In response to your comment, the sentiment that Third World nations should be forbidden from buying foreign weapons is an extremely paternalistic one. Why do you wish to enfeeble Third World nations? Why do you think you have the right to remove the responsibility of citizens of Third World nations to regulate their governments’ military spending via the ballot box or the street?

Your argument that fighter planes are WMDs because they “indirectly” cause the death of millions since the money spent on these weapons could be spent more effectively elsewhere is weak at best. You’d rather the government spent that money on some social programme that’d probably be set up to benefit the government’s cronies anyway? Using your logic, I see no reason why one couldn’t describe Indian fertiliser as a “WMD” because of all the indirect deaths the fertiliser subsidy causes due this most egregious example of useless government expenditure.

In your response above, you again contend that American weapons sales are all about dollar profits, and how myopic such a stance is. As I pointed out earlier, commercial profit is not the primary factor in foreign sales of American weapons. If it was, China and North Korea would own new American weapons. And I think your analysis of US arms sales to India and Pakistan - that the Americans are deliberately creating an arms race to make more money - is very simplistic. Have you ever considered that it serves American geostrategic interests nicely when the balance of power between the subcontinental states doesn’t disproportionately favour India?

You have not answered James fully. Indeed your choice of terminology seems to be taken from the rhetorical manual of CPI(M). Consider this: If we were not bullheaded enough to starve our own millions by sheer stupidity of econmic planning, how much role would this arms race play in this alleged impoverishment? Ever thought about it from that angle? You probably have not and as James has already argued, it is a miniscule role already being played. Arms spending is a tiny fraction of te budget of even a arms-buying-maniac like India.
And Atanu “war-mongering leaders” is really a pathetic one-dimensional term. You do your own intellect severe disservice by using these leftist monikers which have little, if any relation to reality. Little have you cared to find out just who pushed the so-called “neo con warmongers” to iraq. Heard of Vali Nasr? Fouad Ajami? and other Shia’a apologists? As I said you do your awesome intellect a severe disservice by repeating stupid monikers.

Good day

I am a realist enough to admit that “conflict is in evitable in international relations.” The US plays a significant role in international relations but it is not alone among the rich industrialized nations profiting from conflict. Yes, if the US did not, other advanced countries would – and indeed, do – supply the weapons that the less developed countries use to basically slaughter each other.

I believe that the US is at the leading edge of weapons development and thus sets the standards for the state of the art for killing humans. True, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. However, how efficiently the killing is effected depends on how efficient the US has been in developing the weapons of mass destruction. Let’s do keep in mind that the true WMD are not nuclear-tipped ICBMs but more of the conventional weapons that kill far more over regular use. Besides, fighter planes kill a lot more – not directly of course but indirectly. Here is how.

Each generation of fighter planes that the US produces makes the previous generations available for sale to the impoverished third world countries. But even though no longer useful to the US, they are sold in lots that costs billions of dollars. To pay for these expensive toys, millions of third world people have to starve. Sure, the US does not directly starve them. There is a lot of indirection. Imagine if these were not available for sale to the poor countries. They would not have to pay for them through the hunger, blood, and sweat of the millions of poor.

All poor nations cannot afford the best of the obsolete technology. So, for example, the US gifts Pakistan the weapons. Then India is forced to buy just to maintain parity. Thus they sell one to India for every one the US gifts to Pakistan. All fair and square. The US is the “Lord of War.” (See that movie even though that insufferable actor has the lead role.)

Now, I realize of course that Americans are not evil incarnate because of which they sell arms to others. Any nation with capabilities similar to the Americans would do precisely as the Americans are doing. It is part of the basic human nature—and nature as we all well know is red in tooth and claw. If Indians had a chance to enrich themselves by selling weapons of mass destruction, they too would do it merrily.

Chandra:

You write that “…it is a false choice that poor nations don’t need armies and security apparatus.” I don’t say that the poor don’t need security. What I am saying is that it is silly to spend billions of dollars in making a billion impoverished people secure against another few hundred million equally impoverished people. If the US were not supply a few billion dollars worth of arms to both sides of a conflict, the conflict would be much less costly in terms of dollars. The US is the auctioneer in the dollar auction where the players are India and Pakistan. Enough said.

James Waterton accuses me of “knee-jerk anti-Americanism.” Although superficially my post can be read as anti-American, I would argue otherwise. I am not anti-American and certainly not knee-jerk anti-American. I leave that to the communists in India. What I am against is the supplying of arms to third world countries. One can be pro-America without being blindly jingoistic and support every aspect of American foreign policy. Indeed, it is out of my sincere love for America that I most seriously criticize the US for the evil that its warmongering leaders unleash upon the world.

I consider myself a half-American, having lived nearly half my life in the US (and more than half of my adult life.) Both India and the US have my loyalty. See my post “What the world owes the US” for a brief elaboration of this point.

