Three of the US military outposts in key regions of the world are either under attack or in chaos. Israel in the Middle East, Ukraine in Europe and now South Korea in East Asia are all in turmoil thanks to the rise of geopolitical tensions, expanding wars and the degradation of the US’ ability to project its military might around the world.

While the G7 countries and non-aligned major world powers have no more than a dozen foreign military bases, and most of them less, the US maintains over 1,000 well-staffed and well-equipped military bases overseas, with most of them in Europe and Japan, where the US has large clusters of over 500 military bases located on the eastern and western borders of the combined Russia-China Eurasian land mass.

US forces never left the countries they occupied at the end of WWII, except for France, where President Charles de Gaulle threw the US military out in 1967, including the Nato HQ, which moved to Brussels as a result. By contrast, Russia has five, mostly in Former Soviet Union (FSU) counties, and China has two.

But at the same time, the US is quick to offer military support to its friends when it is needed. During the April missile barrage on Israel by Iran, US F-16s flew along-side the Israeli air force in a successful effort to shoot down most of the inbound missiles and drones.

Israel and the Middle East

Israel is a key US political ally in the Middle East as well as a military toehold. It is primarily focused on missile defence and intelligence collaboration in a region where it has few other friends.

In September 2017, the US established its first permanent military base in Israel – a dedicated air defence facility located within the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) Mashabim Air Base in the Negev desert. This installation is operated by the US military's European Command (EUCOM). Likewise, Israel remains heavily dependent on US military and financial aid as the basis of its security.

Additionally, the US operates a radar installation known as Site 512, situated atop Har Qeren in the Negev desert. This facility employs the AN/TPY-2 radar system to provide early warning of ballistic missile threats, particularly from Iran and its proxies. Initially staffed by approximately 100 US soldiers, recent expansions have increased its capacity to accommodate up to 1,000 personnel.

Following the Hamas October 7 attacks, the US has beefed up its military presence in Israel even further. In October 2024, the US deployed a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system, along with about 100 troops, to bolster Israel's air defence capabilities against potential missile attacks. Furthermore, US special operations forces have been involved in intelligence sharing and planning with the IDF, particularly concerning the efforts to recover the Israeli hostage snatched by Hamas in their terrorist attack last year.

The US support for Tel Aviv is implacable. It has continued to funnel weapons into the conflict, despite the growing outrage over the nearly 50,000 civilian deaths in Gaza, and has gone rogue, putting itself outside the international community with the White House’s refusal to acknowledge the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrest on war crime charges in November.

But the region has slowly descended into a wider war as a shaky ceasefire in Lebanon looks close to collapse and the war in Syria having flared up again this weekend with the fall of Aleppo, which has already reportedly sucked in fresh reinforcements from Iraq and Russia.

However, strategically, the US cannot withdraw from the region, nor soften its support for Israel, which faces an existential threat from its neighbours, and Iran in particular.

Ukraine and Europe

The US has been expanding its military presence in Europe steadily over the last decades. Nato began expanding eastwards in 1999, when Poland, Hungary and Czechia joined, eventually adding eight new members. Then the US unilaterally dropped out of the ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), a Cold War arms control treaty, in 2002 under President George W Bush, and followed up by putting missiles in Romania and Poland as part of a “missile shield” to nominally protect Europe from “rogue states” such as North Korea, despite fact that North Korea had no missiles that could reach Europe. The Kremlin saw those missiles as a direct threat to Russian territory.

The US has always been keen on using Ukraine as a buffer state to protect Nato’s eastern flank. Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been keen on using Ukraine for exactly the same purpose. Putin has said that in the same way that John F Kennedy would not tolerate Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, Russia would not tolerate Nato missiles stationed in Ukraine, just across the border from 80% of the Russian population and most of its major cities in the European part of the country.

The US invested heavily in the first Maidan revolution in 2014 when Deputy Secretary of the State Department Victoria Nuland famously handed out cookies to the protesters and was caught in a leaked phone call on February 7, 2014 saying “F*ck the EU” and openly choosing leaders for the post-President Victor Yanukovych administration.

