In light of the Trump Administration's new arms trade policy, I write in War on the Rocks how the United States can and cannot use the global arms market to its advantage. The bottom line: it is difficult to create more jobs with US arms exports. And most new orders that do create jobs will likely undermine US national interests.
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Jesse Dillon Savage and I wrote a post for the excellent War on the Rocks site on one important implication for the larger militarization of US foreign policy: increased coup propensity among recipients of US aid as foreign military training. It's based on our recent Journal of Peace Research article, which Sage has kindly undated for us.In the Italian magazine Formiche, I argue that--from arms purchases to political attention to security cooperation spending--Europe in general and Italy in particular will not see a lot of good news in the current administration's budget proposal.
For my Italian-speaking friends, I argue (pdf) that Brexit is as much an opportunity for Italy to improve its defense cooperation with the United States as it is with the European Union.
![]() C-Span recently filmed a discussion between Thomas Berger and me, hosted by the Wilson Center. The title of the talk is "East Asia on the Brink? The Impact of the Arms Trade and Nationalism on Regional Security," and Thomas and I explore whether the oxygen of nationalism and the fuel of arms transfers will combust in the region. In the latest issue (temporarily un-gated) of Survival, Ethan Kapstein and I look at the steep rise in arms imports to Asia and what the consequences are for U.S. influence in that region, the prospects of major conventional weapons proliferation, and for crisis stability in hotspots such as the South China Sea.
The ideas in this short article cover some of the ground in our book manuscript, "Arms for Influence: The Global Arms Trade and the Future of U.S. Power." You can download a copy here for the time being. If you are having trouble, feel free to contact me.
![]() Tonight at at 6pm I will be giving a talk at Bard College's James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series. Details can be found here. From The New Republic:
Only occasionally do the categories used to organize presidential debates and talk-show roundtables reflect the world as it actually works. Case in point: foreign policy, defined, for the purposes of a campaign year, as a narrow set of invariably perilous scenarios, the solution to which always seems to involve blowing something up. Sanders himself is guilty of playing into this facile paradigm. A year into his improbable experiment in populist revolution, he’s laid out the basis for a robust, even radical foreign policy vision and doesn’t appear to realize it. In his recent book-length study, Democratic Militarism,..." |
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