In an exercise, a Kuwaiti F18 Hornet fighter aircraft stages an attack on Royal Navy Type 23 frigate HMS St Albans. Currently, Israel and all six GCC countries are armed with state-of-the art fighter planes, mostly from the United States. Credit: Simmo Simpson/OGL license

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 23 2015 (IPS)

The nuclear agreement concluded last week between Iran and six big powers, the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, is threatening to trigger a new Middle East military build-up – not with nuclear weapons but with conventional arms, including fighter planes, combat helicopters, warships, missiles, battle tanks and heavy artillery.

The United States is proposing to beef up the military forces of some of its close allies, such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, with additional weapons systems to counter any attempts by Iran to revitalise its own armed forces when U.N. and U.S. sanctions are eventually lifted releasing resources for new purchases.“Even though the agreement was just signed on July 14th, countries are apparently already jockeying to see what U.S. conventional weapons they can get out of the deal." -- Dr. Natalie J. Goldring

All six countries, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), are predominantly Sunni Muslims as against Shia Iran.

According to one news report, the administration of President Barack Obama is also considering an increase in the hefty annual 3.0-billion-dollar military grant – free, gratis and non-repayable – traditionally provided to Israel over the years to purchase U.S weapons systems.

The proposed increase is being described as a “consolation prize” to Israel which has denounced the nuclear deal as a “historic mistake.”

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a Senior Fellow with the Security Studies Programme in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS although the nuclear agreement with Iran is likely to aid nuclear nonproliferation efforts, it may also result in a dangerous increase in the proliferation of conventional weapons to the region.

“Even though the agreement was just signed on July 14th, countries are apparently already jockeying to see what U.S. conventional weapons they can get out of the deal,” she said.

On the other hand, the longstanding sanctions against transfers of major conventional weapons, missiles, and missile systems to Iran will continue for several years under the nuclear agreement, she pointed out.

Even so, Gulf states and Israel are reportedly already lining up for more weapons from the United States.

As usual, their argument seems to be that the weapons are needed for their own defence, she added.

“But who are they defending against? Is the presumed adversary Iran, which remains under a conventional weapons embargo? And who has the military advantage?” asked Dr Goldring, who also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations on conventional weapons and arms trade issues.

According to The New York Times, she said, Iran’s military budget is only about a tenth of the combined military budgets of the Sunni states and Israel.

The Times said the Arab Gulf nations spend a staggering 130 billion dollars annually on defence while Iran’s annual military budget is about 15 billion dollars.

Israel spends about 16 billion dollars annually on its defence, plus the 3.0 billion it receives as U.S. military grants.

Nicole Auger, Middle East & Africa Analyst and International Defense Budgets Analyst at Forecast International, a leading U.S. defence research company, told IPS the Times figures are pretty much on target.

Furthermore, she said, the Sunni dominated nations (read: Gulf states) and Israel have strengths that their Iranian rival does not.

“Despite Iran’s manpower advantage and large arsenal of rockets and missiles, the GCC combined and Israel have far greater air power capabilities, not to mention superior aircraft platforms,” said Auger, author of International Military Markets, Middle East & Africa.

The modern, Western hardware purchased through the past decade stands in direct contrast to the ageing inventory of Iranian forces, she added.

Currently, Israel and all six GCC countries are armed with state-of-the art fighter planes, mostly from the United States.

Israel’s air force is equipped with F-16s, Saudi Arabia, with F-15s and Eurofighter Typhoons, UAE, with F-16s. Kuwait, with Boeing F/A-18C Fighters and Qatar, with Dassault-Mirage 2000-5, eventually to be replaced with the Rafale fighter plane both from France.

Auger said Iran’s most modern fighter is the MiG-29, delivered in the early 1990s.

The rest of the fighter force includes aged U.S.-supplied F-14s, F-4s, and F-5s, as well as Russian-supplied Su-24 attack jets and Dassault Aviation Mirage F-1AD fighter-bombers.

But most of them have remained grounded for lack of spares due to economic and military sanctions by the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.

Dr Goldring told IPS it has to be acknowledged that the United States and its negotiating partners have secured an important agreement with Iran, which should make it more difficult for Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

This agreement should also significantly reduce the likelihood of a U.S. war with Iran. The agreement is a good deal for the United States, its negotiating partners, its allies in the Middle East, and Iran, she added..

Still, the U.S. government is once again contemplating providing highly sophisticated weapons to Middle Eastern nations, even though some of the prospective recipients have horrendous human rights records and questionable internal stability.

Continuing to sell our most modern weapons and technologies also makes it more likely that U.S. military officials will soon be testifying before Congress that they need new weapons systems because the current technologies have already been dispersed around the world, she noted.

“We’ve seen this script before. This approach ignores the risks posed by weapons transfers, and increases the risk that our military personnel will end up fighting our own weapons,” said Dr Goldring.

She pointed out that the prospect of increasing conventional weapons sales as a result of the Iran agreement “looks like a sweet deal for the arms merchants, but not for the rest of us. “

It’s long past time to break out of the traditional pattern of the U.S. government using conventional weapons transfers as bargaining chips.

“Middle Eastern countries need to reduce their stockpiles of conventional weapons, not increase them,” she declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry chats with Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia on Mar. 5, 2015, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, before the two and their counterparts attended a meeting of the regional Gulf Cooperation Council. Credit: U.S. State Department/public domain

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 15 2015 (IPS)

When the United States sells billions of dollars in sophisticated arms to Arab nations, they are conditioned on two key factors: no weapons with a qualitative military edge over Israel will ever be sold to the Arabs, nor will they receive any weapons that are not an integral part of the U.S. arsenal.

But against the backdrop of a White House summit meeting of Arab leaders at Camp David this week, the administration of President Barack Obama confessed it has dispensed with rule number two.“This raises some major questions about the seeming lack of arms control in the region and the potential risks of further one-sided procurement of advanced weapons by GCC states." -- Pieter Wezeman

According to Colin Kahl, national security advisor to Vice-President Joe Biden, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) flies the most advanced U.S.-made F-16 fighter planes in the world.

“They’re more advanced than the ones our Air Force flies,” he told reporters at a U.S. State Department briefing early this week, without going into specifics.

The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia – which participated in the summit were, not surprisingly, promised more weapons, increased military training and a pledge to defend them against missile strikes, maritime threats and cyberattacks from Iran.

An equally important reason for beefing up security in the region is to thwart any attacks on GCC countries by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“I am reaffirming our ironclad commitment to the security of our Gulf partners,” President Obama told reporters at a news conference, following the summit Thursday.

But he left the GCC leaders disappointed primarily because the United States was not willing to sign any mutual defence treaties with the six Arab nations – modeled on the lines of similar treaties U.S. has signed with Japan and South Korea.

Still, Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Kuwait (along with Pakistan) are designated “major non-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) allies.”

Kahl told reporters: “This administration has worked extraordinarily closely with the Gulf states to make sure they had access to state-of-the-art armaments.”

He said that although the U.S. has not entertained requests for F-35s, described as the most advanced fighter plane with the U.S. Air Force, “but keep in mind under this administration we moved forward on a package for the Saudis that will provide them the most advanced F-15 aircraft in the region.”

Taken as a whole, Kahl said, the GCC last year spent nearly 135 billion dollars on their defence, and the Saudis alone spent more than 80 billion dollars.

In comparison, the Iranians spent something like 15 billion dollars on their defence, said Kahl, trying to allay the fears of GCC countries, which have expressed strong reservations about an impending nuclear deal the U.S. and other big powers are negotiating with Iran.

Still, arms suppliers such as France and Britain have been feverishly competing with the United States for a share of the rising arms market in the Middle East, with continued turmoil in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen.

Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher, Arms and Military Expenditure Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS that GCC countries have long procured weapons from both the U.S. and several European countries.

Qatar is probably the one country in the GCC where U.S. military equipment makes up a low share of its military equipment and instead it has been more dependent on French, British and other European arms, he pointed out.

Last year, Qatar ordered a large amount of new arms from suppliers in Europe, the U.S. and Turkey, in which U.S. equipment was significantly more important than it had been in the decades before in Qatari arms procurement.

“None of the GCC countries has been mainly dependent on a single arms supplier in the past four to five decades. The U.S., UK and France have long been the main suppliers to the GCC, competing against each other,” he added.

In an article last week on the GCC summit, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior advisor to the Security Assistance Monitor, described it as “an arms fair, not diplomacy.”

He said the Obama administration, in its first five years in office, entered into formal agreements to transfer over 64 billion dollars in arms and defence services to GCC member states, with about three-quarters of that total going to Saudi Arabia.

He said items on offer to GCC states have included fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, radar planes, refueling aircraft, air-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, artillery, small arms and ammunition, cluster bombs, and missile defence systems.

