Dismantling common defenses of US (global) arms sales
Speaking Security Newsletter | Congressional Candidate Advisory Note 20 | 25 June 2020
Below are three common defenses of US global weapons sales with corresponding rebuttals.
The counterarguments aren’t that sophisticated but I’ve found that they’re useful in exposing the unseemly values of whoever’s defending the status quo.
Contact me directly if you have follow-up questions or comments, I’m around.
Situation
A (longstanding) global weapons pandemic:
^Figures expressed in millions. Data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Three common defenses of the arms trade
1. Conditioning arms sales doesn’t work
Conditionality in this context refers to attaching requirements like adherence to international human rights standards or proper weapons stockpile management to which the recipient country must adhere in order to receive US military equipment. Defenders of the status quo say that attaching conditions to arms deals is ineffective.
Two central problems with this argument:
A. The referenced case studies didn’t give conditionality a chance to work
Example (post-coup Egypt): The US halted a transfer of F-16s to Egypt immediately after the latter’s coup in July 2013. This is often invoked as a case study in articles saying that conditionality doesn’t work. But left out of these pieces is the fact that after the decision was announced to halt the delivery of F-16s, US officials told the Egyptian elites that aid would soon be restored, defeating the whole purpose of the freeze.
There were also all sorts of caveats that allowed certain types of military aid to proceed unencumbered while the half-assed arms embargo was in place. These workarounds were intentional: the Obama administration initially called it a coup, but later settled on calling it a “transition” to prevent the triggering of Section 508 of the Foreign Assistance Act, which is pretty explicit on how the US must cut off aid to any country “whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”
B. Conditionality does work (even when the administration/Congress self-sabotages)
From the same example (Egypt): U.S. diplomats were still able to leverage the temporary/partial suspension to deter the Egyptian government from enforcing an arbitrary deadline for NGOs to register under the country’s criticized 2002 NGO law.
Even the incompetent Trump administration demonstrated how weak this argument is: former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson convinced the Egyptian government to resolve criminal charges against 41 foreign NGO workers and suspend military cooperation with North Korea in exchange for $195 million in suspended US military assistance.
(Bonus: In Yemen, US holds and other legislation restricting arms transfers to Saudi Arabia pressured the Saudi-led coalition to re-enter negotiations with the Houthis on a deal related to the port of Hodeidah.)
2. ‘National security’
‘National security’ has never been defined, but the only manner in which I’ve seen the concept manifest itself is through its production of inequality in various ways (ranging from bothersome to unspeakable acts maligning the global working class). Arms sales are no exception.
3. Arms sales abroad create jobs at home
This is Trump’s favorite justification: he’s been saying this since he entered office. But people forget that this argument was deployed as a ‘progressive’ defense of the arms trade before January 2017. (Not sure of its provenance, but far as I can tell it was popularized by liberals in the foreign policy establishment toward the end of the Obama administration, when scrutiny over US support for the Saudi-led coalition’s rampage in Yemen started to become harder for members of Congress to ignore).
Three main problems with this one:
A. Jobs numbers are exaggerated
Reported employment benefits from US arms sales are routinely overstated (by a lot). If your opponent cites a figure of jobs produced by a given sale, chances are s/he got it from a news source that copied the job numbers directly from a defense contractor website. Vox did just that in their video on Lockheed Martin’s F-35, even though it’s fairly well-documented that Lockheed reported that the program supports roughly twice the number of jobs that it actually does.
B. System-wide, it’s a net employment loss
Being the world’s leading arms dealer requires a country to invest heavily in its own weapons-making capacity. Many studies (like this one) find a negative relationship between defense spending and economic growth, with others (like this one or this one) demonstrating that increasing defense spending increases income inequality.
C. Jobs aren’t the point
If jobs are really the most important thing to the person defending the status quo, then they would be arguing instead to convert jobs in weapons manufacturing to literally any other sector for a considerably better employment payoff. So what the liberal foreign policy establishment (and possibly your opponent) is really after is preserving US empire, and they see the ‘jobs argument’ as the most PR-friendly way to go about it.
Conclusion
That last one’s especially appalling because it pits the US working class communities against non-US working class communities, but considering any of these arguments as valid requires a departure from basic morals (as well as a loose relationship with facts): most defenses of US praxis vis-à-vis global arms sales demand treating human beings as means to an end — working-class bodies must be sacrificed either in the name of ‘national security’ or so certain portions of the US working class can afford to pay rent.
The arms transfer data cited above (and a survey of the legislative record) indicates that none of your opponents have demonstrated that they are interested in relearning this moral basis and applying it directly to the issue of US arms sales (at least in any serious way). This is either an ideological problem or one of corruption (if they take campaign contributions from the defense industry).
Hope this helps,
Stephen (stephen@securityreform.org; @stephensemler)