Why the US Sells Weapons to 103 Countries

we've been busy mapping where weapons flow in this world especially those that originate in the United States and this is part two of a series on the arms trade if you watch part one you'll already know that there's a long history of businessmen getting rich off of War but I wanted to see what the weapons trade looks like today using data so after months of working on this we finally got a map that looks nice it looks pretty the thicker the lines the more weapons flow so in this video I want to

go deep into these lines to show you what they can teach us about how the United States projects its power about what happens when you sprinkle weapons all around the globe I've been looking at every one of these countries and with the help of my new colleague Sam I'm hoping to bring you in into a much deeper understanding of the American Arms trade I also want to let you in on some of the conversations I've been having with experts in this field which for me was very helpful in decoding all of

this hello hello I'm Jeff abson I'm a senior fellow at the center for international policy I also lead something called The Forum on the armr which is really where my passion is I'm Bill har I'm currently a senior research fellow at Quincy insute for responsible statecraft I've been working on AR issu since the 90s why do we sell weapons to other countries in the first place I mean at the most basic level it is to promote peace and security when we talk about the currency of international relati

onships sometimes weapons become that currency and what we desperately need is alternate currencies well there's the textbook reasons and real reasons you know the pentag would tell you it uh promotes stability it helps allies defend themselves so there's this kind of strategic argument but it's really about if you believe the US should be able to go anywhere fight any battle beat any adversary it's kind of premised in a fairly milit view a foreign policy the United States sold weapons to 103 co

untries and that's major weapons generally when every United States provides weapons to another country they have to agree on how to use them and they're not supposed to use them to violate human rights but it's hard to see The Leverage of the United States can use with that government one last thing I want to do before we dive fully in is give you a theoretical point in IR international relations understanding this will help us understand this map better it's this concept of balance of power th

e big Paradox in international relations Is that countries will naturally get into conflict with each other unless they calculate that it is unwise to do so that they actually don't have a chance of winning or gaining anything so countries are always building up their weapons so that they have just enough so that their enemy will not attack them but not too much to where they will provoke some kind of escalation and their enemy will start to get into a race to have more weapons every country is

making this calculation all of the time this balance of power with their rivals in their region and Weapons Systems and capabilities tend to be the ingredients that are used for that calculation for that balance of power when the US government approves a bunch of weapons being sent to some country in all of the press releases they always say the same thing which is that this sale will not alter the balance of power in the region an imbalance of power is what leads to escalating conflict and inst

ability what an irony that the promotion of peace and security is sell killing machines to other countries there are people who believe this creates better peace and security at the moment of the transfer it seems like a good idea it feels like you've got to provide them or like this is the only solution is you put put these weapons in this situation because we're out of options the first takeaway from this is just what you can see immediately that the United States has a massive presence all ar

ound the world you could look at these lines as almost tentacles of US influence in almost every country on Earth selling Jets and guns and tanks and missiles and bombs and radar and helicopters in exchange for influence I'd say at the real Global level is this idea that if we are engaging in you in the arms trade if you are buying weapons from us we will have some say in how you act but that's about all the map will show you the US has influence all over the world it's something we kind of know

I want to get a deeper understanding of what's going on with each of these lines which is why I reached out to my good friend Sam Ellis Sam Ellis creator of search party do you have time to help me out yeah let's do it let's do it Sam specializes in taking something that's complicated and giving us a better insight into it helping us learn from it using design and visual language so Sam's down here and we're going to figure out how to decode this map there's a place that collects all what we ar

e trying to do here is we want to understand the why because this map doesn't say why it doesn't say like what is the US's motive in this it's often securing the Loyalty of a regime somewhere and weapons are the currency for securing loyalty the US sometimes wants stability in the region mhm and it achieves that sometimes by wanting stability in terms of we picked you as a government we would like you to stay in power of the reasons we sell is so that we don't have to be the world policeman ever

ywhere all the time doing all the work we can have people would basically Outsource a to you know what I'd like this map system to somehow convey is that what the US buys with the currency of weapons varies and I think it would be really interesting to to zoom in to some of these case studies and somehow show what the US is buying yeah so stability it's allies Ally stability resources relationship and we put all the categories on and then you zoom into the different combinations let's zoom into

