The Tragicomedy of Arms Trade Control

Because of the threat to world peace embodied in this spiralling arms traffic, and because of the special responsibilities we bear as the largest arms seller, I believe that the United States must take steps to restrain its arms transfers. . . . These controls will be binding unless extraordinary circumstances necessitate a Presidential exception. . . . -Jimmy Carter, May 19, 1977 H o w quaint, comical, and sad these words sound only three years later. By 1980, born-again cold warriors could be found peddling weapons all along the Arc of Crisis in an attempt to bolster a new line of containment and secure visitation rights for a resurgentprojection of American forces. Arms sales are again normalrather than exceptional. This about-face was not due simply to the shock of the invasionof Afghanistan, because the policy was not just an artifactof detente. The program of arms trade restraint had been crumbling from the moment of its inception. Philosophically flawed, practically infeasible, and never seriously implemented, the policy needed only the coup de grrice administered by the Sovietsin December 1979. Retrospect and Prospect What can be gained from a conceptual post mortem of a policy relic? First, it is an instructivecase study in the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy. The arms trade policy was a microcosm of the aggressive Wilsonian idealism permeating Carter’s view of the world. It reflects the intensity of contradictions -more extreme than the normal contradictions that every administration has to manage-in the President’s ambitious aims. Second, these old impulses may be dormantrather than dead. U.S. foreign policy tends to oscillate between complacent optimism and near-hysterical alarm. In the first three years of the Carter Administration, the pendulum This article was originally presented in the A r m s Control and Defense Planning Seminarat the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research. An expansion of this essay will appear i n a forthcomingvolume edited by Richard Burt. Richard K . Beth isa Research Associate at the Brookings Institution,and author of Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold W a r Crises. He teaches defense p o k y at Columbia and Johns Hopkins universities. 80 Arms Trade Control I 81 swung in the latter direction. But once the dust settles, adrenalin runs down, and the Byzantine fluidity of alignmentsin the Near East swamps American leaders a few times, there may be a renewal of skepticismabout arms transfers , if not a rebirth of hope in the evolution of world politics toward harmony . After all, it was barely two years after Dullesarticulated the “rollback” policy and the Soviets crushed the East German insurrection that we had ”the Spirit of Geneva.” Even less time elapsed between the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the bloom of Nixon’s detente. Arms controllers argue that tension makes agreementson restraint more rather than less important, so the lobby for arms transfer controls will not die even if U.S.-Soviet confrontation remains intense. Third, even if American leaders remain soberly disillusioned with the naivetk of Carter’s original arms transfer policy, the question of restraint will not go away. Revival of containment does not justify all sales, because some customers are not proxies of either superpower, and want arms for purposes unrelated to U.S.-Soviet competition. The United States cannot give or sell all the weapons potential customers would like. Simple constraints of production capacity make it necessary to establish discriminatory priorities, and in many cases transferswill not serve American interests.Just because Carter’s conventional arms controllers had stars in their eyes does not mean that limitations are never advisable. A philosophical and operational basis still has to be found for integrating the benefits of arms trade for U.S. defense policy and the standards of restraint that may serve diplomatic objectives. Clarification of the weaknesses in arguments for arms trade control that held sway in recent years helps to put the problem into perspective. A R M S CONTROL AND DEFENSE INTJ2RESTS The relationship between U.S. security interests and the control of conventional arms trade is foggy. Where the linkage of arms transfers to defense policy is direct-provision of weapons to close allies-there has never been any controversy. The only...