On any given day, Kahl said, the United States has about 35,000 U.S. forces in the Gulf region.

“As I speak, the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group is there. The USS Normandy Guided Missile Cruiser, the USS Milius Aegis ballistic missile defense destroyer, and a number of other naval assets are in the region,” he said.

“And we have 10 Patriot batteries deployed to the Gulf region and Jordan, as well as AN/TPY-2 radar, which is an extraordinarily powerful radar to be able to track missiles fired basically from anywhere in the region.”

The mission of all of these forces, he said, ”is to defend our partners, to deter aggression, to maintain freedom of navigation, and to combat terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.”

Still, in the spreading Middle East arms market, it is business as usual both to the French and the British.

Wezeman told IPS Qatar has acquired the Rafale to replace its Mirage-2000 aircraft which France supplied about 20 years ago.

The UAE has been considering the purchase of Rafale to replace Mirage-2000 aircraft procured about 10 years ago from France.

Similarly Saudi Arabia has in the past decade ordered British Typhoon combat aircraft and U.S. F-15SAs, just like it ordered British Tornado combat aircraft and U.S. F-15Cs in the 1980s and 1990s.

Oman has recently ordered U.S. F-16s and British Typhoon aircraft to replace older U.S. F-16s and replace UK supplied Jaguar aircraft.

“The same arms acquisition patterns can be seen for land and naval military equipment. It would be a real change if the GCC countries would start large-scale procurement of arms from Russia and China. This has, however, not yet happened,” said Wezeman, who scrupulously tracks weapons sales to the Middle East.

He said access to certain technology has occasionally been one of several reasons for the GCC countries turning to Europe, as the United States tried to maintain a so-called ‘Qualitative Military Edge’ for Israel, in which it refused to supply certain military technology to Arab states which was considered particularly threatening to Israel.

He said for a while the U.S. was not willing to supply air launched cruise missiles with ranges of about 300 km to Arab states. Instead Saudi Arabia and the UAE turned to the UK and France for such weapons and the aircraft to integrate them on.

However, the U.S. has now become less restrictive in this regard and has agreed to supply certain types of cruise missiles to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Finally, what is particularly interesting is that U.S. officials once again emphasise the military imbalance in the Gulf region when mentioning that GCC states’ military spending is an estimated nine times higher than that of Iran (figures which are roughly confirmed by SIPRI data).

“This raises some major questions about the seeming lack of arms control in the region and the potential risks of further one-sided procurement of advanced weapons by GCC states,” he added.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The U.S. Navy variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C, conducts a test flight over the Chesapeake Bay. The F-35 programme includes an unusual arrangement with U.S. allies under which sales of the aircraft will begin as it is being deployed with U.S. forces. Credit: public domain

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 27 2015 (IPS)

The escalating military conflicts in the Middle East – and the month-long aerial bombings of Yemen by an Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia – have triggered a new arms race in the politically-volatile region.

The primary beneficiaries are the United States and Russia, two of the world’s largest arms suppliers, who are feeding the multiple warring parties in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and most recently in Yemen.We keep repeating the same mistake, which is to assume that our foreign policy decisions will not be answered by our adversaries. Time and time again, we’ve been proven wrong in this regard." -- Dr. Natalie Goldring

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a senior fellow with the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS “once again, the Middle East seems to be mired in an arms race.”

The New York Times, she pointed out, recently published a provocative article titled, “Sale of U.S. Arms Fuels the Wars of Arab States,” mentioning several potential U.S. arms sales to the region in the near future.

“But this isn’t likely to be the whole story,” she added.

In all likelihood, said Dr. Goldring, if the proposed U.S. sales go forward, the Russian government will use them as an excuse to supply its clients with more weapons.

“It’s an easy cycle to predict — the United States makes major sales to clients such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or the United Arab Emirates. Then Russia sells weapons to Iran and perhaps Syria with the argument they’re simply balancing U.S. sales. And the cycle continues,” she added.

The six-member Arab coalition engaged in bombarding Yemen is led by Saudi Arabia and includes the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt – all of them equipped primarily with U.S. weapons systems.

The jets used in the attacks inside Yemen are mostly F-15s and F-16s – both front line fighter planes in Middle East arsenals.

The London Economist says ”oblivious to the unfolding humanitarian crisis,” Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, described as a billionaire member of the Saudi royal family, is offering 100 super luxury Bentley cars (one each) to the fighter pilots participating in the bombing raids inside Yemen.

Last week, Russia announced it was lifting a five year voluntary embargo on a long-pending sale of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, which is accused of arming the Houthi rebels under attack by Saudi Arabia and its allies.

The Saudi coalition, which temporarily halted the aerial attacks last week, resumed its bombings over the weekend.

As the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the air campaign has transformed Yemen into a battlefield for broader contest over regional power between Shiite Iran and Sunni Muslim countries led by Saudi Arabia.

There were also reports the Russian government has offered to sell advanced surface-to-air missiles to Iran, providing Tehran with a mobile system that could attack both missiles and aircraft.

The system, the Antey-2500, apparently has the capacity to defend against – and attack – ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and fixed-wing aircraft.

Meanwhile, Russia has also continued to be the primary arms supplier to Syria, another military hot spot in the Middle East.

Historically, virtually all of the weapons systems in the Syrian arsenal have come from Russia, which decades ago signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Damascus ensuring uninterrupted supplies of arms from Moscow.

The civil war in Syria, which has cost over 220, 000 lives, is now in its fifth year, with no signs of a settlement.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) recently released data that showed the United States was still the world’s leading arms exporter.

In the most recent period its data covered, 2010-2014, the United States accounted for 31 percent of the world’s transfers of major conventional weapons. Russia was in second place with 27 percent. No other country accounted for more than 5 percent of arms sales during this period.

According to the New York Times, U.S. defence industry officials told Congress they were expecting within days a request from Arab countries “to buy thousands of American-made missiles, bombs and other weapons, replenishing an arsenal that has been depleted over the past year.”

And Qatar is planning to replace its French-made Mirage fighters with U-S.-made F-15 jets.

Dr. Goldring told IPS one particularly troubling aspect of recent press accounts is the consideration of potential sales of the U.S.’s new F-35 stealth fighter, one of the most advanced, to countries in the Middle East.

“We’ve seen this tactic before. First, U.S. policymakers want to sell our most sophisticated fighter aircraft. Then they turn around and say we need to develop new fighters because the current technology has been distributed to so many countries.

“If we want to preserve our military forces’ technological advantages over potential adversaries, we need to show more restraint in our weapons transfers,” she added.

The F-35 programme already includes an unusual arrangement with U.S. allies under which sales of the aircraft will begin as it is being deployed with U.S. forces.

“We shouldn’t compound this error by considering even wider sales of the F-35,” Goldring said.

Meanwhile, France is negotiating the sale of its most sophisticated fighter plane, the Rafale, to the United Arab Emirates.

Ironically, as these potential sales were being negotiated, countries have been meeting in Vienna to develop implementation plans for the Arms Trade Treaty.

The Arms Trade Treaty calls on countries to be more reflective before making weapons sales decisions, taking into account their potential effects on human rights and humanitarian concerns, and considering factors such as the effect of the transfers on peace and security, among other issues.

“Middle Eastern suppliers and recipients alike desperately need to do this sort of reevaluation. Unfortunately, the recent reports suggest that it’s ‘business as usual’ in the Middle East,” declared Dr. Goldring, who also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations on conventional weapons and arms trade issues.

“For years, I’ve written and spoken about the ‘fallacy of the last move’ in U.S. foreign policy. We keep repeating the same mistake, which is to assume that our foreign policy decisions will not be answered by our adversaries. Time and time again, we’ve been proven wrong in this regard. It’s likely to happen again in this case.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Abu Firuz, the commander of Liwa (Brigade) Salahadin, a Kurdish military unit fighting alongside rebel fighters, watches the besieged district of Karmel al-Jabl in eastern Aleppo, on Dec. 6, 2012. Several of the GCC states, specifically Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, are significant suppliers of weapons, mostly unofficial and clandestine, to some of the warring factions in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. Credit: สังฆมณฑล เชียงใหม่/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 16 2015 (IPS)

The ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen have helped spiral arms sales upwards to the Middle East, according to a study released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The primary beneficiaries were the United States and Russia, whose overall arms exports show a marked increase through 2014, with China lagging behind, according to the latest figures.“As the oil-supplier countries have recovered economically, they have resumed their arms purchases. Financial pressures are not an effective long-term control measure." -- Natalie Goldring

Arms sales to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – increased by 71 per cent from 2005–2009 to 2010–14, accounting for 54 per cent of imports to the Middle East in the latter period.

Saudi Arabia rose to become the second largest importer of major weapons worldwide in 2010–14, increasing the volume of its arms imports four times compared to 2005–2009.