Ukraine was actually invited to join Nato during the Bucharest Summit in April 2008. President Bush pushed hard for a concrete invitation with a concrete timetable, but according to bne IntelliNews sources at the meeting, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande baulked at the decision, afraid of Putin’s response, and the final declaration was watered down to a vague “eventually” date.

Ukraine’s entry into Nato has remained Putin’s bête noire ever since. In the run-up to the war in Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an eight-point list of demands, but made it clear that negotiations started and ended with an “iron-clad legally binding” guarantee that Ukraine never join Nato. The White House refused, despite the fact that the bulk of Nato’s 33 members have no intention of ever inviting Ukraine to join, for fear of a Russian retaliation using nuclear weapons à la Cuban Missile Crisis. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is at a Nato summit that starts on December 4 where he is once again calling for accelerated Nato membership as the only way to end the war currently raging in Ukraine. He will be refused yet again.

Even if Ukraine is not incorporated into Nato, both the US and Europe are looking to Europe to shore up Nato’s eastern border. The new EU foreign policy chief and former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas was in Kyiv this week and reiterated the EU’s strong support for Ukraine and a promise to continue to supply it with arms and money post-war to create a de facto buffer country between the EU and Russia.

Putin also wants a buffer zone and looks likely to get it if he can hang on to the 20% of Ukrainian territory Russia currently occupies along Ukraine’s entire eastern border that will be part of, what seems to be increasingly inevitable, territorial concessions Zelenskiy will be forced to make as part of any ceasefire deal.

South Korea and East Asia

Seoul was rocked last night by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s decision to declare martial law on December 3. The country has been thrown into chaos and the decision was quickly overturned at a midnight emergency meeting of Parliament. However, technically under the Korean constitution, martial law remains in effect as the parliamentary decision can only be confirmed by the president himself. Now the country is facing a constitutional crisis and on the morning of December 4 the opposition party started impeachment proceedings against Yoon.

The US has played a key role in South Korean security since the Korean war in 1950, when North Korea invaded. Seoul came very close to losing, had it not been for US coming to South Korea’s aid, just as North Korea was supplied by the Soviet Union. The invasion was an attempt to unify the Korean peninsula under communist rule.

Like in Europe and Japan, the US never left and continues to maintain a force of 20,000 troops stationed in South Korean bases, which remains its military bulwark in East Asia. The US contributes about 90% of the military personnel, equipment and financial resources of a nominally UN-led coalition to protect South Korean democracy.

The US continues to build out its military presence in East and Southeast Asia with recently expanded security guarantees with The Philippines, which has had a mutual defence treaty with the West since 1951 that has been upgraded several times, most recently to a “Bilateral Defence Guidelines” in 2023.

The Philippines has its own problems with China, which is aggressively making maritime territorial claims in the waters around the archipelago, and the US is in the processes of deepening its military ties with the island state, including the recent deployment of medium-range missiles there in a repetition of the missile deployments to Romania and Poland, as well as talk of setting up a permanent military base.

China has reacted harshly to these moves. It has been investing heavily in its navy, which is now larger than the US navy and conducting large-scale naval exercises in the region.

China is still playing catch-up with its submarine fleet, but that is growing rapidly too. One of the reasons that Beijing is so fixated on regaining control of Taiwan is that the waters off all its ports on the South China Sea coast are relatively shallow, allowing US satellites to spot any departing Chinese submarines, whereas the waters off Taiwan’s eastern coast are very deep where the submarines could immediately disappear, according to leading sinologist Professor Axel Schneider of Goettingen university. Moreover, some 40% of global maritime cargo traffic travels through the South China Sea straits.

The US can ill afford to lose control of these three major security allies and military outposts at a time when its allies in Israel and Ukraine are already under attack and China is ratcheting up the pressure in Southeast Asia. The combined problems have weakened Washington’s hand and as well as its promise to provide security guarantees to these major regional allies. All this comes as President-elect Donald Trump is about to take over and has promised to follow a much more isolationist foreign policy that could further weaken US support.