Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago turns geopolitics into a barbed pop quiz, and the answers are meant to embarrass you. The first question is almost comically simple: virtually no country stations troops on US soil. The second is the real trapdoor: the United States, by contrast, has seeded bases across the planet. Set side by side, the imbalance reads less like “defense” and more like a map of permission and power.

The intent isn’t to tally installations; it’s to puncture the euphemisms that make empire sound hygienic. “Military base” is a bureaucratic phrase that smuggles in a whole architecture of influence: treaties signed under pressure, governments calibrated to Washington’s priorities, local economies rearranged around foreign payrolls, sovereignty turned into a negotiable lease. By framing it as two questions anyone can understand, Saramago bypasses the expert class that often launders these realities in jargon about “security partnerships” and “stability.”

The subtext is moral and political: if a country can place armed infrastructure nearly everywhere and face almost no reciprocity, then the world isn’t operating as a community of equals. It’s operating as a hierarchy. Coming from a Portuguese Nobel laureate with a long leftist streak, the line sits in the post-Cold War moment when US dominance was frequently sold as inevitable, benevolent, even boring. Saramago refuses boredom. He makes the obvious feel newly accusatory, forcing the listener to confront how normalized permanent, global military presence has become.