Several of the GCC states, specifically Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, are significant suppliers of weapons, mostly unofficial and clandestine, to some of the warring factions in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.

Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher at SIPRI’s Arms and Military Expenditure Programme, said GCC states have rapidly expanded and modernised their militaries – primarily with arms from the United States and Europe.

“The GCC states, along with Egypt, Iraq, Israel and Turkey in the wider Middle East, are scheduled to receive further large orders of major arms in the coming years,” he added.

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a senior fellow with the Security Studies Programme in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union provide ready markets for arms transfers.

But those transfers, she pointed out, aren’t always reflected in the SIPRI data. SIPRI’s database focuses on major conventional weapons.

“This means that the light weapons and small arms often featured in recent conflicts are not captured in the SIPRI totals,” said Golding, who also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations on conventional weapons and arms trade issues.

She said the drop in crude oil prices since September 2014 reduces the revenues available to oil-rich nations.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the oil price cuts have had strong effects across the oil-producing nations because of their dependence on oil exports.

For the short term, those effects can be moderated by using the financial buffers that are available to countries such as Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

In the past, however, financial pressures have only slowed weapons acquisitions for as long as they have persisted, Goldring said.

“As the oil-supplier countries have recovered economically, they have resumed their arms purchases. Financial pressures are not an effective long-term control measure,” she noted.

According to the most recent SIPRI data, roughly three-quarters of all countries in the world imported major conventional weapons between 2010-2014. Just 10 countries accounted for roughly half of all imports of major conventional weapons during this period.

Of the top 10 largest importers of major weapons during the five-year period 2010–14, five are in Asia: India (15 per cent of global arms imports), China (5 per cent), Pakistan (4 per cent), South Korea (3 per cent) and Singapore (3 per cent).

These five countries accounted for 30 per cent of the total volume of arms imports worldwide.

India accounted for 34 per cent of the volume of arms imports to Asia, more than three times as much as China. China’s arms imports actually decreased by 42 per cent between 2005–2009 and 2010–14.

The new SIPRI data make it clear that the United States and Russia continue to dominate the global arms trade in major conventional weapons.

The United States accounted for 31 percent of the market, up from 29 percent from 2005-2009. Russia’s share increased even more significantly, going from 22 percent of the world market in 2005-2009 to a 27-percent share of the international market from 2010-2014.

“The United States has long seen arms exports as a major foreign policy and security tool, but in recent years exports are increasingly needed to help the U.S. arms industry maintain production levels at a time of decreasing U.S. military expenditure,” said Dr. Aude Fleurant, director of the SIPRI’s Arms and Military Expenditure Programme.

“Enabled by continued economic growth and driven by high threat perceptions, Asian countries continue to expand their military capabilities with an emphasis on maritime assets,” said Wezeman.

He said Asian countries generally still depend on imports of major weapons, which have strongly increased and will remain high in the near future.

Goldring told IPS that although SIPRI notes the significant percentage increase in Chinese exports between the two periods, China is still a minor supplier in comparison to the United States and Russia.

Even with a large increase in its exports, China still only accounts for five percent of the global trade.

The United States and Russia alone account for nearly 60 percent of the world market. U.S. and Russian dominance of the world market is simply not threatened by China, she said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The continuing decline in oil prices has already reduced purchasing power and impacted negatively on some of the world's currencies. Credit/Justin R/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 2 2015 (IPS)

In a satirical piece titled ‘An Unserious Look at the Year Ahead’ in the Wall Street Journal last week, Hugo Rifkind predicts the price of a barrel of oil will fall so low that people across the world would start buying oil for the barrel – and throw the oil out.

The journalistic spoof about the oil market may be an improbable scenario, but in reality the sharp decline in prices has generated both good and bad news – mostly bad.If Middle Eastern sales flatten out or decrease, arms companies may fight harder for contracts in other parts of the world where military expenditure is still on the increase and less dependent on oil prices, such as in North, South East and South Asia.

In the United States, the fall in oil prices is being viewed as an unexpected – but welcome – stimulus to the country’s recession-struck economy.

As one U.S. newspaper headline read: ‘For (U.S. President Barack) Obama, Low Oil Prices Bring Hope’

The London Economist points out that a 40-dollar price cut would shift about 1.3 trillions dollars from oil producers to consumers.

But in the developing world, the current plunge is threatening to undermine oil-dependent economies in Africa, Asia, Latin American and the Middle East.

The continuing decline – from around 107 dollars per barrel last June to less than 70 dollars last month – has already reduced purchasing power and impacted negatively on some of the world’s currencies, including the ruble (Russia), real (Brazil), rupiah (Indonesia), bolivar (Venezuela), naira (Nigeria), peso (Chile), lira (Turkey) and ringgit (Malaysia).

But sooner or later the fall in oil prices is also likely to have a negative impact on both military spending and the thriving multi-billion-dollar arms market in the Middle East.

Perhaps for peace activists, this may be a positive sign in the global campaign for disarmament – mostly in conventional arms.

Arms buying by the six Gulf monarchies alone – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain – have been traditionally fueled by rising oil incomes: more incomes, more state-of-the art weapons.

The exceptions in the Middle East are Israel and Egypt, which depend heavily on U.S. military grants that are gratis and non-repayable.

Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Arms Transfers and Arms Production Programme, at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS lower oil revenues will undoubtedly put pressure on the military expenditure of Middle Eastern states, as in the past.

Saudi Arabia’s arms imports peaked in the 1990s, he said, but then fell rapidly, partly because of oil price-related lower government revenues.

“However, for 2013, we estimated Saudi Arabia will be the world’s fourth largest military spender [about 67 billion dollars] and the UAE the fifteenth largest [19 billion dollars],” said Wezeman, who closely tracks the Middle Eastern arms market.

The world’s three largest military spenders are the United States (640 billion dollars), China (188 billion) and Russia (88 billion), according to 2013 figures released by SIPRI.

Striking a cautionary note, Wezeman said it is, however, too early to say anything about this with certainty, as the arms procuring states in question tend to be highly secretive and undemocratic about military matters and arms procurement programmes and plans.

“They may very well decide to cut spending in other sectors instead, if lower oil prices force them to cut overall government spending,” he declared.

Unveiling its 2015 budget last week, Saudi Arabia said it was “rationalising” its expenditure, but did not specify any details.

According to estimates by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Saudi Arabia’s total foreign exchange reserves amount to about 750 billion dollars.

Nicole Auger, a military analyst covering the Middle East and Africa at Forecast International, a leader in defence market intelligence and industry forecasting, told IPS a projected five-year defence spending (2015-2019) for the Middle East region shows the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) at approximately 3.48 percent.

This number is lower than the past five years’ CAGR (2010-2014), which was 8.45 percent.

“I do credit some of this decline to the anticipated fall in oil prices,” she said.

For Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE, this trend will only serve as a nuisance they can comfortably withstand for a few years – “so I do not expect any significant changes in their defence spending tendencies.”

These markets are huge, and they all spend lavishly on building up their defence capabilities, she said.

Saudi Arabia alone has the world’s fourth-largest military budget and will continue to dominate the Middle East arms market, with a defence budget nearly four times the size of the next closest Middle East military investor, she noted.

“I don’t see a major change in Iran and Iraq’s defence spending trends, even though they stand to be the most hurt by this.”

Auger said due to other regional and internal fractures, these two neighbours will have to maintain their defence spending levels as a cautionary measure.

Even though Iran is already suffering from international sanctions with its unresolved nuclear issue, it still feels it is being threatened, and therefore lower defence spending will only make it more vulnerable from its own perspective, she added.

“With Iraq, you may see them lean more heavily on its allies,” Auger said.

SIPRI’s Wezeman told IPS the importance of the Middle Eastern market for arms producing companies is the fact that sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia alone accounted for 20 percent of sales in 2013 for the third largest arms producer in the world, BAE systems.

And the second largest arms producer, Boeing, sees declining sales of combat aircraft to its main client the United States, and is increasingly dependent on exports, he added.

At the same time, Wezeman said, there are signs the military industry in the region is growing too, though it is still small compared to arms industries in the traditional arms producing countries.

If Middle Eastern sales will flatten out or decrease, he predicted, arms companies will have to fight harder for contracts in other parts of the world where military expenditure is still on the increase and less dependent on oil prices, such as in North, South East and South Asia.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The U.N.'s Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred de Zayas, says it is governments' responsibility to inform the public about military expenditures - and to justify them. Credit: UN Photo/Amanda Voisard

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 14 2014 (IPS)

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has relentlessly advocated drastic cuts in global military spending in favour of sustainable development, will be sorely disappointed by the latest findings in a report released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The decline in arms spending in the West, says SIPRI, has been offset by a rise in military expenditures by emerging non-Western and developing nations who are, ironically, the strongest candidates for development aid."Four hours of military spending is equal to the total budgets of all international disarmament and non-proliferation organisations combined." -- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Asked whether there are any future prospects of reversing this trend, Dr. Sam Perlo-Freeman, director of SIPRI’s Military Expenditure Programme, told IPS, “At present, there is little or no prospect of a large-scale transfer of resources from military spending to spending on human and economic development.”

