(ominous synth music)
- 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.
(synth music)
But I wanted to see
what the weapons trade looks like today using data.
So after months of working on this,
we finally got a map that looks nice.
It looks pretty.
The thicker the lines, the more weapons flow.
So in this video I want to go deep into these lines
to show you what they can teach us about
how the United States projects its power, about what happens
when you sprinkle weapons all around the globe.
I've been looking at every one of these countries
and with the help of my new colleague, Sam, I'm hoping
to bring you in into a much deeper understanding
of the American arms trade.
I also wanna let you in on some
of the conversations I've been having
with experts in this field,
which for me was very helpful in decoding all of this.
Hello. Hello.
- I'm Jeff Abramson.
I'm a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy
and I also lead something called The Forum on the Arms Trade
which is really where my passion is.
- I'm Bill Hartung.
I'm currently a senior research fellow
at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
I've been working on arms trade issues since the 90s.
- Why do we sell weapons to other countries
in the first place?
- I mean, at the most basic level it is
to promote peace and security.
When we talk about the currency
of international relationships,
sometimes weapons become that currency
and what we desperately need is alternate currencies.
- Well, there's the textbook reasons and real reasons.
The Pentagon would tell you it promotes stability,
it helps allies defend themselves.
So there's this kind of strategic argument,
but it's really about if you believe the US should be able
to go anywhere, fight any battle, beat any adversary.
It's kind of premised
in a fairly militarized view of foreign policy.
- The United States sold weapons to 103 countries
and that's major weapons.
Generally whenever the United States provides weapons
to other country, they have to agree on how to use them
and they're not supposed to use them
to violate human rights.
But it's hard to see the leverage
that the United States can use with that government.
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- One last thing I wanna do before we dive fully in is give
you a theoretical point in IR, international relations.
Understanding this will help us understand
this map much better.
It's this concept of balance of power.
The big paradox in international relations
is that countries will naturally get into conflict
with each other unless they calculate
that it is unwise to do so,
that they actually don't have a chance
of winning or gaining anything.
So countries are always building up their weapons
so that they have just enough so that
their enemy will not attack them,
but not too much to where they will provoke some kind
of escalation and their enemy will start
to get into a race to have more weapons.
Every country is making this calculation all of the time,
this balance of power with their rivals in their region.
And weapons systems and capabilities tends
to be the ingredients that are used for that calculation,
for that balance of power.
When the US government approves a bunch
of weapons being sent to some country,
in all of their press releases
they always say the same thing, which is that
this sale will not alter the balance of power in the region.
An imbalance of power is what leads
to escalating conflict and instability.
What an irony that the promotion of peace
and security is sell killing machines to other countries.
- There are people who believe
this creates better peace and security.
At the moment of the transfer it seems like a good idea.
It feels like you've gotta provide them
or like this is the only solution is you put these weapons
in this situation because we're out of options.
- The first takeaway from this is just
what you can see immediately,
that the United States has a massive presence
all around the world.
You could look at these lines as almost tentacles
of US influence in almost every country on earth,
selling jets and guns and tanks and missiles and bombs
and radar and helicopters in exchange for influence.
- I'd say at the real global level is this idea
that if we are engaging in you in the arms trade,
if you are buying weapons from us,
we will have some say in how you act.
- But that's about all this map will show you.
The US has influence all over the world.
It's something we kind of know.
I want to get a deeper understanding of what's going on
with each of these lines, which is why I reached out
to my good friend Sam Ellis.
Sam Ellis, creator of Search Party.
Do you have time to help me out?
- Yeah, let's do it. - Let's do it.
Sam specializes in taking something
that's complicated and giving us a better insight into it,
helping us learn from it using design and visual language.
So Sam's down here and we're going to figure out
how to decode this map.
- There's a place that collects all and that's our guy.
- What we are trying to do here
is we want to understand the why
'cause this map doesn't say why.
It doesn't say what is the US' motive in this.
It's often securing the loyalty of a regime somewhere
and weapons are the currency for securing loyalty.
- The US sometimes wants stability in the region
and it achieves that sometimes by wanting stability
in terms of we picked you as a government,
we would like you to stay in power.
