Originally Posted By: rshaw125
Originally Posted By: Jetronic
You think that defense is provided free?
It's the pipe dream of any nation world power to have bases abroad, it would be foolish to give those up.
Really? We spend hundreds of billions of borrowed yes borrowed dollars a year to protect countries that are nearly as rich as we are. It's beyond foolish to keep doing it.
We get financial contributions from Korea and Japan for our military presence, though it probably isn't quite enough. We don't get squat from other countries, I believe.
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/04/u-s-foreign-military-support/
Quote:
There are about 49,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan, 28,000 in South Korea and 38,000 in Germany. These countries make contributions toward the cost of keeping U.S. military bases there, with Japan contributing $2 billion in 2012 and South Korea giving $765 million. The Senate Committee on Armed Services report concluded that the contributions from those two countries, which were agreed upon by the U.S., hadn’t kept pace with the growth of costs for the United States. (In terms of Germany, the report faulted the U.S. for not seeking cash payments for the return of facilities to Germany, and instead accepting in-kind contributions.)
The history of Japan is pretty interesting. One of Japan's Shoguns isolated Japan because he didn't like the slave trade (Portuguese Jesuits trading gunpowder for Japanese girls). Those girls mostly wound up in Spain, so a lot of Spanish have tiny bits of Japanese in them.
The U.S. (Commodore Perry) forced Japan to open up mostly because Japan had a lot of gold and we had a lot of silver. Japan was trading gold at 5:1 gold/silver and we were at like 20:1, so we swapped a boatload of silver for their gold. Oh, edit. We also didn't like how they treated our shipwrecked whalers (they'd get killed). After we slaughtered the whales in the North Atlantic, we slaughtered the whales around Japan. BTW, the setting of Moby **** is Japan.