Of the top 15 military spenders in 2013, eight were non-Western nations: China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, South Korea, Brazil, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The Western countries in the top 15 were the United States, France, UK, Germany, Italy and Australia, plus Japan. Canada, a former high spender, dropped out of the list in 2013.

The increase in military spending in emerging and developing countries continues unabated, said Perlo-Freeman.

“While in some cases it is the natural result of economic growth or a response to genuine security needs, in other cases it represents a squandering of natural resource revenues, the dominance of autocratic regimes, or emerging regional arms races,” he added.

World military expenditure totalled 1.75 trillion dollars in 2013, a fall of 1.9 percent in real terms since 2012, according to SIPRI.

The fall in the global total comes from decreases in Western countries, led by the United States.

But military spending in the rest of the world increased by 1.8 percent.

Bemoaning the rise in arms spending, the secretary-general said last year the world spends more on the military in one month than it does on development all year.

“And four hours of military spending is equal to the total budgets of all international disarmament and non-proliferation organisations combined,” he noted.

The bottom line: the world is over-armed and peace is under-funded, said Ban. Bloated military budgets, he said, promote proliferation, derail arms control, doom disarmament and detract from social and economic development.

Last week, a U.N. expert came out strongly against rising arms expenditures on the occasion of the Global Day of Action on Military Spending.

The U.N.’s Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred de Zayas, called upon all governments “to proactively inform the public about military expenditures and to justify them.

“Every democracy must involve civil society in the process of establishing budgets, and all sectors of society must be consulted to determine what the real priorities of the population are,” he said in a statement released here.

Lobbies, including military contractors and other representatives of the military-industrial complex, must not be allowed to hijack these priorities to the detriment of the population’s real needs, he added.

According to SIPRI, the fall in U.S. spending in 2013, by 7.8 percent, is the result of the end of the war in Iraq, the beginning of the drawdown from Afghanistan, and the effects of automatic budget cuts passed by the U.S. Congress in 2011.

Meanwhile, austerity policies continued to determine trends in Western and Central Europe and in other Western countries.

Perlo-Freeman told IPS the worst conflict in the world today, in Syria, which has killed over 150,000 people, is still less severe than the worst conflicts of even 15 years ago, such as the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which led to the deaths of millions.

There are certainly tensions in many parts of the world, most notably between Russia and Ukraine at the moment, but inter-state armed conflict is still extremely rare, he added.

“I think the increases in military spending in many parts of the world can rather be traced to a continuing belief in the centrality of military power to conceptions of national security and national greatness,” he said.

He said the United States has set a very clear example in this regard, most especially under the administration of President George W. Bush (2001-2009), but even now the notion that U.S. global military supremacy is a national necessity is effectively unchallenged in the political mainstream.

Other major powers, especially Russia and China, do not view this U.S. dominance in their neighbourhoods with equanimity, or accept their subordinate position in the system.

While neither can challenge the U.S.’s global role, each has been seeking to increase their own military power sufficiently to be able to exert regional influence and not be subject to U.S. dominance, he noted.

This pattern is repeated at lower levels, amongst middle powers such as India.

“Even in much more peaceful regions, Brazil, which has always sought a higher status in the international system, regards having a strong, modern military as an essential part of this,” Perlo-Freeman said.

However, Brazil’s spending has leveled off in recent years, as its economy has not been as strong as in the past and as it has other pressing social priorities that compete with military spending.

There are other important factors as well – one is simply economic growth, which tends to lift military spending along with other areas of spending, said Perlo-Freeman.

USS Ronald Reagan and other ships from RIMPAC 2010 transit the Pacific. The United States, a Pacific power whose military spending is not included in the Asia figures, has also played an important role in driving up the expenditures in the region. Credit: U.S. Navy photo

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, Apr 14 2014 (IPS)

For the second year in a row, the world is spending a little less on the military. Asia, however, has failed to get the memo. The region is spending more at a time when many others are spending less.

Last year, Asia saw a 3.6 percent increase in military spending, according to figures just released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The region — which includes East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and Oceania — posted topping off a 62 percent increase over the last decade.To a certain extent, the arms race in Asia is connected not to the vast expansion of the Pentagon since 2001 but rather to the relative decline of Asia in U.S. priorities over much of that period.

In 2012, for the first time Asia outpaced Europe in its military spending. That year, the world’s top five importers of armaments all came from Asia: India, China, Pakistan, South Korea, and (incredibly) the city-state of Singapore.

China is responsible for the lion’s share of the increases in East Asia, having increased its spending by 170 percent over the last decade. It has also announced a 12.2 percent increase for 2014.

But China is not the only driver of regional military spending. South Asia – specifically the confrontation between India and Pakistan – is responsible for a large chunk of the military spending in the region. Rival territorial claims over tiny islands  — and the vast resources that lie beneath and around them — in both Northeast and Southeast Asia are pushing the claimants to boost their maritime capabilities.

Even Japan, which has traditionally kept its military spending to under one percent of GDP, is getting into the act. Tokyo has promised of a 2.8 percent increase in 2014-15.

The United States, a Pacific power whose military spending is not included in the Asia figures, has also played an important role in driving up the expenditures in the region. The Barack Obama administration’s “Pacific pivot” is designed to reboot the U.S. security presence in this strategically critical part of the world.

To a certain extent, the arms race in Asia is connected not to the vast expansion of the Pentagon since 2001 but rather to the relative decline of Asia in U.S. priorities over much of that period.

As U.S. allies, South Korea and Japan were expected to shoulder more of the security burden in the region while the United States pursued national security objects in the Middle East and Central Asia.

China, meanwhile, pursued a “peaceful rise” that also involved an attempt to acquire a military strength comparable to its economic strength. At the same time, China more vigorously advanced its claims in the South China Sea even as other parties to the conflict put forward their counter claims.

The Pacific pivot has been billed as a way to halt the relative decline of U.S. influence in Asia. So far, however, this highly touted “rebalancing” has largely been a shifting around of U.S. forces in the region.

The fulcrum of the pivot is Okinawa, where the United States and Japan have been negotiating for nearly two decades to close an outdated Marine Air Force base in Okinawa and transfer those Marines to existing, expanding, and proposed facilities elsewhere.

Aside from this complex operation, a few Littoral Combat Ships have gone to Singapore. The Pentagon has proposed putting slightly more of its overall fleet in the Pacific (a 60-40 split compared to the current 50-50). And Washington has welcomed closer coordination with partners like the Philippines and Vietnam.

Instead of a significant upgrade to U.S. capabilities in the region, the pivot is largely a signal to Washington’s allies that the partnerships remain strong and a warning to Washington’s adversaries that, even if U.S. military spending is on a slight downward tilt, the Pentagon possesses more than enough firepower to deter their power projection.

This signaling function of the pivot dovetails with another facet of U.S. security policy: arms exports. The growth of the Pentagon over the last 10 years has been accompanied by a growth in U.S. military exports, which more than doubled during the period 2002 to 2012 from 8.3 to 18.8 billion dollars.

The modest reduction in Pentagon spending will not necessarily lead to a corresponding decline in exports. In fact, the opposite is likely to be true, as was the case during the last Pentagon slowdown in the 1990s. The Obama administration has pushed through a streamlining of the licensing process in order to facilitate an increase in military exports – in part to compensate U.S. arms manufacturers for a decline in orders from the Pentagon.

Asia and Oceania represent the primary target for U.S. military exports, absorbing nearly half of all shipments. Of that number, East Asia represents approximately one-quarter (South Asia accounts for nearly half).

The biggest-ticket item is the F-35 fighter jet, which Washington has already sold to Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Long-range missile defence systems have been sold to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Overall between 2009 and 2013, Australia and South Korea have been the top U.S. clients. With its projected increase in military spending, Japan will also likely rise much higher on the list.

The more advanced weaponry U.S. allies purchase, the more they are locked into future acquisitions. The United States emphasises “interoperability” among its allies. Not only are purchasers dependent on the United States for spare parts and upgrades, but they must consider the overall system of command and control (which is now C5I — Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat systems and Intelligence).

Although a French fighter jet or a Russian naval vessel might be a cheaper option in a competitive bid, the purchasing country must also consider how the item integrates with the rest of its hardware and software.

The United States has argued that its overwhelming military presence in the region and lack of interest in territorial gain have dampened conflict in Asia. But the security environment has changed dramatically since the United States first presented itself as a guarantor of regional stability.

