I think it’s fair to say that the covert illegal activities of the US government probably exceed that of any other country by any reasonable measure.
And we also manufacture and ship weapons all over the world, including to horrible regimes like Saudi Arabia. We are currently about to ship over $1 billion in weapons to a country actively perpetrating a genocide.
So yeah, you’re right. It’s not even close. It’s much more extensive. We are however more concerned with hiding those activities. We’re a “democracy” after all.
Russia, Iran and China match or outdo the US in all of these. I'm no fan of the US at all, but to claim that they are worse than those countries is absurd.
The five largest weapon manufacturers are all from the US [1]. The US army is bigger than the next ten-ish armies together by budget [2] (I eyeballed that one).
The US has a rich history of propping up extremist to take over democratically elected governments and supported the killing of millions of civilians.
And they gave amnesty to some of the worst criminals from Germany and Japan after WW2 in order to give them jobs after the war to make use of the "knowledge" these criminals gained during their crimes.
Honestly, I can't see any country competing with the US on this one. Even if there would have been intent, they would still lack scale....
> The five largest weapon manufacturers are all from the US
The question is not the absolute value of exports, but how much is exported to problematic regimes, and how this compares to the other countries I mentioned.
The US's most problematic exports are to Saudi and Qatar - due to the likely human rights violations in Yemen - and Israel - due to the same in Palestine. Collectively, in 2022 this was around £3 billion in arms exports [0]. That's the most recent data I can find. The vast majority of the remainder is to countries like Japan or Ukraine, who's military activities are much more justified.
Iran's most obvious problematic arms exports are to Russia, which is prosecuting an illegal invasion of Ukraine. It also exports arms to Sudan and North Korea, and funds Hamas in Palestine and Houthi rebels in Yemen. A major difficulty here is that international sanctions force a lot of the deals to be done covertly. Russia, for example, is struggling to pay for anything in cash and is known to have resorted to paying in gold. However, leaked documents from hacks into the Iranian Revolutionary Guard servers suggest that Russia has recently paid around $1.8 billion for Shahed drones alone from Iran [1]. I admit that leaked docs are hardly the most verified source of information, but if they are anywhere near accurate, then Iran is absolutely funding global atrocities at a rate comparable to the US.
> The US has a rich history of propping up extremist to take over democratically elected governments
Agreed, but look also at Russia's activities in Afghanistan, Belarus, Georgia, Chechnya, Crimea, Moldova... . Look at what China has done to Hong Kong, and how it funds oppressive regimes in Latin America and Africa.
Sorry but I find your criticism quite misleading. For one, the countries you labelled as problematic aren't the only ones on the list, so the $3b is vastly understated. The list includes sells to 58 countries, so I don't think that you can claim, as apparently implied, that the US is more ethical in how it sells weapons.
Russia would currently pay a premium, so Iran selling $1.8b (assuming the leak is ballpark accurate) would translate to what at market rates?
But most importantly you ignore the shear difference in size of the US military activity. Russia and China together wouldn't be able to do the same damage if they put all their resources together and only focused on it. The size of the US military operations (as shown above) is absolutely unmatched (bigger than the next 10 biggest countries roughly)
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EDIT: Looks like the US has a 40% share of global arms exports, again more than the next 8-ish countries together. Number two for instance is France with 10%. [0]
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The US has propped up and supported extremist regimes for over a century, something neither China nor Russia nor any other country can claim.
Extremist regimes include the worst historical outliers like Nazi Germany, which relied heavily on US exports to undertake the holocaust (IBM) and had very friendly industrial relations before '41. There was also strong support for the Nazi party amongst industrial US leaders in particular (e.g. business plot).
Of the Allied forces, the US went into war the latest (only after Japan and Germany declared war on the US) and gave generous amnesty to some of the worst murders from both Nazi Germany and Japan.
No other country on earth can claim anything like this.
Please don't minimise the crimes of the US by trying to compare them to other countries when the scope is so extremely different. The US has been at perpetual war nearly every year since the last 120 years or so and has done quite horrible experiments on their own population... it really would be good to start having a conversation about it.
> For one, the countries you labelled as problematic aren't the only ones on the list, so the $3b is vastly understated.
I've addressed this. The absolute value is neither here nor there. What matters is how much is exported to problematic regimes. The vast majority of the remaining exports are to countries like Japan, Norway, Ukraine, UK, Australia, Poland... . These countries by and large use the weapons for legitimate defense purposes. Perhaps you can find another billion by adding in the UAE and Bahrain, and a couple of others but by the time you get down to Thailand it's comparatively peanuts per country.
> Russia would currently pay a premium, so Iran selling $1.8b would translate to what at market rates?