Saudi Arabia they have all four why do they have all four let's go to Colombia they have two why two so when we zoom into these cases we should be more descriptive and less analytical like what do you think the map is going to look like like do you think that the the most weapons are going to go to the country with the most number of badges yes at the end of the day there is a deep underlying force in all of this which is that the more weapons we sell the more money they make and the people in t

his town want to make a ton of money okay so the goal here is to take this map which shows who the US is selling weapons to and add what they're asking for in return but that's a lot easier said than done because the US doesn't say exactly what it wants back for these countries and exchange for weapons it's hard for us to make any definitive claims but I think if we look at these countries locations their history and their relationship with the us we can surmise that the US is asking for basical

ly five main things stability alliances friendship help against an enemy or rival and vital resources so we looked at the more than 100 countries that the US H weapons to and tried to estimate what they could give the US in return and then we mapped [Music] it so now we can see not only who the usl's weapons to but we have an idea of why and although this is based on subjective estimations by us it's still useful to see that American weapons come with expectations namely that these countries wil

l help the US project its influence and its power all over the globe so if we think of weapons as a currency then the most common thing it's buying is friendship weapons are one of the most effective ways for the US to get other governments on its side and so it's a goal of almost every weapons deal but some countries have more to offer than others if we Zoom to Europe you'll see that the US is also buying stronger allies the US is in the NAT alliance with most of these countries so the US sells

them weapons as a way to make their defenses as strong as possible and to prepare them for the possibility that they may have to fight a war together the US considers many countries allies but we only included countries that the US is obligated to defend because it signed a treaty Ukraine is an example of a country that the US sells lots of weapons to but but isn't in the NATO alliance instead the US is asking for Ukraine to counter an enemy we've defined four countries as the main enemies or R

ivals of the US the US often sells weapons to their neighbors as a way to fight a war against them or deter them from starting a new one Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and so the US is selling Ukraine weapons and in exchange the US is stopping Russia from conquering it and other countries in the region in the Middle East the US sells weapons to a number of countries as a way to en counter its other enemy Iran the primary example is Israel who gets a huge number of weapons from the US but the US

also sells weapons to countries that control vital resources that it needs in the case of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States that's oil but a vital resource can also mean a strategic passageway like the Suez Canal in Egypt where a lot of the world's shipping goes through by selling them weapons the US is asking these countries to protect and give it access to these resources in Africa the US sells weapons to many governments not just to secure resources but also to try and make them more stable wa

r and cou have made many regions in Africa volatile and unpredictable and the US hopes that by selling weapons to these governments it can help them stay in power and maintain the status quo it's important to understand that these labels often overlap like in East Asia China a major US rival is pushing to assert its control over this region and the US is responding by selling weapons to countries standing in its way some are allies some control vital resources like taiwan's semiconductor industr

y then there are many that the US feels it needs to strengthen so that China can't destabilize the region so now we can see not only where these weapons flow but why the definitions are based on some subjective categories that we came up with but even still it's useful to see that American weapons come with expectations that these countries will help the US project influence and power all over the globe okay thank you Sam I'm glad Sam came into this story he is the master of taking complex syste

ms and breaking them down to get a deeper understanding of really rich data search party is the channel I started with Sam um last year and it is awesome it is similar to what we do here but with a very different journalistic approach you should go subscribe because it's really good stuff so for the final chapter of this video I'm going to address something that many of you from amiliar with the arms trade are maybe thinking about right now which is does all of this actually work if weapons are

