Editor’s note: This commentary is by Joseph Gainza, the founder of Vermont Action for Peace and the producer and host of “Gathering Peace” on WGDR and WGDH. He lives in Marshfield.
[D]onald Trump is determined to make America grieve again. He is preparing to pour ever greater numbers of U.S. made weapons into hot spots across the globe. This may well result in American soldiers and Marines once again finding themselves facing enemies armed with advanced weapons manufactured in their hometowns.
The New York Times reports that “… the Trump administration is quietly moving forward with a new rule to boost U.S. fire-arms exports …” Trump is doing so in obedience to the demands of arms manufacturers who want the Commerce Department to replace the State Department in licensing U.S. gun manufacturer sales overseas and to weaken congressional oversight of such sales. The State Department, the Times continues, emphasizes diplomatic solutions and human rights, whereas the Commerce Department “is primarily concerned with promoting U.S. business abroad.” So weapons manufacturers prefer that Commerce become the licensing agent. Larry Keane, the senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which considers the rule change their top legislative priority, is reported as saying the change will create a “more even playing field” for U.S. weapons manufacturers as they compete internationally with other merchants of death.
They hardly need the additional help. While the rule is about sale of firearms, such sales must be seen in the overall context of U.S. weapons sales abroad, both small arms and major weapons systems. As William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy points out: “For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion.” Mr. Trump is following a long line of American presidents, going back to Nixon, in swamping the world with deadly weaponry. Hartung reports that, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, “between 2002 and 2016 the United States delivered weaponry to 167 countries — more than 85% of the nations on the planet.” And between 1981 and 2010, Washington, with the active involvement of the Pentagon, provided weaponry to 59 percent of all nations engaged in high-level conflicts.
In how many of these conflicts are U.S. troops engaged? Few Americans know. There are approximately 200,000 U.S. troops in 177 foreign countries. It was not known that the U.S. had troops actively engaged in conflict in Niger until three Green Berets were killed in that African country in October last year. It is likely American troops are facing fighters armed with weapons made in the USA as they have in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr. Trump is on the way to becoming the president overseeing the greatest amount of arms sales of any previous administration, surpassing Barack Obama, presently the leading presidential merchant of death. Trump makes no effort to hide the political nature of his arms sale policies. When the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the largest U.S. arms client, was visiting the White House, Trump displayed a map of the 50 states showing which would benefit most from arms sales to that authoritarian regime presently destroying the people of Yemen. Prominent was Michigan, Ohio and Florida, crucial swing states in the 2016 election. Trump has promoted weapons sales saying it is all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”
If Mr. Trump wants to create jobs, he could reduce the bloated military budget and invest the money in education, health care, renewable energy, or simply return it to taxpayers — all shown by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create many more jobs than equivalent expenditures on the military. But that would not please the likes of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Remington Arms and other producers of weapons who are also major contributors to political campaigns.
There is no discernible concern for the lives of those who will be killed by these weapons. Morality cannot compete with profit, financial or political, so Mr. Trump nominated, John Rood as undersecretary of defense for policy, where one of his responsibilities is major arms sales. Mr. Rood is a former Lockheed Martin executive who, during his confirmation hearings, refused to say he would recuse himself from transactions involving his former employer. The Senate confirmed him by a vote of 81-7.
But some members of Congress are concerned about how weapons sales will affect human beings.
In September 2017, Democrat Sens. Ben Cardin, Dianne Feinstein and Vermont’s Patrick Leahy sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raising concerns about the proposed firearms rule change. They wrote, in part, “Combat firearms and ammunition are uniquely lethal; they are easily spread and easily modified, and are the primary means of injury, death and destruction in civil and military conflicts throughout the world. As such they should be subjected to more — not less — rigorous export controls and oversight.” They could have added that these firearms are also the primary means of mass killings in the U.S. It would seem the Trump administration is ignoring them, can’t be bothered with such sentimental hogwash. The majority of Congress seems ready to follow the president into this moral depravity.
But Congress was not always so lacking in moral fiber. From April 1934 to February 1936, the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee held 93 hearings to investigate four topics: the munitions industry; bidding on government contracts in the shipbuilding industry; war profits; and the background leading up to U.S. entry into World War I. The committee was chaired by Republican Sen. Gerald Nye of North Dakota, and is known in history as the Nye Committee. Sen. Nye summed up the committee’s findings: “The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself.” In April of 1936, the Nye Committee issued its final report. Of the seven members, four called for nationalization of the munitions (arms) industry. The three remaining members called for “rigid and conclusive munitions control.”
And the American people were not as complacent or cowed as we seem to be today, awash as we are in a militarized mentality. Just before the release of the final Nye Committee report, a Gallup poll made public on March 7, 1936, reported that when asked “Should the manufacture and sale of war munitions for private profit be prohibited?” 82 percent of Americans responded “yes.” Would we do the same today? Would it change anything?