Why the US Sells Weapons to 103 Countries

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- We've been busy mapping where weapons flow in this world,

especially those that originate in the United States.

And this is part two of a series on the arms trade.

If you watch part one, you'll already know

that there's a long history

of businessmen getting rich off of war.

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But I wanted to see

what the weapons trade looks like today using data.

So after months of working on this,

we finally got a map that looks nice.

It looks pretty.

The thicker the lines, the more weapons flow.

So in this video I want to go deep into these lines

to show you what they can teach us about

how the United States projects its power, about what happens

when you sprinkle weapons all around the globe.

I've been looking at every one of these countries

and with the help of my new colleague, Sam, I'm hoping

to bring you in into a much deeper understanding

of the American arms trade.

I also wanna let you in on some

of the conversations I've been having

with experts in this field,

which for me was very helpful in decoding all of this.

Hello. Hello.

- I'm Jeff Abramson.

I'm a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy

and I also lead something called The Forum on the Arms Trade

which is really where my passion is.

- I'm Bill Hartung.

I'm currently a senior research fellow

at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

I've been working on arms trade issues since the 90s.

- Why do we sell weapons to other countries

in the first place?

- I mean, at the most basic level it is

to promote peace and security.

When we talk about the currency

of international relationships,

sometimes weapons become that currency

and what we desperately need is alternate currencies.

- Well, there's the textbook reasons and real reasons.

The Pentagon would tell you it promotes stability,

it helps allies defend themselves.

So there's this kind of strategic argument,

but it's really about if you believe the US should be able

to go anywhere, fight any battle, beat any adversary.

It's kind of premised

in a fairly militarized view of foreign policy.

- The United States sold weapons to 103 countries

and that's major weapons.

Generally whenever the United States provides weapons

to other country, they have to agree on how to use them

and they're not supposed to use them

to violate human rights.

But it's hard to see the leverage

that the United States can use with that government.

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- One last thing I wanna do before we dive fully in is give

you a theoretical point in IR, international relations.

Understanding this will help us understand

this map much better.

It's this concept of balance of power.

The big paradox in international relations

is that countries will naturally get into conflict

with each other unless they calculate

that it is unwise to do so,

that they actually don't have a chance

of winning or gaining anything.

So countries are always building up their weapons

so that they have just enough so that

their enemy will not attack them,

but not too much to where they will provoke some kind

of escalation and their enemy will start

to get into a race to have more weapons.

Every country is making this calculation all of the time,

this balance of power with their rivals in their region.

And weapons systems and capabilities tends

to be the ingredients that are used for that calculation,

for that balance of power.

When the US government approves a bunch

of weapons being sent to some country,

in all of their press releases

they always say the same thing, which is that

this sale will not alter the balance of power in the region.

An imbalance of power is what leads

to escalating conflict and instability.

What an irony that the promotion of peace

and security is sell killing machines to other countries.

- There are people who believe

this creates better peace and security.

At the moment of the transfer it seems like a good idea.

It feels like you've gotta provide them

or like this is the only solution is you put these weapons

in this situation because we're out of options.

- The first takeaway from this is just

what you can see immediately,

that the United States has a massive presence

all around the world.

You could look at these lines as almost tentacles

of US influence in almost every country on earth,

selling jets and guns and tanks and missiles and bombs

and radar and helicopters in exchange for influence.

- I'd say at the real global level is this idea

that if we are engaging in you in the arms trade,

if you are buying weapons from us,

we will have some say in how you act.

- But that's about all this map will show you.

The US has influence all over the world.

It's something we kind of know.

I want to get a deeper understanding of what's going on

with each of these lines, which is why I reached out

to my good friend Sam Ellis.

Sam Ellis, creator of Search Party.

Do you have time to help me out?

- Yeah, let's do it. - Let's do it.

Sam specializes in taking something

that's complicated and giving us a better insight into it,

helping us learn from it using design and visual language.

So Sam's down here and we're going to figure out

how to decode this map.

- There's a place that collects all and that's our guy.

- What we are trying to do here

is we want to understand the why

'cause this map doesn't say why.