Perhaps. Who knows? Happy to look at any further data on this that you can pull out. Even if it's significantly less, we're talking about a single shipment of drones to one country. Iran's overal arms exports will be dramatically greater than this, and includes other exports to Russia as well as exports to problematic regimes or organisations like North Korea, Sudan, Hamas and Houthi rebels.
> The US has propped up and supported extremist regimes for over a century, something neither China nor Russia nor any other country can claim.
This is a tricky comparison since China and Russia haven't existed in their current form for a century. But look, China and Russia are extremist regimes. They oppress minorities, brutally shut down protests, tightly control media and the internet, have cults of personality, conduct sham elections, etc... . The Soviets have been supporting extremist regimes in other countries for virtually a century - look at Afghanistan, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, and the Congo. And as I said in my post, Russia is right now explicitly propping up Belarus, Chechnya, Moldova and many more. China's activity in the Korean war allowed the formation of North Korea and China continues to be one of the few countries that supports it through political and economic backing. Let me repeat this for clarity: North Korea, arguably the most oppressive regime in existence, would not be able to exist if it were not for the support of countries like China and Iran.
> Of the Allied forces, the US went into war the latest (only after Japan and Germany declared war on the US) and gave generous amnesty to some of the worst murders from both Nazi Germany and Japan.
> No other country on earth can claim anything like this.
China is prosecuting ethnic cleansing of its Uyghur population, including forced sterilisation and labour and other abuses. Several organisations and nation states regard this as a genocide. It's going on right now. It also killed 15-55 million of its own people by implementing the "Great Leap Forward" in 1958-62. The Soviet Union caused a man-made famine in Ukraine that killed around 4 million people. Do you think any of the perpretators of either of those have gotten just retribution to this day? Forget about amnesty - their governments have actively supported these acts.
> Please don't minimise the crimes of the US by trying to compare them to other countries
Putting in context is not minimising. I maintain that the US is far from alone in the scale of its unethical behaviour, and nothing you've said is compelling otherwise.
Your point here about selling to non-problematic countries is really moot. As shown, the US does 40% of arms trade by revenue and counts over 100 countries as their client. They are selling to everyone that pays. They also never have claimed to have anything like a "responsible selling of weapons" policy.
Re holodomor and the great leap forward:
These disasters were caused by the attempts of the SU and China to industrialise rapidly. As such, a somewhat more reasonable comparison would be to compare it to the death and disaster caused by the US industrialisation, which I again suspect will outnumber the rest given the much longer timeframe.
Comparing holodomor and the great leap forward with say the US treatment of Unit 731, slave trade, the multitudes of war waged directly or the decade long direct support of murderous gangs throughout the Americas doesn't make any sense, since the death of the deaths of holodomor/glf were not the intended outcomes (I'm not excusing the actors here as I think absent of intent is not sufficient to omit blame) compared with the plentiful examples of US wars, policies and actions where deaths were absolutely the intended outcomes. Let's remember Albright reminding us "that we think it is worth it".
> They are selling to everyone that pays. They also never have claimed to have anything like a "responsible selling of weapons" policy.
This is incorrect [0]:
> no arms transfer will be authorized where the United States assesses that it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit, facilitate the recipients’ commission of, or to aggravate risks that the recipient will commit: genocide; crimes against humanity; grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, including attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such; or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law, including serious acts of gender‑based violence or serious acts of violence against children.
> ... a somewhat more reasonable comparison would be to compare it to the death and disaster caused by the US industrialisation, which I again suspect will outnumber the rest given the much longer timeframe
I was giving a counter-argument to your point that no other countries actions compares to the US giving amnesty to perpetrators of genocide. The fact is that both China and Russia did worse: they actively supported genocides against Uyghurs and Ukrainians.
Yeah I suspect this person is immersed in western news and just hears all about “the bad guys”, but I wonder what the USA looks like to someone in those places.
I appreciate your sharing of links. I didn’t have the energy to dig up a bunch of data, but the note about military expenditures supports the point nicely.
As shown in my other answer, neither have you shown that the points matters. The scale of the US weapons program and military which outsizes any other countries definitely still supports the main point made.
That some parts of the world appreciate the US activity has no bearing on criticism from parts of the world that do not appreciate it, as I'm sure you'd agree.
> I think it’s fair to say that the covert illegal activities of the US government probably exceed that of any other country by any reasonable measure.
Not even close, and I say this as a citizen of a developing country that has seen its fair share of superpower influence operations. The covert illegal activities of China and Russia equal or surpass those of the US in most regions. There are Russian operatives committing sabotage on European industrial facilities, and the country has an entire private army (Wagner, now rebranded as Africa Corps) that has been conducting dodgy activities all over Africa for decades now. The recent string of military coups in the Sahel clearly have Russian influence involved, given how quickly Wagner/Africa Corps rushes in immediately after.
