World Peace Threatened Not By Unbridled Arms Exports Alone, Jingoism And Expansionism Are Larger Subtexts
The US comes down with a heavy hand, and rightly so, on any attempt to sneak narcotics into the country but has no qualms about having blood on its hands by blithely exporting arms to all and sundry with an eye on propping up its economy as well as to fight its own enemies, often perceived, sometimes directly and often through its proxies. At 43%, the US has been maintaining its numero uno position, with Ukraine hogging the honours at the other end of the spectrum, namely imports (https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/ukraine-worlds-biggest-arms-importer-united-states-dominance-global-arms-exports-grows-russian). The US President Donald Trump’s vow, on his second inauguration, to end all wars across the globe would carry conviction if he takes the bold decision not to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. You cannot wish for peace when, at the same time, you keep on arming the war-torn or war-prone countries to the teeth.
Worst is the case of countries which, while not fighting any wars, their own or others, produce deadly weapons solely for export revenues. Remember Sweden, whose Bofors guns roiled the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in a kickback controversy leading to his ouster at the hustings? Defence imports have been a fecund source of funds for ruling parties in the form of kickbacks—over-invoicing and sharing a generous sliver of the extra amount with the key ruling functionaries of the importing country. Narendra Modi, the incumbent Prime Minister of India, nipped the possible charge of kickbacks in the bud by going for a government-to-government contract with the government of France for the import of Rafale fighter jets. Be that as it may.
Unlike weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons), conventional weapons are recognised as legitimate tools of governments, militaries, law enforcement, and civilians. The conventional arms trade is the exchange of a broad range of equipment, including armoured combat vehicles, combat aircraft, combat helicopters, warships, small arms and light weapons (known collectively as "SALW"), landmines, cluster munitions, artillery, and ammunition. States and state-authorised actors are privileged participants in the conventional weapons trade. Article 51 of the 1945 UN Charter guarantees sovereign states the inherent right to individual or collective self-defence. This implies that states, and licensed entities within states, have the right to produce, trade, and retain conventional arms. In other words, the arms trade is with the blessings of the UN. Such a delightfully permissive dispensation is lapped up both by exporters and importers.
To be sure, the regime of the UN arms embargo is in place on paper. Mandatory multilateral arms embargoes are sometimes imposed on human rights violators, warring parties, and those seen to be compromising international peace and security. Yet, they are frequently and often flagrantly violated, with arms being available for the asking and friendly nations and arms dealers playing ball. Be that as it may.
The US and the other superpowers constantly worry about nuclear proliferation and insist on asking others to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, which has 191 signatories. These include the five recognised nuclear-weapon states (the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom) and numerous non-nuclear-weapon states. Four countries are not signatories: India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. North Korea was previously a signatory but withdrew in 2003. Taking a cue, Iran has given dark hints of pulling out of the constrictive NPT. NPT or not, the world has, by and large, been behaving responsibly in abjuring the use of atom bombs, crude or refined, perhaps chastened by the havoc it wreaked in Japan as well as by the grim and imminent possibility of a retaliatory nuclear strike now that they are no longer esoteric weapons.
The other two weapons of mass destruction, namely biological and chemical weapons, too seem to have been subdued. Experts aver that cyberwar has a more potentially crippling effect and could be the order of the day. Hacking is not only to obtain scientific and trade secrets but also to cynically and perversely bring your enemy to his knees with information blackouts and tinkering.
The UN charter permitting acquisition of arms as being necessary for self-defence has a ring of verisimilitude, as evident from Ukraine and Iran being able to keep Russia and the US, respectively, at bay. The greater danger to world peace then stems from jingoism and expansionism. Russia’s declining exports of arms don’t mean pacificism; instead, it is about jingoism and expansionism. Both Russia and the US covet Ukraine’s rare earths or precious minerals. President George Bush had a pathological hatred for Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi strongman, and charged him with amassing chemicals of mass destruction. That charge came a cropper. Now POTUS Trump smelled enriched uranium in Iran (which his own Intel Chief Tulsi Gabbard rubbished) and dropped bunker busters on its nuclear installations. He justified it as a pre-emptive strike and later on rationalised it as being necessary to end the Israel-Iran war, smugly forgetting that Israel was being used by the US to settle its scores with Iran. In fact, while rationalising the attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, he drew a parallel with the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the Second World War. Touche! That the first and hopefully the last use of the atom bomb vapourised as many as two lakh humans didn’t occur to him as the most sinister and cruel form of warfare, even if its bottom line was the end of WWII.
The world has witnessed two holocausts thus far. One by Hitler, gassing as many as six million Jews, whose only fault was that Hitler perceived them as racially inferior. And second by the then US president Harry Truman, when he ordered the bombing of Japan. POTUS Trump hastily beat a retreat and brokered a ceasefire between Iran and Israel not with altruistic motives but because he realised, in hindsight, that he had bitten off more than he could chew. Iran retaliated against the recent US deployment of bunker busters by targeting US bases in Qatar and Iraq. Such ubiquitous bases being quick launch pads for the US has been trite all along, but Iran made them soft targets. It struck back by targeting US bases in its backyard. This must be a sobering experience for the US. After all, it has its soft underbelly abroad.
Net-net, free imports of weapons are no longer the main cause of concern. Superpowers seeking to lord over land, sea and air are now the source of growing anxiety.
S Murlidharan is a freelance columnist and writes on economics, business, legal and taxation issues.
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