a currency for influence and the US is using that currency to buy stuff to buy influence or stability around the world does that actually work the way that the Pentagon and the United States government think it does the short answer is sometimes but not really where weapons really do work is in keeping alliances strong there's no question some countries welcome it realiz like Korea and Japan and so forth Australia and it probably does cement those relationships make it more likely they'll suppor

t the US in a crunch but when it comes to trying to use weapons as an incentive to get countries to behave the way you want them to that's where it kind of starts to break down and the best case for this is Saudi Arabia you can see on this map we give a lot of weapons to to Saudi Arabia the Obama Administration approved loads of weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia and in doing so we had some strings attached a big one being that those weapons could not be used to violate human rights or from the h

orse's mouth genocide crimes against humanity grave breaches of the Geneva conventions serious violations of common article 3 of the Geneva conventions attacks directed against civilians who are legally protected from attacks or other war crimes as defined by 18 USC 2441 translation Saudi Arabia is not to use these weapons against civilians in any of their conflicts and yet as Saudi Arabia has been waging this war against Yemen they've done exactly that using American weapons they've bombed hosp

itals weddings and even a school bus and we know that this is American weapons because investigators and journalists have looked at the wreckage of these attacks and looked at the actual serial numbers concluding that these are American weapons that they flow through these lines although Saudi Arab bombs most people in Yen view it as an American war sent arms to Saudi Arabia that slaughter people in Yemen but there was sort of this of well they're an oil supplier they're a bwork against Iran and

those so-called larger strategic interests overrode the human rights Imperials shout out to bellingcat the open source investigative journalism project that like helped uncover a lot of this stuff so Saudi Arabia isn't obeying the itions that we put on these weapons and Congress tried to pass a resolution that said that they were going to cut off some of this military aid that we were giving to Saudi Arabia the problem is a lot of the power to approve these weapon sales rests with the executive

the president so president Trump actually vetoed this resolution and even under the Biden Administration even though there was like a brief pause the weapons have kept flowing making it very clear that this leverage that the US thinks it has because it's the provider of all of these weapons is actually kind of reversed turns out Saudi Arabia has a lot more leverage than we thought you know the idea is that the United State has kind of captured Saudi Arabia by having this weapons and defense Arr

angement that the Saudis need to rely on us they will do things that we ask them to do or I think the opposite is now happening that Saudi Arabia has been able to turn the tides and say hey if you don't provide this we'll find an alternate partner the relationship has been perverted okay but Saudi Arabia is a monarchy maybe we have better luck influencing fellow democracies so let's look at Israel who receives more military aid from the United States than any other country I think Israel is the

prime example of the lack of Leverage that you would think a welldeveloped long-term weapons relationship would have the US government has come out and said that they are not happy with the way that Israel is conducting its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and yet what we see here is an effort to push more military aid to Israel without any pause or withdraw of these weapons transfers and that's the reality of the arms trade is that we can hope countries will take things into mind we can tell

them we want to do things but ultimately they end up making local decisions for their local needs there's a lot more cases just like this like the Philippines where the duterte regime has used American weapons to carry out a brutal War on Drugs murdering and jailing civilians in the process what's confusing about this is that in some sense the weapons are working for us interests we sell them these weapons we give them these weapons we buy their support in deterring our enemy but in the process

these weapons that we use as our currency are used for other things that have nothing to do with deterring our enemy and sometimes it gets really out of control like we give a lot of weapons to Turkey a NATO Ally turkey will then transfer that to its proxies in Syria who will use them to fight against american-backed Rebels that are also using Us weapons so American weapons are being used on both sides of a conflict it just feels a little bit like dja Vu from the book that was written 100 years

ago stating that this was a problem and it still kind of is the other big issue with using weapons as your main currency for influence around the world is that weapons don't just go away back in the80s the CIA transferred a bunch of weapons to Rebel fighters in Afghanistan who were fighting against the Soviets decades later those same weapons were being used by those Fighters and their descendants to fight against Americans who were then invading Afghanistan same thing happened in Libya we gave