There are increasing reports of Russian and Chinese influence operations designed to sway my country's next national election, including the emergence of an entirely new political party which espouses extreme traditionalist and anti-Western views and somehow has endless funding for rallies, advertising, and other campaigns all over the country. It was discovered a few years ago that the computer and telecommunications systems that China generously donated to the AU Parliament were riddled with surveillance equipment. There are many more examples out there.
>And we also manufacture and ship weapons all over the world, including to horrible regimes like Saudi Arabia. We are currently about to ship over $1 billion in weapons to a country actively perpetrating a genocide.
Yes, and the US deserves criticism for that, but by and large the US is a lot more selective about who it sells to and what it sells them than Russia and China are. In fact, it's because of concerns about the consistency of US munition supplies that Saudi Arabia (and the UAE) have invested substantially in setting up their own bomb, missile, and other armaments factories so they're less reliant on the US. The US retains the right to refuse weapons that it sees as pursuing policies it disagrees with, so it has for instance in the past agreed to provide surface to air missiles or air to air missiles but paused the delivery of aircraft bombs.
Nearly all of the weapons driving wars in Africa are Russian and Chinese, with a sprinkling of Iranian, Turkish, Emirati, and those of a few other small players, and they never block any shipments over human rights concerns. The genocide happening right now in Sudan is not driven at all by American or even Western weapons, and the flow of weapons hasn't slowed down despite the existence of sanctions.
It's good to hold the US to a high standard, but it's silly to let that turn into a belief that it's uniquely terrible among the world's nations. That's far from accurate.
> There are Russian operatives committing sabotage on European industrial facilities
After the NorthStream was blown up by the US (they even announced it), which constitutes as the biggest act of industrial terrorism EVER, I do not know if I believe you that Russia is "more evil".
> it's silly to let that turn into a belief that it's uniquely terrible among the world's nations
Not saying that they are uniquely terrible, I'm saying that they constantly want to remind everone that "rules based order" is so important, but when it comes to MKUltra or Gitmo they have no rules for themselves at all. It about the standard they set themselves and then only apply it to other countries.
>After the NorthStream was blown up by the US (they even announced it), which constitutes as the biggest act of industrial terrorism EVER, I do not know if I believe you that Russia is "more evil".
While the US must be considered a suspect in the Nordstream demolition, it is by no means clear that they did it, and they certainly did not 'announce it'. There are several other plausible suspects, along with various bits of circumstantial evidence pointing in other directions, but no conclusive evidence of any party's involvement.
Do you really think Europe would've sat by meekly if they had solid evidence that the US did it?
>Not saying that they are uniquely terrible, I'm saying that they constantly want to remind everone that "rules based order" is so important, but when it comes to MKUltra or Gitmo they have no rules for themselves at all. It about the standard they set themselves and then only apply it to other countries.
Superpowers are going to do superpower things. For those on the receiving end, the US comes closest to actually respecting the rules-based order most of the time, which is as a result of it not being run as a dictatorship and having a relatively free, open, and transparent society with a free press. It's obviously far from perfect, and things like the invasion of Iraq were a blatant abuse of power, but it's often the best chance of a win-win for populations rather than just leadership.
Ask Russia and China's neighbours how much they appreciate those countries' 'might makes right' approach to international conflict, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's takeover of territorial waters belonging to the Phillipines and other countries.
> Do you really think Europe would've sat by meekly if they had solid evidence that the US did it?
What would their options be? Their military is tiny compared to the US. Another data point is that they did sit by meekly when they had solid evidence that their leaders were taped by the US. Merkel, Chancellor of Germany at that time, didn't even shrug....
EDIT:
> Ask Russia and China's neighbours how much they appreciate those countries' 'might makes right' approach to international conflict, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's takeover of territorial waters belonging to the Phillipines and other countries.
The difference is that the US doesn't limit it's meddling with territory to its neighbours. They takeover globally when needed (Iraq, Afghanistan, South America, Libya, Syria, etc....)
> What would their options be? Their military is tiny compared to the US. Another data point is that they did sit by meekly when they had solid evidence that their leaders were taped by the US. Merkel, Chancellor of Germany at that time, didn't even shrug...
Do you think Europe’s only response was a military one?
If Europe was so scared of the US and willing to obey every move it makes, explain what happened over Iraq when even France and Germany opposed the US at the UNSC.
As for the spying revelations, they were met with a shrug because those countries do or attempt to do the same to enemies and allies alike too. It’s part of the game.
