The Top Political Question Worldwide

11 July 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Shall our country be independent (sovereign), or instead be ruled by and for the U.S. Government, or maybe by and for Israel or some other imperial country?

There are just six empires today. The #1 empire is U.S., which in 2022 had 900 foreign military bases, now has 861 (to see the information about each, click on “List” at “View Mode … List”, and then onto each of the 861). That 861 is 6.6 times as many as #2 Turkey, which has 131. And whereas Turkey’s ones are in 9 host countries, all in its own neighborhood, America’s ones are in 95 host countries, which are all over the world. So it dwarfs any other. #3 is UK, which now has 118, which (like America’s) are spread all over the world (in 38 countries). #4 is Russia, whose 35 foreign military bases are in 11 countries, all in its own region. #5 is India, whose 19 are also all in its own region. And #6 is Israel, whose 14 military bases are all in Syria. Syria had had protection by Russia during 2015-2024 against the U.S.-Turkey-Israel-Qatar-Saud gangs, which now control it via their stooge al-Jolani-al-Sharaa, who had been leading al-Qaeda in Syria, and who now serves as those foreign gangs’ imposed-and-propped-up ruler.

America’s 861 foreign military bases are versus 363 military bases from all other countries, and so constitute 70.5% of the world’s total of 1,224 foreign military bases.

The U.S. also spends 65% of the entire world’s military spending (not the 40% that SIPRI alleges), and that’s just 5.5% less than America’s percentage of the world’s foreign military bases.

No empire is authentically voluntary except on the part of the occupying power — the imperial power. In any international neighborhood, protection money is always being paid to a nation’s gang in order to buy protection against another or other national gangs — other empires. That’s how empires are formed and structured, like competing gangs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew this — that imperialism is international gangsterism — and he had his first-ever extended conversation with the intensely imperialistic Winston Churchill on 11 August 1941 and was appalled to find Churchill resisting FDR’s proposal that a democratic world federation of nations must be established after the War to outlaw and replace all empires because both World Wars had been started by competing empires and FDR was determined that there must be no Third World War. (He said this even before Pearl Harbor.) FDR said to Churchill “You see, it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me.” He then told his son, Elliott, privately, after that dust-up, “A real old Tory, isn’t he? A real old Tory, of the old school.” FDR’s successor Truman decided on 25 July 1945 to side with Churchill on that crucial matter, not with the deceased FDR; and this decision by Truman started the Cold War and doomed the U.N. (which Truman, who ended up designing the U.N., had already weakened from what FDR had planned for it). So, we live in Truman’s world, not in FDR’s.

In this world, there is only a single global empire, America’s empire, and all of its 95 colonies depend upon it for protection against any competing empire in its region, thus has no national independence unless it quits the empire and refuses to be a part of any nation’s empire — which would cause all gangs to try to take control over it. So, unless the nation is prepared to deal with that problem, it is trapped within its existing empire. Iran, Russia, and China, look at what America recently did to the independent nation of Venezuela, and view it as a warning of what the empire plans to do to themselves. Evidently, the U.S. empire, globally, is voracious, just like the much smaller Israeli empire is voracious inside its own neighborhood; and anyone who writes or talks about this as being a matter pitting democracies versus autocracies is nothing but a lying propagandist, or else a fool. Because imperialists always look for excuses by which to fool their gulls.

I now include as one of those gulls Col. Douglas Macgregor, who yesterday scandalously butchered the historical record — what I presented just above — to portray Truman as the hero and FDR as a blithering fool and supporter of communism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opeymG_Imxc&t=350s

Macgregor supports Churchill there against FDR. Churchill wanted WW2 to be followed immediately by a U.S.-UK invasion of the Soviet Union (Churchill’s plan was labelled “Operation Unthinkable”), an idea that even Truman rejected. I listen with respect to Macgregor as a geostrategic analyst, but his historical ‘knowledge’ is loaded with shocking inaccuracies — in this case, turning history on its head in order to make it fit his false ideological beliefs.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.