Japan no longer abides by a strict interpretation of its “peace constitution.” North Korea has developed nuclear weapons. China has dramatically increased its capabilities. South Korea has created its own indigenous military manufacturing sector and greatly expanded its exports. Territorial disputes in the South China, Yellow, and East China Seas have sharpened. The only flashpoint that has become more peaceful in the last few years has been the Taiwan Strait.

The continued increase in military spending by countries in East Asia and the massive influx of arms into the region are both symptoms and drivers of conflict. Until and unless the region restrains its appetite for military upgrades, the risk of clashes and even all-out war will remain high.

In such an increasingly volatile environment, regional security agreements – on North Korea’s nuclear programme, the several territorial disputes, or new technological threats like cyberwarfare – will be even more difficult to achieve.

Most importantly, because of these budget priorities, the region will have fewer resources and less political will to address other pressing threats, such as climate change, which cannot be defeated with fighter jets or the latest generation of battle ship.

Saudi Arabia is now the world's fifth largest arms importer, moving up from the 18th largest in 2004-2008. Credit: Radio Nederland Wereldomroep/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 17 2014 (IPS)

The Middle East continues to be one of the world’s most lucrative arms markets, with two Gulf nations – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – taking the lead, according to a new study released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

During 2009-2013, 22 percent of arms transfers to the region went to the UAE, 20 percent to Saudi Arabia and 15 percent to Turkey."The Gulf is the Eldorado for Western arms merchants and governments that want to recycle some of the wealth generated from oil." -- Toby C. Jones

The United States accounted for 42 percent of total arms supplies to the region, SIPRI said.

The rising arms purchases are attributed to several factors, including perceived threats from Iran, the growing Sunni-Shia sectarian strife, widespread fears of domestic terrorism, political instability and hefty oil incomes.

“I definitely think it is a mixture of all of those factors,” said Nicole Auger, a military analyst covering Middle East/Africa at Forecast International, a U.S.-based defence market research firm.

The Middle East defence market, she told IPS, is growing substantially as a result of civil unrest, international instability – especially between Iran and Gulf States – and higher oil prices.

Toby C. Jones, an associate history professor at Rutgers University, told IPS, “The Gulf is the Eldorado for Western arms merchants and governments that want to recycle some of the wealth generated from oil.”

There is no collection of states on the planet with more money and more enthusiasm for purchasing expensive weapons systems than in the Gulf, he pointed out.

Whatever strategic value these weapons have or do not have, it is important to keep in mind these weapons are mostly useless for “actual” war, which is why the United States continues to keep such a huge military presence in the region, he added.

“There is almost literally nothing else states could possibly buy that allow for recycling some of the Gulf’s cash,” he said.

Weapons sales generate a lot of virtual bang for the buck, said Jones, a former fellow at Princeton University’s Oil, Energy and Middle East Project and author of ‘Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia’.

Iran, which is barred from importing most types of major arms due to U.N. sanctions, received only one percent of the region’s arms imports in 2009-2013, according to SIPRI.

During the same period, the UAE was ranked the world’s fourth largest arms importer and Saudi Arabia the fifth largest (having been the 18th largest in 2004-2008).

Both countries have large outstanding orders for arms or advanced procurement plan, SIPRI said.

The top three arms importers, however, were India, China and Pakistan. And the five largest arms suppliers during 2009-2013 were the United States (29 percent of global arms exports), Russia (27 percent), Germany (seven percent), China (six percent) and France (five percent).

Auger told IPS, “I would pin Iran as the number one driver: its ongoing role in supporting rebel Shiite groups, cultivating political-military proxy allies in Hamas and Hezbollah and more recently its effort to keep Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in power.”

The Middle East’s major interest right now in upgrading or purchasing missile defence networks is almost all in preparation to defend against long-range attacks from Iran.

Also, Iran appears to be the major reason behind the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) trying again to form the U.S.-backed joint military command, she added.

These GCC countries include Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.

Auger said internal security would be a close second following the 2011 uprisings, the ongoing unrest in certain nations and the continuing threat of established and emerging Islamic fundamentalist groups.

“This is evident due to the new focus on special operations, electronic surveillance, and cybersecurity equipment,” she said.

The influx of revenue among the energy-exporting nations and the high oil price trend obviously plays a part as well, she added.

Last year’s 10.5-billion-dollar arms deal, one of the largest in the Middle East in recent years, included the sale of 26 F-16 fighter planes to UAE and sophisticated air-launched and air-to-ground missiles to Saudi Arabia.

These missiles were mostly to arm 154 F-15 fighter planes, to be delivered beginning 2015, purchased from the United States in 2010 at a staggering cost of 29.5 billion dollars.

The missiles were meant “to address the threat posed by Iran”, according to a senior U.S. official quoted in a news report.

The arms contract also included 1,000 GBU-35 “bunker busting” bombs to Saudi Arabia and 5,000 to UAE – bombs ideally suited to destroy underground nuclear installations.

But despite the sale of these weapons to Middle Eastern nations, the United States has always maintained it will continue to “guarantee Israel’s qualitative military edge” over Arab nations.

Jones told IPS the Arab Gulf states are politically vulnerable at home and the last three years have been particularly contentious.

While the region has not seen the kind of unrest that shook other parts of the Middle East, except for Bahrain and Kuwait, the regimes in Riyadh and elsewhere are anxious about the possibility there could be a rise in revolutionary fervour.

“They always have been, but these anxieties are more acute in this particular moment. So buying lots of weapons is often connected to domestic policing and counter-revolutionary concerns,” he said.

These weapons will likely never be used in a serious way in a regional conflict, he added.

Jones pointed out the purchasing of weapons, especially long range and complex weapons systems, has little to do with these states’ interest in going to war with Iran or even defending against it. “They have the United States for that,” he said.

But, in buying weapons like these, Gulf regimes claim they are also looking after U.S. energy concerns in a tough neighbourhood.

“These are specious claims, designed to reinforce American anxieties about dangers in the region in order to keep the U.S. military there,” Jones said.

The Arab states need “crisis” to be a permanent condition in order to maximise the West’s and especially Washington’s security commitment – whether crisis is real or not, he added.

Crews of an Egyptian ranger battalion in Jeep YJ light vehicles circa 1992. The soldiers standing are holding Russian-made SA-7 Grail surface-to-air missiles. Credit: public domain

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 11 2014 (IPS)

Russia, which is at loggerheads with Washington over the spreading political crisis in Ukraine, is threatening to undermine a longstanding military relationship between the United States and one of its traditional allies in the Middle East: Egypt.

A photograph of Russian President Vladimir Putin shaking hands with Egypt’s de facto leader Field Marshal Abdel Fateh Al Sisi was flashed across newspapers and TV screens in the Arab world last month.Although advanced surface-to-air missile systems have a much lower price-tag than larger systems such as combat aircraft, their transfer could have significant military effects.

Sisi, who is planning to run in the country’s presidential elections later this year, was in Moscow to negotiate a hefty two-billion-dollar arms deal with Russia.

“The U.S. government has built the modern Egyptian military over the course of the last three decades,” Dr Natalie J. Goldring, a senior fellow with the Security Studies Programme in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS.

“Egypt would have to turn its military upside-down to switch to Russian weapons at this point,” she noted.

Ironically, if and when the arms deal is signed, the funding will come from money pledged by three strong U.S. allies in the region: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who themselves depend heavily on U.S. weapons for survival.

All three countries pledged more than 12 billion dollars to Egypt last year for two reasons: first, to provide economic support to a bankrupt Sisi regime, which ousted the government of former President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and second, to counter the U.S. threat to reduce or cut off billions of dollars in military grants and suspend arms supplies to Cairo.

The U.S. had expressed its displeasure at the ouster of Morsi, the head of the first democratically elected government in Egypt.

Despite these tensions, Goldring said the Egyptian military will continue to be dominated by U.S. weapons for the foreseeable future.

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), more than 80 percent of Egyptian weapons deliveries (by dollar value) in recent years have been supplied by the United States.

The U.S. government has provided roughly 1.3 billion dollars of military assistance each year since Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979.

“While attention has focused on the dollar value of the agreement, it is more important to focus on the types of [Russian] weapons that are transferred,” said Goldring, who also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations on conventional weapons and arms trade issues.

Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher with the Arms Transfers Programme of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS the deal would include air defence systems, MiG-29 or Sukhoi fighter aircraft, combat and transport helicopters and anti-tank missiles.

That Egypt would be looking for such weapons to augment what it gets from the United States is not surprising, he noted. Egypt has since long sought to diversify its arms suppliers in order not to be dependent on Washington.