It doesn't say what is the US' motive in this.

It's often securing the loyalty of a regime somewhere

and weapons are the currency for securing loyalty.

- The US sometimes wants stability in the region

and it achieves that sometimes by wanting stability

in terms of we picked you as a government,

we would like you to stay in power.

- One of the reasons we sell is so that we don't have

to be the world policemen everywhere all the time

doing all the work.

We can have people who basically outsource it to.

- What I'd like this map system

to somehow convey is that what the US buys

with the currency of weapons varies.

And I think it would be really interesting

to zoom in to some of these case studies

and somehow show what the US is buying.

So it's stability, it's allies--

- It's ally, stability, resources, relationship,

and we put all the categories on

and then you zoom into the different combinations.

Let's zoom into Saudi Arabia. They have all four.

Why do they have all four?

Let's go to Columbia. They have two. Why two?

- So when we zoom into these cases,

we should be more descriptive and less analytical.

- So what do you think the map is gonna look like?

Do you think that the the most weapons are gonna go

to the country with the most number of badges?

- Yes.

At the end of the day, there is a deep underlying force

in all of this, which is that the more weapons we sell,

the more money they make.

And the people in this town

wanna make a (beep) ton of money.

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- Okay, so the goal here is to take this map,

which shows who the US is selling weapons to

and add what they're asking for in return.

But that's a lot easier said than done.

Because the US doesn't say exactly what it wants back

for these countries in exchange for weapons,

it's hard for us to make any definitive claims.

But I think if we look at these countries' locations,

their history and their relationship with the US,

we can surmise that the US is asking

for basically five main things: stability, alliances,

friendship, help against an enemy or a rival

and vital resources.

So we looked at the more than 100 countries

that the US sell's weapons to and tried to estimate

what they could give the US in return.

And then we mapped it.

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So now we can see not only who the US sell's weapons to,

but we have an idea of why.

And although this is based on subjective estimations by us,

it's still useful to see that American weapons come

with expectations, namely

that these countries will help the US project its influence

and its power all over the globe.

So if we think of weapons as a currency,

then the most common thing it's buying is friendship.

Weapons are one of the most effective ways for the US

to get other governments on its side.

And so it's a goal of almost every weapons deal.

But some countries have more to offer than others.

If we zoom to Europe, you'll see

that the US is also buying stronger allies.

The US is in the NATO alliance with most of these countries

so the US sells them weapons as a way

to make their defenses as strong as possible

and to prepare them for the possibility

that they may have to fight a war together.

The US considers many countries allies,

but we only included countries that the US is obligated

to defend because it's signed a treaty.

Ukraine is an example of a country that the US sells lots

of weapons to but isn't in the NATO alliance.

Instead, the US is asking for Ukraine to counter an enemy.

We've defined four countries

as the main enemies or rivals of the US.

The US often sells weapons to their neighbors

as a way to fight a war against them

or deter them from starting a new one.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014,

and so the US is selling Ukraine weapons

and in exchange the US is stopping Russia

from conquering it and other countries in the region.

In the Middle East, the US sells weapons to a number

of countries as a way to counter its other enemy, Iran.

The primary example is Israel

who gets a huge number of weapons from the US.

But the US also sells weapons to countries

that control vital resources that it needs.

In the case of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, that's oil.

But a vital resource can also mean a strategic passageway

like the Suez Canal in Egypt where a lot

of the world's shipping goes through.

By selling them weapons, the US is asking these countries

to protect and give it access to these resources.

In Africa, the US sells weapons to many governments,

not just to secure resources, but also to try

and make them more stable.

War and coups have made many regions in Africa volatile

and unpredictable, and the US hopes that by selling weapons

to these governments, it can help them stay in power

and maintain the status quo.

It's important to understand

that these labels often overlap like in East Asia.

China, a major US rival is pushing

to assert its control over this region

and the US is responding by selling weapons

to countries standing in its way.

Some are allies, some control vital resources

like Taiwan's semiconductor industry.

Then there are many that the US feels it needs to strengthen

so that China can't destabilize the region.

So now we can see not only

where these weapons flow, but why.

