Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Interestingly enough, maintaining access to Persian Gulf oil requires about $50 billion of the annual U.S. defense budget, including maintenance of one or more carrier task forces there, protecting sea lanes, and keeping large air forces in readiness in the area. But the oil we import from the Persian Gulf costs only a fifth that amount, about $11 billion per annum. Middle Eastern oil accounts for 10 percent of U.S. consumption, 25 percent of Europe’s, and half of that of Japan, which contributes in inverse proportion to maintaining a G-7 military presence there. It is not that Europe and Japan are incapable of securing their own oil supplies through commercial treaties, diplomacy, or military activity, but that America’s global hegemony makes it unnecessary for them to do so.

One of the things this huge military establishment also does is sell arms to other countries, making the Pentagon a critical economic agency of the United States government. Militarily oriented products account for about a quarter of the total U.S. gross domestic product. The government employs some 6,500 people just to coordinate and administer its arms sales program in conjunction with senior officials at American embassies around the world, who spend most of their “diplomatic” careers working as arms salesmen. The Arms Export Control Act requires that the executive branch notify Congress of foreign military and construction sales directly negotiated by the Pentagon. Commercial sales valued at $14 million or more negotiated by the arms industry must also be reported. Using official Pentagon statistics, between 1990 and 1996 the combination of the three categories amounted to $97,836,821,000. From this nearly $100 billion figure must be subtracted the $3 billion a year the government offers its foreign customers to help subsidize arms purchases from the United States.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the five leading arms suppliers for the period 1993 through 1997 were the United States, Russia, England, France, and Germany, though total American sales were some $14 billion greater than those of the other four combined. SIPRI has found that the five leading arms purchasers for that period were Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Turkey, Egypt, and South Korea, each of which spent between $5 billion and $10 billion on arms over this five-year period.²⁹ Japan was the second-biggest purchaser of high-tech weapons. All the leading purchasers were close American allies or clients.

Both the United States government and the world’s arms dealers claim that the arms trade has declined since 1987, the benchmark year for the Cold War. However, this “decline” is based almost entirely on declining arms sales by the former Soviet bloc—and it is likely that the 1987 estimates of arms sales by the former Soviet Union were as inflated as the estimates of, for example, the Soviet naval threat during the 1980s. American arms sales in any case have actually increased in the years since the Cold War ended. By 1995, according to its own Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the United States was the source of 49 percent of global arms exports. It shipped arms of various types to some 140 countries, 90 percent of which were either not democracies or were human rights abusers.

In November 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton announced that he would make it his policy “to reduce the proliferation of weapons of destruction in the hands of people who might use them in very destructive ways.” In February 1995, President Clinton released his new arms export policies. They renewed old Cold War policies even though the Cold War had clearly ended, but they emphasized the commercial advantages of foreign arms sales. According to the Clinton White House, the United States’ arms export policies are intended to deter aggression; “promote peaceful conflict resolution and arms control, human rights, [and] democratization”; increase “interoperability” of the equipment of American and allied armies; prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missiles; and “enhance the ability of the U.S. defense industrial base to meet U.S. defense requirements and maintain long-term military technological superiority at lower costs.”³⁰ One of the arms industry’s chief lobbyists commented, “It’s the most positive statement on defense trade that has been enunciated by any administration.”³¹ But despite the doublethink language of the White House, there are certain essential contradictions in arms sales policy that cannot be papered over. The Pentagon’s global industrial policy, which keeps its corporate support system in place and well funded, regularly overrides more traditional foreign policy concerns, creating many potential long-term problems that may, in the end, prove beyond all solution. Arms sales are, in short, a major cause of a developing blowback world whose price we have yet to begin to pay.