- One of the reasons we sell is so that we don't have
to be the world policemen everywhere all the time
doing all the work.
We can have people who basically outsource it to.
- What I'd like this map system
to somehow convey is that what the US buys
with the currency of weapons varies.
And I think it would be really interesting
to zoom in to some of these case studies
and somehow show what the US is buying.
So it's stability, it's allies--
- It's ally, stability, resources, relationship,
and we put all the categories on
and then you zoom into the different combinations.
Let's zoom into Saudi Arabia. They have all four.
Why do they have all four?
Let's go to Columbia. They have two. Why two?
- So when we zoom into these cases,
we should be more descriptive and less analytical.
- So what do you think the map is gonna look like?
Do you think that the the most weapons are gonna go
to the country with the most number of badges?
- Yes.
At the end of the day, there is a deep underlying force
in all of this, which is that the more weapons we sell,
the more money they make.
And the people in this town
wanna make a (beep) ton of money.
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- Okay, so the goal here is to take this map,
which shows who the US is selling weapons to
and add what they're asking for in return.
But that's a lot easier said than done.
Because the US doesn't say exactly what it wants back
for these countries in exchange for weapons,
it's hard for us to make any definitive claims.
But I think if we look at these countries' locations,
their history and their relationship with the US,
we can surmise that the US is asking
for basically five main things: stability, alliances,
friendship, help against an enemy or a rival
and vital resources.
So we looked at the more than 100 countries
that the US sell's weapons to and tried to estimate
what they could give the US in return.
And then we mapped it.
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So now we can see not only who the US sell's weapons to,
but we have an idea of why.
And although this is based on subjective estimations by us,
it's still useful to see that American weapons come
with expectations, namely
that these countries will help the US project its influence
and its power all over the globe.
So if we think of weapons as a currency,
then the most common thing it's buying is friendship.
Weapons are one of the most effective ways for the US
to get other governments on its side.
And so it's a goal of almost every weapons deal.
But some countries have more to offer than others.
If we zoom to Europe, you'll see
that the US is also buying stronger allies.
The US is in the NATO alliance with most of these countries
so the US sells them weapons as a way
to make their defenses as strong as possible
and to prepare them for the possibility
that they may have to fight a war together.
The US considers many countries allies,
but we only included countries that the US is obligated
to defend because it's signed a treaty.
Ukraine is an example of a country that the US sells lots
of weapons to but isn't in the NATO alliance.
Instead, the US is asking for Ukraine to counter an enemy.
We've defined four countries
as the main enemies or rivals of the US.
The US often sells weapons to their neighbors
as a way to fight a war against them
or deter them from starting a new one.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014,
and so the US is selling Ukraine weapons
and in exchange the US is stopping Russia
from conquering it and other countries in the region.
In the Middle East, the US sells weapons to a number
of countries as a way to counter its other enemy, Iran.
The primary example is Israel
who gets a huge number of weapons from the US.
But the US also sells weapons to countries
that control vital resources that it needs.
In the case of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, that's oil.
But a vital resource can also mean a strategic passageway
like the Suez Canal in Egypt where a lot
of the world's shipping goes through.
By selling them weapons, the US is asking these countries
to protect and give it access to these resources.
In Africa, the US sells weapons to many governments,
not just to secure resources, but also to try
and make them more stable.
War and coups have made many regions in Africa volatile
and unpredictable, and the US hopes that by selling weapons
to these governments, it can help them stay in power
and maintain the status quo.
It's important to understand
that these labels often overlap like in East Asia.
China, a major US rival is pushing
to assert its control over this region
and the US is responding by selling weapons
to countries standing in its way.
Some are allies, some control vital resources
like Taiwan's semiconductor industry.
Then there are many that the US feels it needs to strengthen
so that China can't destabilize the region.
So now we can see not only
where these weapons flow, but why.
The definitions are based on
some subjective categories that we came up with.
But even still, it's useful to see
that American weapons come with expectations
that these countries will help the US project influence
and power all over the globe.
- Okay, thank you Sam.
Man, I'm glad Sam came into this story.
