US frontier forts operated as foreign bases enabling westward conquest

Evidence

While scholars generally identify Guantánamo Bay as the first U.S. military base abroad, they strangely overlook bases created shortly after independence. Hundreds of frontier forts helped enable the westward expansion of the United States, and they were built on land that was very much abroad at the time. … By 1802, there was a chain of U.S. forts from the Great Lakes to New Orleans. Native American groups’ support for Britain in the War of 1812 brought only more displacement, expropriation, and base building. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 58

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes US westward expansion as an early instance of the same overseas-basing dynamics later chapters trace; echoes settler-colonial analysis of US Indian policy from the reader’s library.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when does the standard base-abroad chronology start accepting a homeland-vs-frontier distinction, and why did scholars pick Guantánamo 1898 rather than Fort Harmar 1785?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 58