Wezeman said there have been reports that Egypt is looking for new combat aircraft from another supplier than the United States to replace its ageing Soviet and Chinese models, and that it has looked at options from China, Russia or even surplus fighter planes of French origin from the UAE.

Goldring told IPS the types of weapons transferred will determine the military effects of the sale.

Although advanced surface-to-air missile systems have a much lower price-tag than larger systems such as combat aircraft, their transfer could have significant military effects, she noted.

Before the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, Egypt was equipped mostly with Soviet weapons systems.

Goldring said the upgrading of these weapons, obtained from the then-Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, is less likely to be militarily significant.

“This [Russian] sale isn’t just about the potential military effects, it’s also about world politics,” she said.

By funding the Egyptian purchase, the Saudi government shows its preference for the Egyptian military government over the Muslim Brotherhood and former Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi, Goldring noted.

In turn, Russia gets cash from Saudi Arabia for providing the weapons.

The sale could also potentially help Russia further weaken ties between Egypt and the United States, she added.

The Saudis have pledged massive quantities of aid to the military government, beginning with a pledge of five billion dollars just a week after the military took power in July 2013.

The Saudis also organised contributions from the UAE of three billion dollars and four billion dollars from Kuwait, for a total pledge of 12 billion dollars.

Wezeman said the deal, when completed, does not mean that Russia will become the sole or dominant arms supplier to Egypt, taking advantage of the current rift in relations between Egypt and Washington.

He said the United States still plans to resume its large military aid and Egypt is shopping for arms elsewhere too.

Despite the fact that European Union (EU) states had agreed to carefully review their arms exports to Egypt after the violence of last August, they don’t seem to have lost their appetite for selling weapons to Egypt altogether, said Wezeman.

Just last week, it was reported that Egypt was very close to signing a one-billion-euro deal with a French company for four to six new missile-armed corvettes for its navy.

And last year, there were reports Egypt had ordered two submarines from Germany, now under construction (with two more to be ordered this year).

Wezeman said Egypt has also been a longstanding market for Chinese arms and there is no doubt China will work hard to maintain that relationship.

The first U.S. Navy T-45A Goshawk (BuNo 162787) pictured on the assembly line at the McDonnell Douglas facility at Long Beach, California (USA). Credit: public domain

By William Hartung
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 2014 (IPS)

The United States is the world’s leading arms trafficking nation, with $60 billion in arms transfer agreements last year alone. In 2011, U.S. companies and the U.S. government controlled over three-quarters of the international weapons trade.

The Obama administration regularly touts the role of U.S. officials in promoting U.S. arms sales. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Tom Kelly underscored this point in April 2013 testimony to Congress.Whether arming the Shah of Iran in the 1970s or transferring of weaponry to Afghan extremist groups fighting against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has paid too little attention to where U.S. arms end up.

“It is an issue that has the attention of every top-level official who’s working on foreign policy throughout the government, including the top officials at the State Department …in advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through . . . we take it very, very seriously and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

But according to administration officials, promotion is only one side of its approach to arms transfers. On Jan. 15, the Obama administration issued the first official policy directive on conventional arms sales since the mid-1990s. The document, Presidential Policy Directive 27, carries on the administration’s explicit commitment to promoting arms sales, but it also includes a pledge to show restraint.

The human rights connection

The most encouraging element of the new policy is its pledge to forego sales where there is a likelihood that the weapons transferred will be used to conduct genocide or other atrocities, violate international humanitarian law, or contribute to violations of human rights.

One would think that any reasonable policy on arms transfers would include these strictures, but that is not the case. Human rights concerns have too often taken a back seat to other considerations, from access to military bases and the cultivation of allies in key strategic locations to a desire to cement relations with major oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia.

The explicit human rights language in the new Obama policy directive mirrors that contained in the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, and it holds out hope that basic principles of human rights may now be given higher priority in arms export decision-making.

As the State Department’s Tom Kelly put it in an interview with Reuters, “we wanted to make sure that it’s very clear that human rights considerations really are at the core of our arms transfer decisions.”

Another promising element of the administration’s new policy is its pledge to pay closer attention to where U.S. arms end up. Whether arming the Shah of Iran in the 1970s or transferring of weaponry to Afghan extremist groups fighting against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has paid too little attention to where U.S. arms end up.

Iran still has U.S. weaponry dating back to the Shah’s era, and Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-like groups around the world have benefited from the U.S. weapons that were poured into South Asia during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The new Obama policy seems to take account of the risk of U.S. weapons ending up with hostile regimes or organisations when it states that it will take into account “the risk that significant change in the political or security situation of the recipient country could lead to inappropriate end use transfer of defense articles.”

The real question is how these new arms transfer criteria will be applied in practice.

A loosening of controls

Ironically, the administration’s new rhetoric of restraint has been enunciated in parallel with an effort to loosen arms export controls, an initiative that could make it easier for U.S. weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists and human rights abusers. This danger results from a decision to take thousands of items off of the U.S. Munitions List (USML) and place them on the less restrictive Commerce Control List (CCL).

This will mean that these items will no longer need a license from the State Department to be exported and will instead be subject to the less stringent controls maintained by the Department of Commerce.

There are two principal problems with the administration’s new approach. First, the weapons and weapons components that are moved under the jurisdiction of the Commerce Department are not likely to receive the regular human rights vetting that occurs during the State Department’s licensing process.

Second, the decision to allow many of the items moved to the Commerce list to go to 36 allied nations with no license at all will make it easier for smugglers that have set up front companies in these allied nations to get a hold of U.S. arms components and ship them on to Iran, China, or other destinations prohibited under U.S. law.

The administration has defended its new arms export control policy as an effort to put “higher fences around fewer items” so that scarce enforcement resources can be concentrated on high-end weapons and weapons components. But the administration’s narrow focus on controlling the flow of modern equipment to potential competitors ignores the danger posed by making it easier to export low-tech items.

Iran wants spare parts to keep its aged U.S.-made fighter jets and attack helicopters flying; China wants older model technology to copy and manufacture; and many regimes want the means of daily repression, like low-tech guns and communication and surveillance equipment. None of these items would be kept behind the “high fence” of United States export controls as envisioned by the Obama reform.

Business interests

The Obama reforms did not occur in a political vacuum. Major business networks like the Coalition for Security and Competitiveness have welcomed the administration’s pro-industry stance.  The 19 members of the group, which lobbied hard for the arms export control reform, include the Aerospace Industries Association, the Business Roundtable, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the National Defense Industrial Association.

As so often happens in the realm of business lobbying, the public rationale for this policy change focused not on the possibility of increasing industry profits but on the jobs that would allegedly be produced.

The only study of the subject was a flawed effort by the Milken Institute – funded by the National Association of Manufacturers — which arbitrarily assumed that export control reform would radically increase U.S. sales to key markets like China and India. And neither the Milken report nor the administration accounted for the job loss that could occur if the reforms make it easier to transfer U.S. production technology to other countries.

It’s hard to see how the Obama administration’s aggressive promotion of arms exports can be made compatible with the pledges of restraint contained in its new policy directive. Congress needs to subject the arms export decontrol initiative to much greater scrutiny with respect to its impact on human rights and jobs. And the public and the Congress need to press the administration to adhere to the human rights principles set out in its new arms transfer policy directive.

Given the uncertainties of current global politics, a policy of unrestrained arms exports is both unwise and unacceptable.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Risks and Returns: The Economic Illogic of the Obama Administration’s Export Reform (August 2013).

The 100-billion-dollar deal for commercial jetliners was announced at the Dubai, UAE airshow, pictured above on Nov. 17, 2013. Credit: Attila Malarik/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

The multi-billion-dollar Middle East arms market – bolstered by hefty purchases by oil-blessed Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Qatar – has always been one of the biggest bonanzas to the U.S. defence industry.

But a staggering 100-billion-dollar deal last week for the sale of Boeing’s new 777X commercial jets to three airlines in the UAE and Qatar threatens to outpace U.S. military sales."The size of the market for purely civilian aircraft isn't a significant concern for those of us who worry about the sophisticated military equipment that's being sold around the world." -- Natalie Goldring

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Centre for International Policy, told IPS U.S. arms sales to the Middle East and Persian Gulf have reached record levels in recent years.

“They have elevated the United States to a position of dominance in the world market, controlling 78 percent, as of 2011,” he said.

And most notable, he pointed out, is a 60-billion-dollar package to Saudi Arabia the U.S. Congress was notified of in 2010.

“It was the biggest arms deal ever concluded by the United States with any country,” said Hartung.

Last week’s multi-billion-dollar deals for commercial airliners may supplant arms sales as the largest source of income from U.S. aerospace deals to the region over the next few years, he predicted. Still, the administration of President Barack Obama has been aggressively pushing U.S. arms sales, so if they decline it won’t be for lack of trying on the part of the administration and U.S. industry, said Hartung.