He is the master of taking complex systems
and breaking them down to get a deeper understanding
of really rich data.
Search Party is the channel I started
with Sam last year and it is awesome.
It's similar to what we do here,
but with a very different journalistic approach.
You should go subscribe because it's really good stuff.
So for the final chapter of this video,
I'm going to address something that many of you familiar
with the arms trade are maybe thinking about right now
which is, does all of this actually work?
If weapons are a currency for influence
and the US is using that currency to buy stuff,
to buy influencer stability around the world,
does that actually work the way that the Pentagon
and the United States government think it does?
The short answer is sometimes, but not really.
Where weapons really do work is in keeping alliances strong.
- There's no question some countries welcome it.
Our allies like Korea and Japan and so forth. Australia.
And it probably does cement those relationships,
make it more likely they'll support the US in a crunch.
- But when it comes to trying to use weapons as an incentive
to get countries to behave the way you want them to,
that's where it kind of starts to break down.
And the best case for this is Saudi Arabia.
You can see on this map
we give a lot of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
The Obama administration approved loads of weapons transfers
to Saudi Arabia, and in doing so,
we had some strings attached.
A big one being that those weapons could not be used
to violate human rights or from the horse's mouth:
genocide, crimes against humanity,
grave breaches of the Geneva Convention,
serious violations of Common Article 3
of the Geneva Conventions, attacks directed
against civilians who are legally protected from attacks
or other war crimes as defined by 18 USC 2441.
Translation, Saudi Arabia is not to use these weapons
against civilians in any of their conflicts.
And yet, as Saudi Arabia has been waging this war
against Yemen, they've done exactly that,
using American weapons.
They've bombed hospitals, weddings, and even a school bus.
And we know that this is American weapons
because investigators and journalists have looked
at the wreckage of these attacks
and looked at the actual serial numbers, concluding
that these are American weapons,
that they flow through these lines.
- Although Saudi Arabia was dropping bombs,
most people in Yemen viewed it as an American war.
Sent arms to Saudi Arabia that slaughter people in Yemen.
But there was sort of this notion of,
well, they're an oil supplier.
They're a bulwark against Iran
and those so-called larger strategic interest
overrode the human rights imperatives.
- Shout out to Bellingcat,
the open source investigative journalism project
that helped uncover a lot of this stuff.
So Saudi Arabia isn't obey the conditions
that we put on these weapons,
and Congress tried to pass a resolution that said
that they were gonna cut off some of this military aid
that we were giving to Saudi Arabia.
The problem is a lot of the power
to approve these weapon sales rests
with the executive, the president.
So President Trump actually vetoed this resolution.
And even under the Biden administration,
even though there was like a brief pause,
the weapons have kept flowing, making it very clear
that this leverage that the US thinks it has
because it's the provider of all of these weapons,
is actually kind of reversed.
Turns out Saudi Arabia has a lot
more leverage than we thought.
- The ideas of the United States has kind
of captured Saudi Arabia by having this weapons
and defense arrangement, that the Saudis need to rely on us.
They will do things that we ask them to do.
But I think the opposite is now happening,
that Saudi Arabia's been able to turn the tides
and say, "Hey, if you don't provide this,
"we'll find an alternate partner."
The relationship has been perverted.
- Okay, but Saudi Arabia is a monarchy.
Maybe we have better luck influencing fellow democracies.
So let's look at Israel, who receives more military aid
from the United States than any other country.
- I think Israel's the prime example of the lack of leverage
that you would think a well developed
long-term weapons relationship would have.
- The US government has come out
and said that they are not happy with the way
that Israel is conducting its war
against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
And yet what we see here is an effort
to push more military aid to Israel without any pause
or withdraw of these weapons transfers.
- And that's the reality of the arms trade is that
we can hope countries will take things into mind.
We can tell them we want to do things,
but ultimately they end up making local decisions
for their local needs.
- There's a lot more cases just like this,
like the Philippines, where the Duterte regime has used
American weapons to carry out a brutal war on drugs,
murdering and jailing civilians in the process.
What's confusing about this is that
in some sense the weapons are working for US interests.
We sell them these weapons, we give them these weapons,
we buy their support in deterring our enemy.