The definitions are based on

some subjective categories that we came up with.

But even still, it's useful to see

that American weapons come with expectations

that these countries will help the US project influence

and power all over the globe.

- Okay, thank you Sam.

Man, I'm glad Sam came into this story.

He is the master of taking complex systems

and breaking them down to get a deeper understanding

of really rich data.

Search Party is the channel I started

with Sam last year and it is awesome.

It's similar to what we do here,

but with a very different journalistic approach.

You should go subscribe because it's really good stuff.

So for the final chapter of this video,

I'm going to address something that many of you familiar

with the arms trade are maybe thinking about right now

which is, does all of this actually work?

If weapons are a currency for influence

and the US is using that currency to buy stuff,

to buy influencer stability around the world,

does that actually work the way that the Pentagon

and the United States government think it does?

The short answer is sometimes, but not really.

Where weapons really do work is in keeping alliances strong.

- There's no question some countries welcome it.

Our allies like Korea and Japan and so forth. Australia.

And it probably does cement those relationships,

make it more likely they'll support the US in a crunch.

- But when it comes to trying to use weapons as an incentive

to get countries to behave the way you want them to,

that's where it kind of starts to break down.

And the best case for this is Saudi Arabia.

You can see on this map

we give a lot of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

The Obama administration approved loads of weapons transfers

to Saudi Arabia, and in doing so,

we had some strings attached.

A big one being that those weapons could not be used

to violate human rights or from the horse's mouth:

genocide, crimes against humanity,

grave breaches of the Geneva Convention,

serious violations of Common Article 3

of the Geneva Conventions, attacks directed

against civilians who are legally protected from attacks

or other war crimes as defined by 18 USC 2441.

Translation, Saudi Arabia is not to use these weapons

against civilians in any of their conflicts.

And yet, as Saudi Arabia has been waging this war

against Yemen, they've done exactly that,

using American weapons.

They've bombed hospitals, weddings, and even a school bus.

And we know that this is American weapons

because investigators and journalists have looked

at the wreckage of these attacks

and looked at the actual serial numbers, concluding

that these are American weapons,

that they flow through these lines.

- Although Saudi Arabia was dropping bombs,

most people in Yemen viewed it as an American war.

Sent arms to Saudi Arabia that slaughter people in Yemen.

But there was sort of this notion of,

well, they're an oil supplier.

They're a bulwark against Iran

and those so-called larger strategic interest

overrode the human rights imperatives.

- Shout out to Bellingcat,

the open source investigative journalism project

that helped uncover a lot of this stuff.

So Saudi Arabia isn't obey the conditions

that we put on these weapons,

and Congress tried to pass a resolution that said

that they were gonna cut off some of this military aid

that we were giving to Saudi Arabia.

The problem is a lot of the power

to approve these weapon sales rests

with the executive, the president.

So President Trump actually vetoed this resolution.

And even under the Biden administration,

even though there was like a brief pause,

the weapons have kept flowing, making it very clear

that this leverage that the US thinks it has

because it's the provider of all of these weapons,

is actually kind of reversed.

Turns out Saudi Arabia has a lot

more leverage than we thought.

- The ideas of the United States has kind

of captured Saudi Arabia by having this weapons

and defense arrangement, that the Saudis need to rely on us.

They will do things that we ask them to do.

But I think the opposite is now happening,

that Saudi Arabia's been able to turn the tides

and say, "Hey, if you don't provide this,

"we'll find an alternate partner."

The relationship has been perverted.

- Okay, but Saudi Arabia is a monarchy.

Maybe we have better luck influencing fellow democracies.

So let's look at Israel, who receives more military aid

from the United States than any other country.

- I think Israel's the prime example of the lack of leverage

that you would think a well developed

long-term weapons relationship would have.

- The US government has come out

and said that they are not happy with the way

that Israel is conducting its war

against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

And yet what we see here is an effort

to push more military aid to Israel without any pause

or withdraw of these weapons transfers.

- And that's the reality of the arms trade is that

we can hope countries will take things into mind.