> The difference is that the US doesn't limit it's meddling with territory to its neighbours. They takeover globally when needed (Iraq, Afghanistan, South America, Libya, Syria, etc....)
What? Russian forces are in Syria in large numbers as we speak. Their Africa Corps is in nearly a dozen African countries, and they’ve helped launch coups across the Sahel, far from their own borders. There are Russian troops helping to sustain an illegal enclave in Moldova which doesn’t even share a border with Russia.
China, too, has become involved in conflicts and influence operations far from its own borders, including in Africa. Chinese ‘private’ security companies, which in actuality have clear ties to the state, are all over Africa and asserting ever stronger control over resources.
In any case, it’s irrelevant: It’s just as wrong to break international law when illegal stealing territory from your neighbours as it is to break international law further abroad.
The US at least had an unambiguous right in terms of international law to enter Afghanistan and Libya, complete with UNSC authorisations. What legal right do Russia and China have for their recent aggression and annexations?
To start: an army is not only there for military response but also for threat of attack and denying defense. So I don't really see your point here. Europe bent over since they are weaker strategically, not because they are doing the same. Do you have any evidence for Europeans spying at the same scale?
And just to clear up the other part: France and Germany were punished for their response to Iraq by the US. They also didn't do it again.
Re Russian forces in Syria. Yes they are in Syria. Are you really saying that the Russian army has a similar scope to the US army? The Russian army tries to actively invade the poorest country in Europe and gets a bloody nose. You really can't compare the two countries here, since the US is in a different category, financially (as shown above) and also by experience. Same counts for China. Saying that those armies do things too isn't really saying much.
Re rights:
The US meddles in Afghanistan since the 70s. They have no rights there and particularly not in Iraq. They also had no rights to support the murderous Pinochet government, Islamic terrorists all over the world, murderous lunatics in the Philippines or central America. They had no rights to support Nazi refugees. Yet they still did all of this and more.
Re Chinese security companies with ties to the state:
Blackwater? Halliburton? All the other companies? The economy of the States is hopelessly centralised and couldn't be tighter with government. You might want to say the companies own the government.
>To start: an army is not only there for military response but also for threat of attack and denying defense. So I don't really see your point here. Europe bent over since they are weaker strategically, not because they are doing the same. Do you have any evidence for Europeans spying at the same scale?
There are many, many avenues open to states that don't include military force or the threat thereof. In the case of the spying scandal, for instance, Germany created a parliamentary committee into the issue, made public many embarrassing details about the US's role, and summoned the US ambassador for a diplomatic dressing down. They also increased oversight of the Operation Eikonal agreement and made it more restrictive. Given the relationship that exists between the two countries, that's enough.
>And just to clear up the other part: France and Germany were punished for their response to Iraq by the US. They also didn't do it again.
Oh please, punished how? By getting some nasty comments from Congressmen? Neither country had any ill effect from it, and in fact came out stronger.
>Re Russian forces in Syria. Yes they are in Syria. Are you really saying that the Russian army has a similar scope to the US army? The Russian army tries to actively invade the poorest country in Europe and gets a bloody nose. You really can't compare the two countries here, since the US is in a different category, financially (as shown above) and also by experience. Same counts for China. Saying that those armies do things too isn't really saying much.
In Syria Russian forces did have a larger scope than US forces there, with more personnel deployed and more aircraft deployed long term. There's a reason most of the world expected them to conquer Ukraine with ease. China, meanwhile, has built a Navy and Air Force that are beginning to rival those of the US in terms of numbers and capabilities.
>The US meddles in Afghanistan since the 70s. They have no rights there and particularly not in Iraq. They also had no rights to support the murderous Pinochet government, Islamic terrorists all over the world, murderous lunatics in the Philippines or central America. They had no rights to support Nazi refugees. Yet they still did all of this and more.
Way to go ignoring what I actually said and pretending I said something different. Also, if you're going to use examples dating from decades ago, there are plenty of similar Soviet and Chinese examples to draw on. I intentionally limited my discussion to the post-Cold War era.
>Blackwater? Halliburton? All the other companies? The economy of the States is hopelessly centralised and couldn't be tighter with government. You might want to say the companies own the government.
Not nearly the same, we're talking about what are de facto state-owned enterprises with a CCP presence on their boards. Moreover, Blackwater? Seriously? They were so damaged by the bad publicity they (rightly) got over Iraq that they had to rebrand and are a shell of their former selves.
And we also manufacture and ship weapons all over the world, including to horrible regimes like Saudi Arabia. We are currently about to ship over $1 billion in weapons to a country actively perpetrating a genocide.
So yeah, you’re right. It’s not even close. It’s much more extensive. We are however more concerned with hiding those activities. We’re a “democracy” after all.