Base Towns: Local Contestation of the U.S. Military in Korea and Japan
By Claudia Junghyun Kim
Oxford University Press, 2023

The U.S. military basing network has been the subject of much scholarly inquiry over the years, and much of this literature can be divided into one of three lines of inquiry. First, what explains the distribution of bases around the world? Why does the United States establish military bases in the places that it does, why do some foreign governments want (or refuse) to host U.S. bases, and how do U.S. policy-makers and their foreign counterparts use different narratives to legitimize the presence of those bases?

Second, regardless of what policy-makers and military officials think about basing, do military bases actually do what they are meant to do? Do they successfully advance U.S. interests? Or are there conditions under which they are more or less likely to have their intended effects? We see such debates play out on the question of whether small, so-called tripwire forces have any deterrent effect.

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