The White House is apparently determined to ensure that U.S. arms continue to be exported to Saudi Arabia by exploiting a loophole in the Arms Export Control Act. According to media reports, many members of Congress, allegedly including some Republicans, are not happy about what they see as Donald Trump stomping on their authority to have a say in weapons deals.
Since the late 1990s, the United States has been the world’s leading arms dealer. Its biggest customer? Saudi Arabia, one of the most brutal and oppressive dictatorships on the planet. The Saudis have been using those U.S. arms in a horrific war in Yemen against Iranian-backed rebels. As usual, civilians are getting the worst of it, and 20 million Yemenis are at risk of starvation.
During the 2018 fiscal year that ended last September, the United States sold $55.6 billion’s worth of weapons around the world, a one-third increase from 2017, and one-third of the total arms sales by all nations. That year, the U.S. signed some $18 billion in new Saudi arms deals. For the five years ending in 2017, nearly a fifth of U.S. weapons exports went to the Saudis, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
The sales and deliveries of these weapons have been carried on regardless of which political party is in power. But in March, the House and, with the help of seven Republicans, the Senate, voted to suspend support for the Saudis in a resolution whose lead sponsor was Sen. Bernie Sanders. “We should not be associated with a bombing campaign that the U.N. tells us is likely a gross violation of human rights,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy during debate on the resolution.
But Donald Trump vetoed it, and there weren’t nearly enough votes in either chamber of Congress to override.
Subsequently, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey placed a hold on the sale of precision-guided weapons to Saudi Arabia, because these are often used against civilian targets. Such holds are common and have been used in the past by both Democrats and Republicans to block arms sales to various nations. But Karoun Demirjian and Missy Ryan at The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Trump regime is looking to use presidential “emergency” powers to get around the hold. This has alarmed some members of Congress, who worry that such a move by the White House would trample on their authority to have a say in whom the executive branch exports weapons to:
“The congressional review process exists so that the Senate can ask questions about whether a particular arms sale serves our national interests and supports our values, including human rights and civilian protections,” Menendez said in a statement Thursday, warning defense contractors that they, too, should be concerned that “the possible consequences of this will ultimately jeopardize the ability of the U.S. defense industry to export arms in a manner both expeditious and responsible.”
“In addition to suffering the reputational problems of delivering deadly weapons to governments that clearly misuse them, U.S. defense firms should exercise extreme caution that they are not opening themselves, their officers, and their employees to criminal and civil liability by exporting weapons pursuant to potentially invalid licenses,” Menendez said.
The concern extends beyond circumventing the Senate hold on arms sales to the Saudis. On Twitter Wednesday, Sen. Murphy wrote, “To state the obvious, there is no new emergency reason to sell bombs to Saudi Arabia to drop in Yemen. The Saudis [have] been dropping the bombs on civilians, so if there is an emergency, it’s a humanitarian emergency caused by the bombs we sell the Saudis. Maybe Trump will say that ‘Iran’ is the emergency, but that’s a loophole that would allow any President to claim any number of Middle East crises as an ‘emergency’ and then Congress will never ever be able to object to an arms sale again.”
For more than a year, according to CBS News, the White House has been pushing for more arms sales abroad. Last spring, the National Security Council adopted a policy to cut regulations and shorten wait times that usually are a part of weapons sales. It’s supposedly all about economics. The policy, called an "Arms Transfer Initiative," is specifically designed to "expand opportunities for American industry [and] create American jobs," Tina Kaidanow, a longtime State Department diplomat who recently moved to the Pentagon, said at a conference last August.