We can tell them we want to do things,

but ultimately they end up making local decisions

for their local needs.

- There's a lot more cases just like this,

like the Philippines, where the Duterte regime has used

American weapons to carry out a brutal war on drugs,

murdering and jailing civilians in the process.

What's confusing about this is that

in some sense the weapons are working for US interests.

We sell them these weapons, we give them these weapons,

we buy their support in deterring our enemy.

But in the process, these weapons that we use

as our currency are used for other things

that have nothing to do with deterring our enemy.

And sometimes it gets really out of control,

like we give a lot of weapons to Turkey, a NATO ally.

Turkey will then transfer that to its proxies in Syria

who will use them to fight against American-backed rebels

that are also using US weapons.

So American weapons are being used

on both sides of a conflict.

It just feels a little bit like deja vu from the book

that was written a hundred years ago, stating

that this was a problem and it still kind of is.

The other big issue with using weapons

as your main currency for influence around the world

is that weapons don't just go away.

Back in the 80s, the CIA transferred a bunch of weapons

to rebel fighters in Afghanistan

who were fighting against the Soviets.

Decades later, those same weapons were being used

by those fighters and their descendants to fight

against Americans who were then invading Afghanistan.

Same thing happened in Libya.

We gave a bunch of weapons there and they leaked out

and ended up in the hands of militants

and insurgents in Syria and South Sudan.

So if weapons are this currency

that don't actually give us leverage

and that can create more danger than stability,

why do we keep making them

and sending them to over a hundred countries?

There's a lot of answers to that question,

but one of them has to do with money.

There's a lot of money in making weapons.

There always has been since the industrial revolution.

Lots of these weapons are made all over our country,

intentionally creating a network of jobs

that no congressman ever wants to vote down.

If a congressman votes to make fewer weapons,

they could be voting against a factory

or production facility in their district.

Add to that, that some

of our lawmakers own shares in these companies.

If these companies make money, they make money,

and yet they're the ones approving the money

that goes to these corporations.

A massive conflict of interest that we've reported on before

in a previous video on insider trading.

What you get is this military industrial complex,

a permanent economic business machine that is incentivized

to make more and more weapons, both to prepare for war

and provide national security, but also to keep people rich

and to keep the constituents of lawmakers happy.

So in short, one of the reasons the map looks like this

is to keep a bunch of private corporations nice and rich.

(piano music)

Okay, well that is the end of a journey for now.

It started with an old book that really piqued my interest

and brought me into a history that I didn't know about.

And through this process, I feel like I've been able

to draw a linkage between this history

and how it works today.

How for-profit corporations are still motivated

to expand their business by making more

and more killing machines.

Now, weapons are a stabilizing force in our world.

That is true and that is an irony of stability in the world.

You have to have weapons to have some kind

of stability for now.

Weapons also are political leverage that the US uses

to keep the world somewhat stable

and yet there's a lot to scrutinize

and critique about the way that it's done.

We're dealing with weapons. This is dangerous stuff.

We should be able to properly criticize it and critique it.

But instead, our ability to do that is hindered

by the conflict of interest

and the incentives that are brought on

by these for-profit corporations

and their relationship to our lawmakers.

To me, this is what's wrong about the system.

It perverts our ability to actually look into it,

to actually scrutinize it properly

and to actually make the best decision

for the safety and stability of our world.

The weapons industry got out of control

in the early 1900s and ended up contributing

to the worst devastation the world had ever seen,

which woke us up to actually being able to criticize this

and trying to change it.

A lot of those same conflicts of interests

that keep war permanent and enriching still exist today,

and my hope is that it doesn't take

another devastating conflict for us to wake up.

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Covering war and conflict is something

I'm not going to stop doing.

I think it's really important for us

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Thank you all for watching this video. It was a deep dive.

These two parts, if you haven't watched part one,

we'll put the link in the description.

You can go watch it. It's more on the history.

And I'm grateful to Search Party for helping out here.

Search Party is a fantastic new journalistic brand

that we started here with Sam Ellis.

A lot of people worked on this video

to make it come to life.

So, thank you all for watching

and I'll see you in the next one.

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