The Base Dividend

The problem

The American base abroad is the most visible thing the United States does in most of the countries where it does anything. The best count, made by researchers because the Pentagon no longer publishes one, is about 750 installations in 80 countries and territories, at a cost of roughly $55 billion a year. The Defense Department's own Base Structure Report, once an annual public document, stopped appearing in full, and a large share of the smaller sites have never been listed at all. The country does not tell its own citizens where their bases are.

The money in a basing relationship flows in one direction, and it is toward the base. Japan pays about $1.7 billion a year in host-nation support under an agreement worth $8.6 billion over five years; South Korea pays between $1.1 and $1.5 billion. The support is paid from the host capital to the American military. The town outside the gate, which hosts the runway and the bars and the accidents, receives what its own government chooses to send, which in most countries is little and in some is nothing.

Okinawa is the case that shows the shape. The prefecture is 0.6 percent of Japan's land area and holds about 70 percent of the land used exclusively by American forces in Japan. In 2019 its voters rejected the landfill for the newest base at Henoko by 72 percent; construction continued. Okinawa's income per head is the lowest of any Japanese prefecture. It has carried the alliance for seventy years and its reward has been the alliance.

The extreme case is Diego Garcia, where the base was built after the entire population of the Chagos Islands, about two thousand people, was removed between 1968 and 1973. Fifty years on, Britain agreed to pay Mauritius an average of £101 million a year for 99 years to settle the sovereignty question, and the deal has been shelved and revived more than once since. The bill for a base whose hosts were not asked eventually comes due, with interest.

This catalog has argued that a great power is followed for what it does. A base is the place where a country finds out, up close, what America does. It should be a place that wants the base to stay.

The proposal

A Base Dividend: for every overseas installation, an annual payment to the residents of the host municipality, equal per person, funded at one percent of the base's operating cost, paid through the host government under the basing agreement and published, base by base. The full list of installations and what each costs, back in print every year. And every ten years, a published local vote on whether the base should stay.

How it would work

1. One percent of the base, to the town. Each installation's annual operating cost is published, and one percent of it is paid as a dividend to the residents of the municipality or district that hosts it, in equal shares. A base that costs $1 billion a year to run pays $10 million to its town. A town of 50,000 receives $200 a person, every year, with the base's name on the cheque.

1. Paid through the host, published by the guest. The dividend is written into the status-of-forces agreement and paid to residents through the host government's own channels, because a foreign power mailing cheques to a country's citizens directly is an affront and would be received as one. What the United States controls is the publication: the amount, the town, and whether it arrived, on one page, every year.

1. The list, restored. The Base Structure Report is published in full, annually, with every site over a set threshold named and costed. A base the country will not admit to is a base it cannot defend in public, and the dividend cannot be paid to a town that does not officially exist.

1. The ten-year vote. Every decade, the host municipality holds a consultative vote on the base, organised by the host country under its own law, with the result published in the report. The vote does not close the base. It tells Washington and the host capital, in a number, whether the town wants it, and it gives both governments a reason to spend the decade in between earning a better one.

1. The same rule at home. № 036 gave rural counties a share of what they host. Domestic base towns already receive Impact Aid for their schools; under this proposal they receive the same one percent, on the same terms, so that Fayetteville and Ginowan are treated alike.

1. Not a substitute for the fence. The dividend does not settle a crime by a service member, an aircraft accident, or a contaminated aquifer. Those are handled under the agreement as now, and the report lists every incident beside the payment. A dividend paid to a town where the incidents are not addressed will be understood, correctly, as an insult.

The numbers

What it costs. One percent of $55 billion is about $550 million a year, or one percent of what the bases already cost. If the host nation matches it, which the agreements can require, the towns receive about a billion a year between them.

What Okinawa would receive. The American presence in Japan costs several billion dollars a year; assume $5 billion in Okinawa. One percent is $50 million a year for the host municipalities, and with a Japanese match $100 million, in a prefecture of 1.5 million people whose income per head trails the rest of the country. It would not change Okinawa's mind about Henoko. It would be the first time the town, rather than Tokyo, was paid anything at all.

What the alternative costs. Britain's settlement for Diego Garcia is £3.4 billion over the century. A dividend paid to the Chagossians from 1971 would have cost a small fraction of that and would have left a population on the island that wanted the base.

The honest objections

"This is buying consent, and everyone will know it." Yes. The current arrangement buys consent too, from the host capital, and the town outside the gate knows that better than anyone. A dividend paid to the people who carry the cost, in the open, is the honest version of a transaction that already happens in private. The word for paying a host is rent.

"Host governments will refuse to let a foreign power pay their citizens." Some will, and item 2 is written for them: the money is paid by the host government, under the agreement, and what the United States insists on is only that the payment be published. A host government that will take $1.7 billion in return for a base but will not pass one percent of the base's cost to the town that holds it has made a choice its own voters can see.

"One percent is trivial, and a real dividend would be unaffordable." It is small by design. A dividend large enough to matter to a national budget would be a subsidy to the host nation, which already receives one. A dividend of a few hundred dollars a person, every year, with the base's name on it, is the size at which a town notices and a treasury does not. If it proves too small to matter, the report will show it and the percentage can move.

"A published vote invites a 'no,' and then what?" Then the country knows. A base that cannot win a consultative vote in its own town, with a dividend attached, after ten years of trying, is a base the United States should be asking hard questions about anyway, and today it has no instrument for asking them. Okinawa answered the question in 2019 without being asked. The proposal makes the asking regular and the answer official.

"The military will treat the dividend as money taken from readiness." It will, as it treats every dollar not spent on the force. The honest reply is that a base the town is glad to have is a readiness asset, and a base under permanent local protest is a liability that costs more than one percent to manage. Futenma has been scheduled to close since 1996.

Sources

• David Vine, Patterson Deppen and Leah Bolger, Drawdown: Improving U.S. and Global Security Through Military Base Closures Abroad, Quincy Institute and World BEYOND War, 2021, on the count of about 750 installations in 80 countries
• U.S. Government Accountability Office, Burden Sharing: Benefits and Costs Associated with the U.S. Military Presence in Japan and South Korea (GAO-21-270), 2021
• Government of Japan, Special Measures Agreement on host-nation support, 2022–2027; CBS News, "Japan approves 5 years more funding for U.S. military presence," 2022
• Okinawa Prefectural Government, U.S. Military Base Issues in Okinawa, land-area share and the February 2019 prefectural referendum result
• House of Commons Library, 2025 treaty on the British Indian Ocean Territory/Chagos Archipelago (CBP-10273); Loughborough University, "Chagos Islands deal shelved," April 2026
• U.S. Department of Defense, Base Structure Report, last full edition, and reporting on its discontinuation
• U.S. Department of Education, Impact Aid Program, annual appropriation
• Proposals № 010 (The Peace Ledger); № 036 (The Rural Compact); № 047 (The Arsenal Account)