Coincident with the inauguration of President Barack Obama, China issued a White Paper outlining its national defense strategy on Tuesday. In that paper, China pointed to a security situation that was “improving steadily” overall At the same time, the paper explicitly referred to the growing threat from the United States’ increased arms sales to Taiwan. Over Beijing’s protest, the Pentagon announced last October a deal for the sale of $6.5 billion in arms to Taiwan-to include 30 Apache attack helicopters, 330 Patriot missiles, and 32 Harpoon missiles. Beijing referred to the deal as a “violation” of established principles that would cause “serious harm to the China-US relations as well as to peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits.”
In 2008, as in each of the previous seven years, the United States led the world in arms sales at $32 billion. In 2006-2007, the U.S. sold weapons to more than 170 nations, up from 123 at the start of the Bush administration. Obviously, these arms deals are supposed to accomplish a range of foreign policy goals-winning influence, gaining access, maintaining and encouraging friendly regimes, as well as bolstering the U.S. balance of payments and domestic economy. At the same time, these large-scale weapons sales prop up teetering regimes and dictatorships, sow discord, promote violent solutions to international problems, and result in widespread civilian suffering. In fact, U.S. weapons “played a role in 20 of world’s 27 major wars in 2006-07,” according to a December, 2008, report from the New American Foundation. Weapons from the United States are now present in half of the major armed conflicts currently taking place worldwide. And, thirteen of the 25 leading U.S. clients were either undemocratic and/or guilty of human rights violations-Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Korea, Kuwait, Egypt, Colombia, etc.
One obvious omission from this abbreviated list is Iraq. The U.S. has-some would say necessarily-sent into Iraq an enormous volume of weapons. Aside from those destined for the American military, hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons have gone in to arm an Iraqi army and its police and security forces. (Of course, arming Iraq preceded the current war. Each current member of the Security Council armed the regime of Saddam Hussein in the years leading to the present conflict) In the last four years, the Pentagon has financed the shipment of more than 1 million rifles, pistols, and infantry weapons to Iraqi forces. These shipments have largely been the responsibility of private arms firms such as Taos Industries. Taos alone was awarded contracts totaling more than $95 million for supplying arms to Iraq. All told, the Pentagon oversaw the signing of 47 weapons-supply contracts amounting to nearly $220 million since 2003. Due to little or no oversight and widespread corruption, as many as several hundred thousand of those weapons have now been “lost.” Officials are unable to account for their distribution inside Iraq. Many have concluded that some number of those weapons have found their way into the hands of insurgents.
One over-arching and troubling pattern in all of this has been the shift in responsibility from the State Department to the Defense Department since 9/11. This shift has meant, among other things, vastly increased arms available to a wider range of clients (an additional $40 billion in new funding for arms sales), less oversight from the State Department (whose regulations include at least a nod to human rights), and less congressional scrutiny (the responsible congressional committees differ substantially from State to Defense).
As many of us assume, this is not an entirely new phenomenon. However, the real take off moment for this most lethal element of American foreign policy can be traced to a fairly recent past. Following the Vietnam War and amid a faltering economy and BOP deficits, Richard Nixon ordered the Pentagon to relax and/or remove the barriers to international arms sales in 1974. As the result of that decision (coupled with aggressive marketing from U.S. arms suppliers and new wealth among some Middle East states-namely OPEC), arms sales skyrocketed. In the twenty years leading to 1969, U.S. arms sales totaled less than $12 billion-and $9 billion of that went to the “developed” world. From this low, the numbers quickly climbed: $1.4 billion in 1971; $3 billion in 1972; $5.3 billion in 1973; $10 billion in 1974. Added up, the U.S. shipped $49.8 billion in arms in 1974-1977. U.S. arms shipments to Persian Gulf countries alone shot up 2500 percent. These sales had more to do with avoiding massive BOP deficits than with foreign policy and, as we know, resulted in serious “blowback.” Some at the time recognized the contradictory nature of these deals and the resulting blowback. The Shah of Iran was the lead recipient of U.S. arms. A younger Senator Joseph Biden complained in 1982, “we kidded ourselves” that “we had close to $30 billion worth of the most sophisticated arms in the world in Iran.” And yet, “without a shot being fired, the Shah was marched out of the country.” Now, “all those weapons are either lying dormant or have become accessible to the Soviet Union.” Indeed, massive arms sales are probably a better instrument for dealing with balance of payments problems than for charting a sustainable foreign policy.
Perhaps it is this history that the Chinese hope the new administration will recall.
Tags: iraq, Military, military-industrial complex, U.S. Military Aid
James Carter
James M. Carter (Ph.D. University of Houston) specializes in American foreign relations, the Vietnam War, the United States and East Asia, the Cold War, modernization theory, political economy, and nation building. His book _Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968_ was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. He has also written articles on war profiteering in Vietnam and Iraq and the US advisory effort in Vietnam, and he has published reviews and essays in _The Journal of Military History_, _Peace & Change_, _Education About Asia_, _Itinerario_, History News Network, _The Asia Times_, and the BBC. Currently he is pursuing two research projects: the first focuses on US-China relations during the Boxer Rebellion, the second examines the relationship between the government and private corporations in the realm of foreign policy from World War II through the 1960s.