Sincerely,
Atanu

Actually, it’s a miniscule cause - though it hits the emotional red button marvellously - as the above post proves. Your surely deliberate mislabelling of fighter jets as “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) is a symptom of this. What about agricultural trade? Agricultural trade barriers in both the developed and developing worlds cause vastly more human suffering than the weapons trade. Why is it that India is a net exporter of food, yet Indians still starve? Isn’t your government - and government in general - the problem?

The US has to keep selling these WMD so as to keeps its WMD factories humming.

Absolute rubbish. If the third world stopped buying American weapons, I can assure you that the American military-industrial complex would continue on more-or-less unabated. American weapons manufacturers’ sales to the American military outnumber foreign sales several times over. Commercial profit is the vastly junior motivating factor for the Americans in deals such as the one you mentioned regarding F-16 sales to Pakistan. The true profit is measured in political capital - it’s all about cementing alliances and quid-pro-quo. Pakistan supports the US agenda, so it has access to high-tech US military hardware. Ditto India.

Russia, on the other hand (and most ironically), is far less discriminatory in regards to who it will sell its weapons to. In the heartland of the former Soviet Union, the profit motive reigns supreme when it comes to exporting weaponry.

Of course you won’t notice this, and once again, knee-jerk anti-Americanism reigns supreme.

The point you make about human nature forms the basis of one school of Realism. Perhaps not aggression per se, but the desire to dominate over others is in the order of things.

(some nation go)to war more often than other nations. The Swiss don’t want war…but the Americans thrive on it.
Usually it’s those nations who believe that their way of life is the best and the others have to follow it (a form of aggression) who go to war. Look what the US did to the American Indians. Their identity was annhilated.

We need to distinguish between war and aggressiveness/belligerance/hegemonistic desires. Some states are more likely to initiate wars, but most are likely to fight them. (No state simply surrenders). The Swiss are in a situation—not entirely created by themselves—where they can avoid having to go to war. But they too do not take chances. The Swiss Army is not only a pocket knife.

Without those arms deal, Musharaff cant be the dictator for Pakistan (we would get a much worser devil from their anti-human parties) and US cannot move closer to India, while demanding Pakistan to go after Taliban.

Even if an un-corrupted India lived in a quite neighbourhood of post-WWII and post-cold war Europe with no threats from west or east (and with a powerful ally watching over), how much money would you want to tax and transfer to poor people? European nations with 1% of GDP spending on armed forces still have problems with poverty and economic growth just like nations spending 4-5% of GDP.

And how nations have the war mongering generals and pockets of society attacked, and land and resources taken over?

The comparison of poverty with national security is always false choice because reducing one doesn’t solve the other. It is especially true for our country.

As long as US dollar remains the reserve currency of the world,
as long as the Asian Central Banks (esp China) retain their
dollar holdings with US treasury bonds, etc, US dollar will hold.
If and when if the central banks and others loose faith and sell
their dollar assets, that will be the end of US dollar and its
economy. USD will drop like a rock. No one is sure of the future.

Lord Keynes warned “..there is no surer way of undermining a
nation’s character than by undermining her currency..”

We are a living example for this.

Great post!

But like Nitin in the comments above, I’m not sure if its just “the warmongering ignorant policy makers” who are responsible for war. Let’s take India and Pakistan, for instance. I’ve heard politicians make this statement, (Murli Manohar Joshi comes to mind) “We’ll blast them out of existence” — and people cheer! One could argue that politicians create sentiments like these by their very expressions but I would argue that the reason politicians say these things is because they work — people respond to them!! Plus statements like these are so common in conversation that I’ve lost count of times I’ve heard them from my friends.

I also don’t know about most people in the world being able to live and let live. If that was so, wouldn’t we have solved most problems in the world by now? The Israel-Palestine thing would be over tomorrow if they all realized that they had to live and let live. So would our India-Pakistan problems. But it doesn’t work that way, somehow.

Why? It is a pet theory of mine — a little fatalistic, to be sure — that any good thing is built on blood and guts. Secularism, as a concept, arose in Europe, because of all the blood that was spilled there over religion (and there was quite a lot of it). The European Union is a patent result of Western Europe’s very real aversion to another (world ) war. I don’t mean to say that Europeans actually think these things when they they think about war but that the memory of slaughter lives on as a cultural memory. The people of India and Pakistan don’t have a cultural memory of war and destruction, which means they respond jubiliantly to politicians making statements about blasting a country out of existence, which in turn makes politicians go on and on in the same vein. I don’t really have a solution and by no means do I want a war to erupt tomorrow between us and our neighbors — we have enough on our hands without adding war to it. But somehow, I think, peace won’t be posisble without having a real cultural memory of destruction. And frankly, I don’t like this thought very much myself.