Arms Sales and False Alarms
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September 10, 2012
Our world is coming to an end—and it is America’s fault.
At least, that seems to be the response of the arms-control community to a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on global conventional arms sales. The general consensus is that the United States is the Walmart of worldwide arms, and it’s pouring fuel on the fire of warfare everywhere.
According to the report, U.S. arms sales in 2011 more than tripled over the previous year. At about $66.3 billion, the report concludes, America holds about three-quarters of the world arms market.
But statistics can be misleading. Take the claim that U.S. arms sales tripled, for instance. Most of the seemingly dramatic uptick results from a single arms deal—a real whopper with Saudi Arabia. Remember, too that “arms sales” are not the same thing as arms actually delivered. In terms of actual arms deliveries (and surely deliveries matter more than contracts for sales to be consummated over a multiyear timeframe), the United States supplied only a bit more than Russia.
Still, apparently we are supposed to assume that the report is dire news indeed.
A press release from the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, warned that these record sales by the United States
highlight the fact that the global arms trade is booming and that more needs to be done by Washington and the rest of the international community to regulate the flow of weapons to irresponsible regimes with substandard human rights records and conflict regions like the Middle East and Africa. The enormous human toll from the unregulated arms trade undermines security and impedes development.Echoing the association’s criticism, a Chinese news website [3] on Sept. 4 asserted that “those countries [like the United States] which beautify themselves as ‘responsible’ do not have any principles or responsibilities at all in arms export.” The People’s Daily noted that
according to a report issued by U.S. Congressional Research Service, U.S. arms export accounted for 78 percent of the world total in 2011 and about half of them flowed into the Middle East. The flow of advanced U.S. arms will break the sensitive and fragile geopolitical balance of the region and threaten national and public security.There is a problem with implying that the United States is fueling warfare in the Third World: there isn’t much evidence to support that suggestion.
Indeed, the world is actually getting less—not more—violent. The Human Security Project, a research center affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, tracks global trends in political violence. Its 2010 report [4] concluded that various “forces and political developments . . . have driven down the number of international conflicts and war deaths since the 1950s, and the number of civil wars since the early 1990s.” A one-year bump in U.S. overseas arms sales is hardly likely to change that trend—especially when that bump is more a statistical blip than real.
Further the “developing nations” receiving the most arms from all exporting countries are Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, the UAE and Venezuela. Saudi Arabia, India and the UAE are hardly powers wreaking havoc throughout the Third World. And while Pakistan and Venezuela may be regarded as more problematic, it’s worth noting that they are supplied in large part by China and Russia, not the United States.
Most of the concern over delivering arms that fuel violence involves troubled nations in Africa and Latin America. No argument that troubled countries in both continents are awash in arms. But it is hardly fair to blame the United States. According to the CRS report, last year Italy sold $300 million to African countries—three times as much as American exports. Meanwhile, just the small European nations logged combined sales of some $2.4 billion to Latin America, nearly double American sales ($1.4 billion).
Clearly, American arms sales are not destabilizing the world. So what is it that really angers most of the critics?
America is the doghouse with the disarmament nongovernmental organizations because President Obama did not deliver the goods. He had promised to push through an agreed text for a global conventional arms control treaty at the UN convention in July.
The purpose of the convention, which was attended by representatives of just about every country on the planet, was to establish common worldwide standards for the global arms trade. It failed. “President Obama should have—but did not—provide the leadership necessary to close the deal on the arms trade treaty and help reduce human suffering caused by irresponsible international arms transfers and arms brokering,” railed Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, in a press release [5] when the conference collapsed at the eleventh hour.
It is not clear why the United States is the bad guy here. The U.S. record on responsibly managing arms exports is actually better than most other countries. Consider Russia, which places second on the list of top exporters. The Kremlin has far more direct control over arms exports than does Washington. Since 2007, Rosoboronexport, a state-owned company, has been the only Russian entity holding the full license to export arms. Yet Moscow’s record of employing best practices in managing its arms sales is spotty at best. Just check out the number of MANPADS [6] the CRS says Moscow exports. It appears that the Russians sell them only in lots of a thousand.
The Arms Control Association can throw all the rocks at Washington it wants, but the group should be under no illusion that countries such as Russia would ever approve a conventional arms treaty that would actually prohibit them from selling arms to anyone they please.
Moscow was happy to walk away from a final treaty text that would establish common global standards for international arms transfers. “They have no intention whatsoever of signing any treaty that would limit their ability to supply Assad, or anyone else,” observed Ted Bromund, a foreign-policy analyst at the U.S.-based Heritage Foundation who attended the conference as an observer. He concluded:
They [the Russians] want ‘tough implementation standards’ on the treaty to make it apply only to terrorists and criminals. . . . This will allow them to keep on supplying dictators, authoritarians, and thugs under the pretense that they are assisting them in the fight against terrorism—which is exactly the argument they make on Syria.Even if Russia, China and every other major weapons exporter accepted the notion that global oversight of conventional arms sales is a good idea, it is highly debatable whether or not a global treaty would be the best way to put that idea into practice. Treaties work best when the nations entering them share common interests and goals. The more nations that enter a treaty—and the less they share reasons for doing so—the more worthless that agreement becomes. A global arms treaty has about as much chance of curbing Third World violence as the Versailles Treaty had of ensuring world peace.
There is a better approach for dealing with global arms trafficking. Rather than pretend that responsible nations can craft a workable agreement with regimes that have no intention of following the rules, dependable states should work with each other.
There are a number of voluntary arms-control programs that work pretty well. Among them are the Missile Technology Control Regime and the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies. They are not perfect, but they are least useful.
Angst over American arms sales is more than just misplaced. The “Blame America” campaign is part of cheerleading for a treaty that is the wrong answer for how to keep weapons out of the hands of bad people.
James Jay Carafano is director of the Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies.
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