Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago uses two deceptively simple questions to expose an asymmetry that modern geopolitics often treats as natural. If sovereignty were reciprocal and power balanced, one might expect a rough equivalence of military footprints. Instead, almost no foreign militaries operate bases on U.S. soil, while the United States maintains hundreds of installations across scores of countries, from Ramstein in Germany to Okinawa in Japan and beyond. The gulf between those answers dramatizes a world order in which one state projects force globally while remaining largely impermeable at home.

The provocation is not a trivia exercise but a lens on how empire can function without formal colonies. Bases embody logistics, deterrence, and alliance commitments, but they also normalize a hierarchy: whose security concerns set agendas, whose neighborhoods absorb noise, risk, and cultural strain, and whose consent truly matters. Framed as questions, the critique sidesteps sloganeering and invites the reader to supply the unsettling conclusion: if reciprocity is absent, the arrangement likely rests on unequal power rather than mutual need.

Saramago’s background intensifies the point. A Portuguese writer shaped by a long dictatorship and a lifelong critic of authoritarianism and neoliberal globalization, he often challenged comfortable narratives in the West. During the post-Cold War moment and especially around the Iraq War, he condemned the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention that accompanied the expansion or entrenchment of U.S. military presence. The two questions puncture that rhetoric by appealing to common sense. Why is one country everywhere, and why is almost no one here?

There is also a media critique embedded in the form. Because the distribution of bases is treated as technical or inevitable, it slips from public scrutiny. By turning it into an everyday question, he recasts geopolitics as a moral and democratic issue: visibility, accountability, and consent. The questions do not supply answers; they demand that citizens ask for the numbers, then reflect on what those numbers say about power, security, and the world we have learned to accept.