President Biden has made clear in his first 100 days that he will pursue a values-based foreign policy that prioritizes democracy and human rights. This is welcome and past due. But his administration will need to lay out a new approach to US arms sales to make it happen.
US arms sales are one of the trickiest and most complex aspects of US foreign policy. Decisions over arms sales require balancing competing foreign policy, military, and economic interests, as well as weighing these concerns with our democratic values. As a result, US arms sales ultimately reflect the priorities and outlook of the wider administration.
For the previous four years, the Trump administration treated US arms sales, less as a foreign policy tool, than as part of a mercantilist policy to increase American manufacturing and boost exports. It let loose sales held up during the Obama administration. Spurned congressional oversight, transferring weapons to Saudi Arabia over the objections of Congress in dubious and legally questionable ways. And it downplayed and outright dismissed human rights considerations.
Yet Biden cannot and should not try to simply revert back to the approaches of the Obama administration. The world has changed and US foreign policy has different priorities. For the Obama administration, arms sales were rightly seen as a tool of US foreign policy and much less weight was given to the economic aspects of a sale. But geopolitics has changed dramatically since the Obama Administration was in office. U.S. foreign policy is focused on confronting the challenge posed by China and reducing the emphasis on the Middle East. At the same time, the Biden Administration is seeking to strengthen democracies and push back against the rising tide of authoritarianism. U.S. arms sales need to fit into this new framework.
As President Biden has articulated, the challenges posed to democracy require the United States to adopt a foreign policy aligned with our values. General opponents of arms sales might say the Biden Administration should just stop selling arms. But this underestimates the diplomatic and military importance of arms sales Most countries in the world do not manufacture their own major military equipment and need to buy them. Where they buy their military equipment from therefore has huge diplomatic ramifications.
The purchase of high-end weapon systems, such as a fighter jet, a naval frigate, or a tank, is a multi-generational commitment, not just to that weapon system but to the country that is supplying it. Think of your smartphone. When a consumer decides between buying an iPhone or Android, or Samsung Galaxy, they aren’t just buying a piece of hardware. They are buying into a system that offers a web of products and services. Similarly, when a country buys a high end weapon system they are tying themselves to the United States. They need the US to provide software updates, spare parts, repairs and maintenance, and training. Diplomatically, this also entails intensive military-to-military contact and helps build trust between countries. If two countries can trust each other enough to work together on sensitive security issues, they can work together on other issues as well. Arms sales thus help undergird our diplomatic partnerships.
And yet, the logic that countries will buy weapons anyway, better from us than others, is a slippery slope that leads to a debasement of standards. Instead, the US needs to recalibrate how it makes arms sales decisions.
First, treat arms sales as a tool of foreign policy, not economic policy. The Biden Administration has emphasized the importance of the economy and the US worker when it comes to foreign policy. This is an important effort but when it comes to arms sales, foreign policy must come first. While US arms sales can help bolster our defense industrial base, we cannot fall into the Trumpian trap of promoting sales as the primary goal of our foreign policy.
Additionally, such an approach should also extend to US security assistance, where the State Department should be put back in charge of foreign assistance. This means reversing the decade plus creation and expansion of a DoD foreign assistance system and ensuring that the State Department is the principal decision-maker on arms sales decisions.
Second, the Biden administration must also redo the policy guiding our conventional arms transfer. When we served in the Obama administration we rewrote and updated the policy, which was heavily reflective of the post-Cold War environment, highlighting the centrality of human rights. The Trump administration redid our redo, emphasizing the mercantilist aspect of sales. The Biden administration should reverse this, go stronger on human rights, but also emphasize governance, especially as that relates to potential end-use violations of US-provided weapons.
It is vital that U.S. arms sale policy factor in the potential dangers of US arms falling into the wrong hands, whether that’s insurgent groups or peer-adversaries looking to replicate or exploit US technology.
Third, the Biden Administration should focus more on Asia and Europe, and less on the Middle East. The US needs a strategy to manage China’s increasing military strength. This will entail supplying key partners from Japan and Korea in North Asia to India and Australia with highly advanced capabilities and will require extensive Political-Military dialogues between the US and its partners.
As for Europe, the US needs to change course. The US defense industry drove the Trump administration’s opposition to the EU’s fairly tepid efforts to create more of a common European defense market. US insistence that European taxpayer euros are spent on US defense companies is petty and hypocritical — the US rarely buys European. If the US wants Europe to spend more on defense it has to recognize that money will be spent on European companies. We should be encouraging greater US-EU defense industrial collaboration just as the US has done with the UK and Australia. This will require forging new technical agreements and extensive collaboration with our NATO partners.
Fourth, the Biden administration needs to rebuild trust with the Hill. The process for notifying and collaborating with Congress needs to be rebuilt. Crucial to achieving successful collaboration is forging a common outlook with congress on the purpose and utility of arms sales.
Fifth, the US needs to become more proactive in leading global efforts to control destabilizing and dangerous new weapons technology. Too often, the US takes a back seat when it comes to international efforts to control potentially destabilizing developments such as in the field of artificial intelligence or lethal autonomous systems. The US military understandably doesn’t want to be boxed in. But this has led to a generally disinterested diplomatic posture. Instead, the US should be more active in launching international discussions and using these fora to try to box-in and constrain future adversaries.
Lastly, the White House needs to structure itself so that it has the expertise to help quarterback arms transfer issues – whether sales or assistance. Too often, arms sales policy discussions are solely led by the National Security Council’s regional directorates who rarely give proper weight to broader functional considerations, such as whether allowing a transfer will undermine US credibility or undermine arms transfers as a foreign policy tool. When arms transfer decisions are made, at least one eye needs to be focused on the broader message and signal that this is sending to the world and to other partners.
The Biden Administration’s review of arms sales policy and its nascent National Security Strategy presents an opportunity to reset the U.S. approach to arms sales in a way that reflects the changing geopolitical realities and better align our policy with U.S. values. Rather than decide each sale on a case-by-case basis, the Biden team should come up with an approach that makes sense to our partners, Congress and the American people.
Andrew Shapiro, who served as assistant Secretary of State for political-military affairs from 2009 to 2013, is a founder and managing director of Beacon Global Strategies.
Max Bergmann, who was a senior advisor in the State Department from 2011-2017 where he helped oversee the Political-Military Affairs bureau, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
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