From Draft NOtices, July-August 2002
- Molly Morgan
From May 31 to June 2 I attended the Radfest conference in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where I heard Zoltan Grossman speak. Grossman, a long-time peace activist who recently received his doctorate in geography, shared with conference participants his insights about a largely ignored consequence of U.S. military interventions in the last decade. The information he presented strongly suggests that the installation of new U.S. military bases has been one of the primary purposes of these wars.
Grossman explained that as a result of the increasing economic strength of the European Union and the East Asian economic bloc since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has been making geopolitical decisions to counter the possibility of being excluded from much of the Eurasian land mass. This explanation helps to make it clear that the choices of U.S. military interventions were based not on the official explanations, let alone the needs of the local people, but on whether there was an opportunity to develop a U.S. sphere of influence in the strategic area bounded by Europe, Russia, and China.