Long before Donald Trump became pr*sident, the United States was the world’s leading supplier of arms. Although this varies year-by-year, U.S. sales of weapons—many of them highly advanced technologically—are about 40 percent of the global total. In the three years 2014-2016, that came to $110 billion. More than half of the total went to developing nations. The authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates have been the main recipients recently, but the United States sells arms to more than 100 nations. Only Russia comes anywhere close to selling as much. One of the arguments has always been some version of if-we-don’t-sell-them-somebody-else-will.
The Pentagon and the State Department both have worked assiduously to promote these sales, boosting bottom lines for the likes of Lockheed and Boeing and numerous smaller companies. Advocates argue that this is all about protecting the United States by providing allies with equipment they need to protect themselves, boosting U.S. foreign policy interests, and providing jobs at home.
To achieve all this, they declare, means U.S. arms-makers must remain “competitive.” Says William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, "More of it is domestic pork-barrel politics dressed up as national security," Hartung wrote last year:
Arms deals are a way of life in Washington. From the president on down, significant parts of the government are intent on ensuring that American arms will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing will live the good life. From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of US embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms. And the Pentagon is their enabler. From brokering, facilitating, and literally banking the money from arms deals to transferring weapons to favored allies on the taxpayers’ dime, it is in essence the world’s largest arms dealer.
In a typical sale, the US government is involved every step of the way. The Pentagon often does assessments of an allied nation’s armed forces in order to tell them what they “need”—and of course what they always need is billions of dollars in new US-supplied equipment. Then the Pentagon helps negotiate the terms of the deal, notifies Congress of its details, and collects the funds from the foreign buyer, which it then gives to the US supplier in the form of a defense contract. In most deals, the Pentagon is also the point of contact for maintenance and spare parts for any US-supplied system. The bureaucracy that helps make all of this happen, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, is funded from a 3.5 percent surcharge on the deals it negotiates. This gives it all the more incentive to sell, sell, sell.
What’s been done in the past, however, is not good enough in the view of the Trump regime, reports Bryan Bender and Tara Palmeri at Politico. The White House, they write, wants to sell even more weapons, and it wants the State Department and Pentagon to be an even more active ad hoc member of the sales team:
Those efforts would include establishing a more active government role in pushing U.S. products, beyond what military and diplomatic officials already do to help defense firms sell their wares internationally. This could also strengthen the defense industrial base and create jobs on production lines that Pentagon investments don’t fully support.
"It is about making sure we are doing everything we can to promote the competitiveness of American trade," said a State Department official involved in the discussions who, like the other sources, was not authorized to speak publicly. "The message from the NSC is we can certainly be doing more."
The changes, which officials insist are also intended to enhance Americans' interests around the world, would be the latest in a series of moves by Trump to relax former President Barack Obama’s restrictions on U.S. military activities.
According to the subscription-only newsletter “Inside the Pentagon,” at a Sept. 20 speech before the Air Force Association’s annual convention in Maryland, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he wants to establish more robust lines of communication between the defense industry and Pentagon. As if these were not robust enough already.
Arms sales abroad have long been a bipartisan effort. From 2009 through 2015, the Obama administration made deals to sell more arms—$190 billion worth—than any administration since FDR’s during World War II when all the stops were pulled out to defeat the Axis powers. Restrictions on sales were also loosened, allowing more advanced weapons to be sold to more nations with less scrutiny than before. As a result 36 U.S. allies no longer have to obtain licenses to import American weapons or weapons components, giving smugglers more choices for getting access to those weapons and secretly selling them to entities whose goals are anything but friendly to those of the United States.
Hartung notes that when Tom Kelly, Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, was asked by Congress if the administration was going far enough in pushing U.S. arms exports, he said:
“[We are] advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through … and that is something we are doing every day, basically [on] every continent in the world … and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”
“Everything” they can? That’s not how the Trump regime sees it. While overseas sales rose about 43 percent under the Obama administration, during the first eight months of 2017, notifications on energy transfers
hit $48 billion, nearly twice as much as in the same period of 2016. Here’s Bender and Palmeri again:
"The questions I would have are what are the motivations?" said Rachel Stohl, who directs the Conventional Defense Program at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank. "The United States is the world's largest arms exporter. Are there markets closed to the United States? Yes. Are there reasons they are closed? Yes. Are those reasons good? I think they are."
She added: "While you can always improve bureaucratic process, those fundamental goals of supporting our foreign policy and supporting democracy and human rights need to be recognized. My concern is there is such an emphasis on selling more that we are losing the notion of restraint and why that restraint exists. I don't believe the argument that 'if we don't sell to them, someone else will,' is reason to go into a new market.
As in the past, some of these weapons will wind up in hostile hands. Or they will be used, as they are by the Saudis in their war against rebels in Yemen, to kill large numbers of civilians. On that specific score there has been some opposition. In June,
a resolution to bar a $500 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia that was introduced by Democrat Chris Murphy—the Connecticut senator for whom
a progressive foreign policy is a top priority—Democratic Sen. Al Franken and Republican Sen. Rand Paul failed by a vote of 47-53. But even if that sale had been blocked, multiyear arms deals with the Saudis run into the tens of billions.
As for the bigger picture, a visitor to the Senate gallery could likely hear a pin drop if the notion of the United States retreating from its position as No. 1 in global arms deals were ever raised on the chamber floor.