The 100-billion-dollar deal – for commercial jetliners announced at the Dubai, UAE airshow – was signed by Emirates and Etihad airlines (of UAE) and Qatar Airways, with deliveries slated for 2020.

The total contracts for commercial jet sales to countries in the Middle East were estimated at more than 150 billion dollars, according to one published report.

Boeing, which is based in the United States, said it had orders for 342 planes just on the first day of the airshow.

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a senior fellow with the Security Studies Programme in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS the Dubai Airshow represents a potential windfall for the Boeing aircraft company.

However, she said, it is important to separate the public relations efforts at air shows from the actual deliveries.

“Companies negotiate for months to reach agreements that they can announce with great fanfare at the beginning of the major international air shows like Dubai,” Goldring said.

But not all orders become contracts, and not all contracts result in deliveries. That means any announcements at air shows are likely to be overstated, she noted.

However, Goldring pointed out, contracts to sell commercial aircraft overseas are an economic boost to manufacturers, stockholders, and the communities in which the aircraft are built.

Such sales avoid the short- and long-term risks of military sales, she added.

Goldring said some have suggested the commercial aircraft market may overshadow the military market.

“The size of the market for purely civilian aircraft isn’t a significant concern for those of us who worry about the sophisticated military equipment that’s being sold around the world,” said Goldring, who also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations on conventional weapons and arms trade issues.

Other proposed Middle East arms sales include 4.7 billion dollars in military equipment to Iraq; a 1.1-billion-dollar deal for early warning radar to Qatar; a 588-million-dollar package of C-130J airlifters to Libya; and a 200-million-dollar deal to support Kuwait’s fleet of F/A-18 fighters.

In contrast, the other two major arms buyers in the Middle East, namely Egypt and Israel, are not cash customers but receive virtually all of their weapons at no cost, as part of U.S. military aid.

Hartung told IPS the Saudi deal includes fighter planes, attack helicopters, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, armoured vehicles, bombs, guns and ammunition – virtually enough to upgrade the entire Saudi armed forces. Boeing, he said, was the biggest beneficiary of the deal.

The only missing items in the Saudi package were combat ships and a large-scale missile defence, which are now in the works.

The rearming of Iraq — drawing from Iraqi oil revenues, not U.S. aid — has also been a large boost to U.S. producers, said Hartung. He said that large U.S. producers are looking to foreign sales to fill in gaps that are occurring as a result of the downward trend in Pentagon weapon spending over the past few years.

“That being said, it’s hard to see how arms sales to the region can continue at this pace — they are certainly saturating the Saudi market, which is far and away the largest in the region,” Hartung said.

However, the funds from a given deal are generally spent out over a five- to 10-year period, so there will be a steady income to U.S. firms from the deals announced in 2010 to the present for some time.

“Even so, while it’s not a certainty, there’s a chance that the recent huge arms deals to the region may be a bit of a bubble,” Hartung warned.

Goldring told IPS the proposed arms sales to Middle East nations haven’t been adequately scrutinised. Even the Israelis, who often worry about sales to potential military adversaries, have apparently chosen to argue for increased military assistance to Israel instead of opposing these sales, she added.

The signing of the Arms Trade Treaty this fall by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was welcome news. Now its time for the United States to live up to those commitments, she noted.

“All proposed military sales should be evaluated to ensure that they’re consistent with the letter and the spirit of the Arms Trade Treaty,” Goldring said.

For example, she said, any weapons sales that are likely to be used for internal repression should be blocked, consistent with the Treaty’s provisions.

Overseas military sales carry many risks. The weapons are often usable for decades, she added.

“That means that when the U.S. government sells weapons to overseas customers, it’s assuming their governments will be stable for that period of time,” she said.

Government instability among weapons recipients increases the risk that U.S. weapons will fall into adversaries hands, and potentially even be used against U.S. forces, Goldring warned. Commercial aircraft sales simply don’t involve the same risks as military sales, she said.

The United States plans to sell eight Apache attack helicopters to Indonesia, but rights groups fear they could be used to oppress civilians. Credit: The U.S. Army/CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 26 2013 (IPS)

U.S. Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel announced Monday that Washington is going forward with a controversial sale of eight attack helicopters to the Indonesian government, despite concerns that the gunships will be used for internal repression.

The deal, worth some 500 million dollars, would be the largest-ever military sale between the two countries. In addition to the eight Apache AH-64E helicopters – the latest of this type of aircraft, built by U.S.-based Boeing – the agreement would include pilot training and radar technologies.

“Providing Indonesia these world-class helicopters is an example of our commitment to help build Indonesia’s military capability,” Hagel said in Jakarta, where he is on an eight-day trip to Southeast Asia.

“Helping ensure the region’s security and prosperity is a goal the United States strongly shares. The strong and enduring security partnership that has been built between the United States and Indonesia is a relationship the United States greatly values.”"Given the history of the Indonesian military [the Apaches] are more likely to be used for internal repression than for external defence." -- John Miller

A U.S. defence official, speaking anonymously, told reporters separately that the Apache gunships would strengthen the Indonesian government’s anti-piracy operations and broader “maritime awareness”.

Yet rights groups say it will be largely impossible for the United States to dictate the Indonesian military’s use of the new hardware once the sale has gone through.

“The problem is that these are offensive-only weapons, and given the history of the Indonesian military they’re more likely to be used for internal repression than for external defence,” John Miller, U.S. national coordinator for the East Timor & Indonesia Action Network (ETAN), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The military will use these helicopters as they want. These are weapons of war, weapons of counter-insurgency, so it would be foolish to expect that the Indonesians wouldn’t use them that way.”

Early last year, when the Apache sale was first publicly discussed, ETAN and about 90 other civil society organisations wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress, warning, “These aircraft will substantially augment the [Indonesian military’s] capacity to prosecute its ‘sweep operations’ in West Papua [province], and thereby almost certainly lead to increased suffering among the civilian populations long victimised by such operations.”

While Congress must be formally notified of any major military sales to foreign governments (that notification took place in September), Miller says lawmakers raised little objection over the issue.

“There is really only rhetorical help coming from Washington, if that,” he says. “History has shown that military leverage was used quite successfully in the case of East Timor, when these types of sales were specifically withheld or conditioned on easily demonstrated reforms. But today’s members of Congress either don’t know their history or they’ve forgotten this lesson.”

Marked upsurge

Both Hagel’s trip and the gunships sale are being seen in the context of the United States’ broader attempt to give new priority to Washington’s bilateral relationships with countries throughout Asia. Indonesia could be central to this strategy – Obama is slated to make a trip there in October – and U.S. officials are keen to nurture an ongoing, though contested, reforms process.

Yet in recent years, national and international rights groups have warned that these reforms are not progressing at the rate Jakarta officials or some Western governments have suggested. Meanwhile, a military that for years stood accused of heinous rights violations today remains involved in battles against several internal rebellions.

West Papua, for instance, is a resource-rich province that became part of Indonesia under highly contentious circumstances in the 1960s. Armed separatist groups subsequently began fighting the state, resulting in up to 100,000 deaths by the following decade alone.

That violence continues to this day, with the province one of the world’s most militarised areas.

Last year, during Indonesia’s Universal Periodic Review – the United Nations’ regular look at countries’ human rights records – more than a dozen countries urged Jakarta to take steps to resolve ongoing problems in the region, including impunity for military abuses. Yet the Indonesian government rebuffed each of these recommendations.

Last year also saw a “marked upsurge in violence as Indonesian security forces apparently sought to crack down on Papuan activists,” Human Rights Watch stated in its most recent reporting on the region.

It listed impunity for security forces as “a serious concern”. It also noted, “Much of U.S. policy towards Indonesia has focused on cementing military ties, including with Indonesian special forces, which have long been implicated in serious abuses.”

Unrepentant and unreformed

For decades the United States was barred by law from selling military hardware to Indonesia specifically because of the military’s rights record. But following the 1998 downfall of Indonesian autocrat Suharto after more than three decades in power, President George W. Bush began to roll back these restrictions.

Claiming further progress on pro-democracy reforms and strengthened oversight within the Indonesian government and military, President Barack Obama essentially dismantled the remaining legal restrictions in 2010.

At the time, some U.S. lawmakers warned that such a step was premature.

Indonesian special forces have “a long history of abuses and remains unrepentant, essentially unreformed and unaccountable,” Senator Patrick Leahy stated in Jul. 2010.

“I deeply regret that before starting down the road of reengagement, our country did not obtain and [the special forces] did not accept the necessary reforms we have long sought,” he said. “It is notable that this is a small step and [then-Secretary of Defence Robert Gates] made clear that future cooperation, to be consistent with U.S. law, hinges on future reforms.”