a bunch of weapons there and they leaked out and ended up in the hands of militants and insurgents in Syria and South Sudan so if weapons are this currency that don't actually give us leverage and that can create more danger than stability why do we keep making them and sending them to over a 100 countries there's a lot of answers to that question but one of them has to to do with money there's a lot of money in making weapons there always has been since the Industrial Revolution lots of these

weapons are made all over our country intentionally creating a network of jobs that no Congressman ever wants to vote down if a congressman votes to make fewer weapons they could be voting against a factory or production facility in their district add to that that some of our lawmakers own shares in these compan companes if these companies make money they make money and yet they're the ones approving the money that goes to these corporations a massive conflict of interest that we've reported on

before in a previous video on insider trading what you get is this military industrial complex a permanent economic business machine that is incentivized to make more and more weapons both to prepare for war and provide National Security but also to keep people rich and to keep the constituents of lawmakers happy so in short one of the reasons the map looks like this is to keep a bunch of private corporations nice and [Music] Rich okay well that is the end of a journey for now it started with an

old book that really peaked my interest and brought me into a history that I didn't know about and through this process I feel like I've been able to draw a linkage between this history and how it works today how for-profit corporations are still motivated to expand their business by making more and more killing machines now weapons are a stabilizing force in our world that is true and that is an irony of stability in the world you have to have weapons to have some kind of stability for now wea

pons also are political leverage that the US uses to keep the world somewhat stable and yet there's a lot to scrutinize and critique about the way that it's done we're dealing with weapons this is dangerous stuff we should be able to properly criticize it and critique it but instead our ability to do that is hindered by the conflict of interest and the incentives that are brought on by these for-profit corporations and their relationship to our lawmakers to me this is what's wrong about the syst

em it perverts our ability to actually look into it to actually scrutinize it properly and to actually make the best decision for the safety and stability of our world the weapons industry got out of control in the early 1900s and ended up contributing to the worst Devastation the world had ever seen which woke us up to actually being able to criticize this and trying to change it it a lot of those same conflicts of interests that keep War permanent and enriching still exist today and my hope is

that it doesn't take another devastating Conflict for us to wake [Music] up covering war and conflict is something I'm not going to stop doing I think it's really important for us to understand these issues so that we can critique them and question them but as a journalist and YouTuber it's hard for me to support this work not a lot of Brands want to sponsor videos about guns and War that's why I'm grateful that I'm a part of nebula which is a creator-owned and operated streaming platform nebul

a is kind of like YouTube but instead of paying by watching tons of ads and selling your data you contribute a small amount every month that goes directly to support creators this is why on nebula you just see a lot of really high quality stuff including nebula Originals which are series that you can't find anywhere else like one of my favorite nebula Originals is modern conflicts which is is this map series by real life lore it dives into the geopolitics the strategies the tactics the issues su

rrounding modern-day Wars and conflicts real-time history's red Adams all about the Soviet nuclear program W over Productions has a fantastic series on Logistics again this is stuff you can't get anywhere else all of these creators like me also put up their videos that are here on YouTube but they're just there ad free I'm grateful to be a part of nebula's community and I'm grateful for those who have signed up for nebula using my link which again directly supports the work we're doing here so i

f you want to check this out there's a link in my description where you can get a discount it is nebula.com are alive doing the lifetime thing is also a direct contribution to getting more nebula original sooner from us creators we're building something special over on nebula and I hope you will join us and support us so we can keep doing independent quality journalism here on the internet thank you all for watching this video it was a deep dive these two parts if you haven't watched part one we

'll put the link in the description you can go watch it it's more on the history and um I'm grateful to sech party for helping out here search party is a fantastic new journalistic brand that we started here with Sam Ellis a lot of people worked on this video to make a to life so thank you all for watching and I'll see you in the next [Music] one