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Comment by floxy | Hacker News Reader

So that prompted me to try and look up which countries don't have U.S. troops. Came up with: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/us-troop-...

Which says there is no presence in only these countries:

  Venezuela
  French Guiana
  Ivory Coast
  Libya
  Western Sahara
  Guinea-Bissau
  Eritrea
  Lesotho
  Eswatini
  Syria
  Iraq
  Iran
  Afghanistan
  North Korea
  Vanuatu
  New Caledonia
  Falkland Islands

...Don't know how accurate that is, since it says there are 38 US troops in Russia? Maybe they're all moonlighting as diplomats?

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That list is wrong. At first glance the Vatican should be on it, the Falkland Islands shouldn't (not being a country), and Syria shouldn't. This very attack was initially believed to have been against one of the US military bases in Syria.

As others have pointed out marine embassy guards exist. Many countries, including the US, also assign military attachés as diplomatic personnel.

A better metric is countries with a US base or cooperative security location. There are 80, or about 40% of all countries. Still high, but more more plausible. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...

> Data include personnel who are assigned to the State Department and Embassies overseas.

I think these might be the marine embassy guards, which would make sense since the us doesn't have embassies in these countries, but it does have one in Russia.

https://www.marines.com/resources/marine-security-guard---em...

That map could do with a logarithmic scale to its colour coding. Australia with 2k+ troops is the same colour as all the countries with ~10

Those last two are not sovereign nations, nor are Western Sahara or French Guiana.

Otherwise, that mostly reads like a list of nations that lack normalized diplomatic relations with the US, hence no embassy staff. Except for Vanuatu, which is in the process of getting a US embassy.

EDIT: As others pointed out, Syria and Iraq do have US troops. All together I'd say this is a pretty terrible source!

Maybe they are counting embassy security..

Could be

There are US troops in Iraq. In fact Iraq is trying to get them out, without success.(so far)

There are US troops in Syria. Al Tanf and the whole area where the oil is to the east of the Euphrates River.

French Guiana and New Caledonia are French territories, not countries. They have no US consulate (go to Suriname for French Guiana and to Fidji for New Caledonia).

That page shows no presence no presence in United States either.

And oh well it did show no presence in Afghanistan. So that's there.

Embassies are guarded by the US Marine Corp.

In that case the list is basically all countries without a US embassy? And aren’t there US troops in Iraq still?

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