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)
----
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]
----
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.
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....
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/12221/the-worlds-biggest-arms... [2] https://www.globalfirepower.com/defense-spending-budget.php