American global dominance, according to host Abby Martin, runs on the same playbook repeated for a century: install a friendly government, back it with a military base, and call the whole arrangement diplomacy. This premiere episode of teleSUR's The Empire Files traces that pattern from the 1952 overthrow in Guatemala through the 1973 coup in Chile to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, arguing that each intervention served corporate and financial interests while leaving local populations worse off. Anthropologist David Vine, author of Base Nation, appears on camera to make the case that the hundreds of U.S. military installations scattered across the globe function less as peacekeeping tools than as sources of regional tension, and he poses the question of how Americans would react to a foreign base on their own soil. Martin uses archival footage and interviews to build a case that covert regime change and permanent military presence are the two mechanisms holding the arrangement together, framing the episode as the opening argument in a longer investigative series.