But in the process, these weapons that we use
as our currency are used for other things
that have nothing to do with deterring our enemy.
And sometimes it gets really out of control,
like we give a lot of weapons to Turkey, a NATO ally.
Turkey will then transfer that to its proxies in Syria
who will use them to fight against American-backed rebels
that are also using US weapons.
So American weapons are being used
on both sides of a conflict.
It just feels a little bit like deja vu from the book
that was written a hundred years ago, stating
that this was a problem and it still kind of is.
The other big issue with using weapons
as your main currency for influence around the world
is that weapons don't just go away.
Back in the 80s, the CIA transferred a bunch of weapons
to rebel fighters in Afghanistan
who were fighting against the Soviets.
Decades later, those same weapons were being used
by those fighters and their descendants to fight
against Americans who were then invading Afghanistan.
Same thing happened in Libya.
We gave a bunch of weapons there and they leaked out
and ended up in the hands of militants
and insurgents in Syria and South Sudan.
So if weapons are this currency
that don't actually give us leverage
and that can create more danger than stability,
why do we keep making them
and sending them to over a hundred countries?
There's a lot of answers to that question,
but one of them has to do with money.
There's a lot of money in making weapons.
There always has been since the industrial revolution.
Lots of these weapons are made all over our country,
intentionally creating a network of jobs
that no congressman ever wants to vote down.
If a congressman votes to make fewer weapons,
they could be voting against a factory
or production facility in their district.
Add to that, that some
of our lawmakers own shares in these companies.
If these companies make money, they make money,
and yet they're the ones approving the money
that goes to these corporations.
A massive conflict of interest that we've reported on before
in a previous video on insider trading.
What you get is this military industrial complex,
a permanent economic business machine that is incentivized
to make more and more weapons, both to prepare for war
and provide national security, but also to keep people rich
and to keep the constituents of lawmakers happy.
So in short, one of the reasons the map looks like this
is to keep a bunch of private corporations nice and rich.
(piano music)
Okay, well that is the end of a journey for now.
It started with an old book that really piqued my interest
and brought me into a history that I didn't know about.
And through this process, I feel like I've been able
to draw a linkage between this history
and how it works today.
How for-profit corporations are still motivated
to expand their business by making more
and more killing machines.
Now, weapons are a stabilizing force in our world.
That is true and that is an irony of stability in the world.
You have to have weapons to have some kind
of stability for now.
Weapons also are political leverage that the US uses
to keep the world somewhat stable
and yet there's a lot to scrutinize
and critique about the way that it's done.
We're dealing with weapons. This is dangerous stuff.
We should be able to properly criticize it and critique it.
But instead, our ability to do that is hindered
by the conflict of interest
and the incentives that are brought on
by these for-profit corporations
and their relationship to our lawmakers.
To me, this is what's wrong about the system.
It perverts our ability to actually look into it,
to actually scrutinize it properly
and to actually make the best decision
for the safety and stability of our world.
The weapons industry got out of control
in the early 1900s and ended up contributing
to the worst devastation the world had ever seen,
which woke us up to actually being able to criticize this
and trying to change it.
A lot of those same conflicts of interests
that keep war permanent and enriching still exist today,
and my hope is that it doesn't take
another devastating conflict for us to wake up.
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Covering war and conflict is something
I'm not going to stop doing.
I think it's really important for us
to understand these issues so that
we can critique them and question them.
But as a journalist and YouTuber,
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Not a lot of brands want
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That's why I'm grateful that I'm a part of Nebula,
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This is why on Nebula, you just see a lot
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Like one of my favorite Nebula Originals
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It dives into the geopolitics, the strategies, the tactics,
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Wendover Productions has a fantastic series on logistics.
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Thank you all for watching this video. It was a deep dive.
These two parts, if you haven't watched part one,
we'll put the link in the description.
You can go watch it. It's more on the history.
And I'm grateful to Search Party for helping out here.
Search Party is a fantastic new journalistic brand
that we started here with Sam Ellis.
A lot of people worked on this video
to make it come to life.
So, thank you all for watching
and I'll see you in the next one.
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