with hosts, and of periodic reports of drunken
brawls between U.S. servicemen and their hosts' youth.
In recent years, however, there appears to have been a sudden,
surprising increase in attention to the geostrategic aspects of basing-
access problems. These have been spotlighted by some crucial recent
events. Bases, staging points, and overflight corridors have entered the
news in the contexts of the role of the Azores Islands in the U.S. arms
resupply of Israel in 1973; Soviet utilization of lengthy staging networks
for supplying arms to Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Vietnam; the
U.S.-Turkey imbroglio over bases amidst the Cyprus crisis; Arab at-
tempts to nudge the West out of bases in the Azores, Malta, Bahrain,
and Oman; Soviet access problems in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and
Ethiopia; and Israel's use of Kenyan facilities on the way home from
Entebbe. In a still broader sense, military access problems have
become prominent in a bewildering number of national security and
arms-control contexts: arms transfers, nuclear nonproliferation, Indian
Ocean demilitarization, SALT verification, raw materials access; and
interventions, "surrogate wars," and rescue missions in the Third World.
Basing diplomacy had indeed become an important component of
"linkage politics," crucially related to numerous other important global
regimes and networks of transactions^ 1)
1
2 GREAT POWER COMPETITION FOR OVERSEAS BASES
One recent illustration was provided by the circumstances sur-
rounding the loss to the United States of its long-held intelligence
facilities in Iran, deemed crucial for verification of SALT II through the
telemetry monitoring of Soviet strategic missile tests. Supporters of
the treaty asserted that the Iranian ground facilities could be replaced
by U-2 aircraft, flown from a British-controlled base in Cyprus, and
rotated over Turkish airspace to provide continuous coverage. There
was some irony here, in that the use of Turkish ground facilities earlier
used for similar purposes (and many others) had previously been
interrupted by the impasse in U.S.-Turkey relations over Cyprus, which
then caused the United States to rely on Iranian bases as a backup. The
Turkish government was later to claim that it would only allow the
United States its U-2 verification flights if Soviet permission for them
was granted, demonstrating among other things the long-term
1
divergence of American and Turkish security orientations and the
Soviets success in moving Turkey somewhat toward neutralization.
Meanwhile, Norwegian bases were also apparently considered as partial
replacements for those in Iran; those reportedly also offered by the
People's Republic of China (PRC) were first said not seriously con-
sidered, but by 1981, that had changed. American intelligence bases
earlier lost in Pakistan, which might have served some of the same
purposes, were no longer available - casualties of U.S.-Pakistan strains
over the long festering India-Pakistan conflict. Hence, the SALT
verification basing issue can be seen to have been enmeshed in a wide
swathe of contemporary alignment politics, involving U.S. relations
with Turkey and Greece, India and Pakistan, the PRC and Norway, as
well as Iran.
The 1973 Middle Eastern war demonstrated the importance of basing
diplomacy in some similar but also different ways, here primarily
involving lengthy air staging routes and aircraft overflight rights.
Soviet supply of arms to Arab clients was eased by the use of staging
facilities in Yugoslavia, and of air spaces over Turkey and Yugoslavia.
The United States, meanwhile, was denied access to facilities and
airspace all over Western Europe on behalf of its arms resupply to
Israel, but was able to make crucial use of Portuguese airfields in the
Azores Islands. Afterward, in the wake of the Portuguese revolution,
the Arabs were to attempt to push the United States out of the Azores
with threats and offers of cash, while the United States responded with
increased military and economic aid, as well as with a new effort to
upgrade the ranges and refueling capabilities of its military aircraft so
as to circumvent the restrictions on access imposed during crises, even
by formal allies. (For the United States, a variety of other critical
military matters were involved, most notably antisubmarine sur-
veillance conducted from the Azores.)
In 1979-1980, meanwhile, in the wake of the crises in Iran and
Afghanistan, the focus of attention regarding matters of access
centered on American efforts to acquire some new footholds in the
Persian Gulf-Indian Ocean area. Whereas the Carter administration
early on in 1977 had attempted to initiate serious negotiations with the
INTRODUCTION 3
USSR over Indian Ocean demilitarization, it was later prodded by
events (Iran and Afghanistan) into seeking new access in Oman,
Somalia, Kenya, and Egypt (as well as a further expansion of facilities
at Diego Garcia) in conjunction with development of the Rapid Deploy-
ment Force (RDF). These moves appeared to signal an American
attempt to reverse a long-term decline in the nation's overseas basing
assets, a decline which had been in progress for some fifteen years.
A final, additional illustration of the contemporary importance of
access diplomacy, and of its political and geographic complexity, has
recently been provided by the Iran-Iraq conflict, regarding respective
arms resupply to the two combatants. Soviet replacement arms for Iraq
were reported transshipped through the Jordanian port of Aqaba, after
the closing of access to Basra and also given the necessity for
overflying Iranian airspace en route from the USSR to Iraq. Meanwhile,
arms reportedly were moved to Iran from its friends in Libya, by Iranian
transports traversing Soviet airspace. The Soviet arms resupplied to
Iraq, meanwhile, were said to have come from pre-positioned "forward"
stocks in South Yemen and Ethiopia, illustrating still one other
important aspect of modern basing diplomacy.
In recent years, the United States, with its postwar basing network
obviously declining concurrent with an overall contraction of power and
responsibility, has been engaged in negotiations over renewal, acquisi-
tion, or disgorging of key facilities in a number of dispersed areas in
Spain, Greece, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, Portugal, and
Ethiopia, among others. Even where access has been retained, the
economic and political costs have risen dramatically. In what had
rapidly become a less permissive environment for U.S. overseas bases,
previously obscure place names like Incirlik, Ramasun, Masirah,
Kagnew, Cockburn Sound, Ras Banas, Souda Bay, Sigonella, Berbera,
and Ascension had become daily fare on the nation's front pages, often
in relation to serious crises or national security issues.
The very nature of basing access requirements had also changed in
recent years, as new technologies and associated new military require-
ments created needs for new types of overseas facilities - variously, for
intelligence, communications, and ocean and outer space surveillance
purposes - and where arms control verification requirements are
juxtaposed to those for traditional national security concerns. Less
visible, but now often as important as operational or staging bases,
these new types of facilities are crucial for antisubmarine warfare
(strategic and tactical), telemetry monitoring of rivals' missile tests,
electronic (radar) intelligence, detection of nuclear explosions through
seismological signals or the gathering of isotopes in air samples,
communication with and tracking of satellites, and interception and
transmission of a variety of military communications. The competition
for access had, in the process, seemed to move from an essentially one-
dimensional plane on the surfaces of the earth and oceans to three
dimensions, involving also the upper atmosphere, outer space, and the
under seas domains.