While important reforms have indeed gone forward since Suharto’s fall in 1998, ETAN’s Miller warns that many of these processes have now stalled.

“Issues like fully removing the Indonesian military from its internal role, holding the military accountable for past and ongoing human rights violations – at best, that’s happening only in fits and starts,” he says.

“Yet the perception in Washington is that Indonesia is now needed as a central ally in the ‘war against terrorism’ and as a bulwark against China, and that the country has undergone a complete democratic transformation, with the military now fully under democratic control.”

“That’s just not true,” he concludes. “There’s no reason to sacrifice the people of West Papua and other parts of the country for this belief.”

The "Green Hornet," an F/A-18 Super Hornet strike fighter jet powered by a 50/50 biofuel blend. The U.S. is far and away the world's biggest military spender. Credit: U.S. Navy

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 15 2013 (IPS)

The spreading economic crisis is taking a bite out of Western military spending – even as the world’s developing nations, along with Russia and China, boosted their arms expenditures last year.

In a study released Monday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported a decline in military spending last year in the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan and Western and Central Europe.

The fall, described as the first since 1998, was attributed to major spending cuts primarily by austerity-driven and deficit-plagued Western nations.

“We are seeing what may be the beginning of a shift in the balance of world military spending, from the rich Western countries to emerging regions,” says Dr. Samuel Perlo-Freeman, director of SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme.

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, 18 of the 31 countries in the European Union, mostly countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), have cut military spending by more than 10 percent in real terms.

And, despite these cuts, members of NATO collectively spent a trillion dollars.

Still, the United States and its allies are responsible for the great majority of world military spending.

The United States, the world’s largest military spender, announced last week that its 2013 proposed defence budget will amount to about 526.6 billion dollars: a reduction of 3.9 billion dollars compared with its 2012 budget.

The 2013 budget will include “substantial reductions” for the U.S. army, which was heavily involved in military operations in Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent in Iraq.

The drawdown in Afghanistan is primarily responsible for reduced spending by the United States.

The reductions were, however, “substantially offset” by increased spending in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America, according to SIPRI.

China, the second largest spender in 2012, increased its expenditure by 7.8 percent (11.5 billion dollars). Russia, the third largest spender, increased its expenditure by 16 percent (12.3 billion dollars).

According to the study, overall world military expenditure totalled 1.75 trillion dollars in 2012, a fall of 0.5 percent in real terms since 2011.

Asked whether military spending was primarily on arms purchases overseas or acquisitions from domestic weapons industries, Perlo-Freeman told IPS the figures include spending both on arms imports and on domestic procurement.

He pointed out that there are very few countries worldwide that rely on their domestic arms industries for “most” of their military equipment. These are probably limited to the United States, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Japan, and possibly China and Israel.

However, there are many more countries that produce some of their own equipment, but still rely on imports for certain major systems.

In Asia, he said, China has an increasingly advanced arms industry able to produce across all types of equipment, and have been gradually weaning themselves off Russian imports that they were previously highly dependent on.

However, they still import quite a lot, he added.

South Korea also has a strongly developing industry, although it still has to import equipment from the U.S., such as advanced combat aircraft.

India, he pointed out, has a large arms industry, but not a very effective one, probably due to an extremely inefficient bureaucracy in charge of the industry.

“Despite decades of effort, they have not succeeded in being able to develop and produce their own advanced weapons systems,” Perlo-Freeman noted.

“They have a local content of arms procurement of I think about 300 percent, but a lot of that consists of e.g. assembly from kit under license of other countries’ systems,” he said.

Elsewhere in Asia, Singapore has a significant industry with strength in certain niches, but still imports most of its equipment.

There are many other countries with some low level arms production, like Indonesia.

“And North Korea, of course, has a major industry, though that’s a rather special case,” Perlo-Freeman said.

In the Middle East, Israel has an extremely advanced arms industry, in some areas (e.g. it is a world leader in unmanned aerial vehicles). But it still imports – mostly under U.S. military aid – in particular major combat aircraft, which Israel doesn’t produce itself.

“They almost certainly could, but why bother when they get them for free from the U.S.?” he said.

He also said that Turkey has a well-developed industry in some areas, but still imports the majority of its equipment.

Iran has a local arms industry but it is not very advanced in most respects. It has imported a lot from Russia in the past, though now of course this is affected by sanctions.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Jordan produce some armoured vehicles, but still import the great majority of their arms.

In Africa, the only country with a significant industry is South Africa, although it also imports a lot, he said.

In Latin America, the only country with a significant industry is Brazil, though again it still imports the great majority of its major equipment.

U.S. weapons sales around the world have massively expanded over the past year, setting several records. Agreements for foreign arms sales in 2011 totalled around 66.3 billion dollars – three times higher than the previous year and constituting an “extraordinary increase”, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Over that same period, total weapons sales agreements around the world also spiked, nearly doubling to a total of around 85.3 billion dollars, the highest recorded since 2004. These figures were recorded despite the fact that nearly all other weapons suppliers saw declines in orders in 2011.

For instance, the second largest supplier, Russia – with whom the United States has vied for the top spot in recent years – had its sales drop by half in 2011, down to 4.1 billion dollars. Analysts attribute this trend down to the sour global economy.

This discrepancy was undoubtedly created by the United States’ enormous haul, which made up nearly 78 percent of all sales, the most lucrative of which were in aircraft and missiles. Even the report (a leaked version of which can be found here) admits that the “extraordinary total value of U.S. weapons orders” for 2011 “distorts the current picture of the global arms trade market”.

“The astounding, record U.S. foreign military sales figures highlight the fact that the global arms trade is booming,” Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an advocacy group based here, told IPS.

Washington and the rest of the international community need to do much more “to regulate the flow of weapons to irresponsible regimes with substandard human-rights records and conflict regions like the Middle East and Africa”, Kimball added.

Developing nations: the world’s newest buyers

Half of this year’s record figures consisted of a single sale of 84 fighter jets and several dozen helicopters to Saudi Arabia, valued at 33.4 billion dollars.

This year’s report, an annual, comprehensive look at the subject by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), focused particularly on arms transfers between the United States and governments in developing countries.

“Developing nations continue to be the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by weapons suppliers,” the report stated.

Between 2004 and 2011, agreements with developing countries reportedly comprised almost 69 percent of all such agreements, but even this already high number has increased substantially in more recent years, resting at nearly 84 percent in 2011.

While Saudi Arabia was the largest purchaser among developing countries, it was followed by India and the United Arab Emirates, potentially highlighting a clear foreign-policy angle to U.S. weapons sales.

The report noted that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are “pivotal partners in the U.S. effort to contain Iran”, thus suggesting that this year’s record-setting sales could in part be driven by the heated discussion over the potential for war with Iran.

Elsewhere, the report stated that “concerns over the growing strategic threat from Iran…have become the principal basis of [Gulf Cooperation Council] states’ advanced arms purchases”.

Analysts have pointed out that Saudi Arabia’s purchase constituted almost 70 percent of the Saudi government’s total spending for 2011, a move representing an enormous advance in its military prowess.

The push for international regulation

The new figures came just weeks after international negotiators failed to agree on a framework that would strengthen regulation of the global arms marketplace, estimated at some 60 billion dollars annually. Currently, according to advocate groups, extremely lax international accords on the issue make it is far easier to sell weapons internationally than to sell more highly regulated products such as fruit.

Throughout the month of July, representatives met at the United Nations headquarters in New York to try to hammer out an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) but ultimately came up short. The ATT would have aimed at regulating a spectrum of war-related aircraft, along with tanks, missiles and large-calibre weaponry, and small arms.

Early on at those talks, the United States condemned the selection of Iran as the summit’s vice president. Eventually, the United States, pressured in particular by strong opposition from the domestic gun lobby, joined with Russia (as well as India and Indonesia) in objecting to the final draft agreement, thus scuppering progress for the time being.

The Arms Control Association’s Kimball, who attended the New York negotiations, lay much of the blame for that failure on the U.S. hosts, particularly President Barack Obama.

“Although the U.S. delegation had succeeded in inserting all of its preferred formulations in the treaty text and avoided all ‘red lines’, President Obama should have – but did not – provide the leadership necessary to close the deal,” he said.

“Now, the release of these new figures highlights the need for the U.S. to translate its rhetoric into reality regarding an effective Arms Trade Treaty. In the coming weeks, the United States has a special responsibility to work with, not against, the many other states that support the Arms Trade Treaty, to conclude a sound agreement this year.”

Although the July ATT talks ended with no agreement, the negotiations did decide to allow member states to engage in further deliberations and, potentially, to bring a draft treaty before the United Nations General Assembly for a vote.

Unlike the unanimous consensus required during the earlier talks, such a move would only require two-thirds of the body to approve the measure. Diplomats have expressed optimism that such a vote will happen before the end of the year.