An Inconvenient Truth: How The Obama Administration Became Earth's Largest Arms Dealer
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Throughout the Obama presidency, and still to this day, there is one central element of his foreign policy that received little attention – the dramatic acceleration of lethal weapons exports by the U.S. military and defense contractors.
The Obama administration approved more lethal weapon sales to more foreign countries than any U.S. administration since World War II. Many billions more than G.W. Bush's administration, in fact. And some of these sales will likely result in unintended consequences, i.e., "blowback" – especially as more than 60 percent of them went to the Middle East and Persian Gulf.
(After all, U.S. weapons supplied to the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets were then used to help launch Al-Qaeda. Arms supplied to Iraqi security forces and Syrian rebels have been captured by ISIS. And “allies” from Bahrain to Egypt to Saudi Arabia have used U.S.-supplied weapons to defeat homegrown democracy movements.)
In 2016, President Obama announced at a press conference in Hanoi that the U.S. would be lifting its decades-long embargo on sales of lethal weapons to Vietnam. Such a reversal in U.S. foreign policy raised questions: How does the U.S. arms export market actually work? Which companies in the military-industrial complex profit from these sales? Who really ends up with U.S. weapons? And most importantly, how many of those weapons could eventually be used against us?
Infographic Sources
- Defense Security Cooperation Agency: Foreign Military Sales (FMS)
- Conventional Arms Transfers To Developing Nations, 2007-2014
- Pentagon Agency Handled Record Foreign Arms Sales In 2015
- With White House Push, US Arms Sales Jump
- The Obama Arms Bazaar
- President Obama's Record-Breaking Arms Sales Are Enabling Human Rights Abuses
- America's Hottest Export Weapons - Full Version
- The US Is Selling Weapons To Nearly Half The Countries In The World
- US Arms Sales Make Up Most Of Global Market
- Military Spending In The United States
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- Blood Money? US Is World's Top Arms Dealer
- Boeing Tops Defense Lobbying
- Defense Contractors Spend Millions To Overturn Limits On Military Spending
- Ike's Warning Of Military Expansion, 50 Years Later
- Military-Industrial Complex
- Top Spenders In Lobbying
- The Top 25 Weapons Companies In The World (Excluding China)
- Lockheed Sees Big Foreign Defense Orders In 2016
- Northrop Grumman Looks To International Market For New Business
- Northrop Grumman
- 2015 Top 100 Government Contractors
- Foreign Assistance Act Of 1961
- US Foreign Arms Deals Increased Nearly $10 Billion In 2014
- Yikes: Obama Is The World's Biggest Arms Dealer, But Look Who's Buying
- Amnesty Report: ISIS Armed With US Weapons
- With American Help Iraq's Cycle Of Violence Spirals
- Iraq: A Broken Justice System
- US State Department Approves Saudi Arabia Arms Sale
- Saudi Arabia Profile - Overview
- About Saudi Arabia
- World Report 2015: Saudi Arabia
- Saudi Arabia 2016/2017
- A Nation Goes To War
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