On America's 250th Birthday, the United States Arms the World's Tyrannies
· Reason
The Founding Fathers debated from the beginning whether the United States should try to spread liberty by force. While Thomas Jefferson wanted to back the French Revolution, George Washington warned Americans "to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" in his Farewell Address.
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What neither of them could have imagined was America becoming a forceful backer of absolute monarchy. But their present successor, Donald Trump, has become obsessed with building an ironclad alliance of the kind of rulers that Washington and Jefferson fought to break free of. A month ago, Trump demanded that Saudi Arabia and Qatar join the Abraham Accords, an alliance underpinned by the United Arab Emirates. Two weeks ago, he offered to be the "guardian" of these governments for pay. All three of these states are monarchies, and—unlike Britain at the time of the American Revolution—don't even have elected parliaments.
The problem goes much deeper than Trump himself. During the first half of the Biden administration, the United States sold weapons to the majority of the world's autocracies, The Intercept found. The situation hasn't improved since. Reason found that a majority of the world's autocracies still benefited from U.S. weapons or security aid from fiscal year 2022 to fiscal year 2025.
The list came from the latest U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) sales book, which includes both military aid and sales by the U.S. government, as well as the security aid announcements (which include training) on ForeignAssistance.gov. The DSCA data only goes up to fiscal year 2024 and doesn't count direct commercial sales of weapons by private American companies, only direct sales by the U.S. government.
Going by the University of Gothenburg's Regimes of the World database, 62 out of the world's 87 autocracies benefited from U.S. weapons or security aid. And going by the nonprofit Freedom House's Freedom in the World report, 39 out of the 61 countries listed as "not free" benefited from U.S. weapons or security aid, while another 38 out of the 42 countries listed as "partly free" benefited from the same.
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If there is a tin-pot tyrant somewhere in the world, odds are that they owe some of their power to the Pentagon. And if there is a country teetering between freedom and dictatorship, odds are that the forces of repression are arming themselves courtesy of Uncle Sam. That's not a comforting fact on the Fourth of July.
Some of these cases are well known. The U.S. government is one of the largest arms suppliers to the Middle East, both selling and giving away guns to the region's monarchies and republican dictatorships. Other cases fly under the radar of the American public. Many of the recent coups d'etat across Africa were carried out by U.S.-trained military officers—some of whom turned against the United States.
It's easy to chalk up these tendencies to cynical statecraft. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously said that foreign policy "should not be confused with missionary work." What would seem to follow, then, is that the U.S. government can simply choose to be more moral. Reformers, such as former USAID Administrator Samantha Power, have argued that an improved U.S. aid policy can help democracy triumph over autocracy.
But perhaps the problem is trying to do missionary work in the first place. After all, many of the U.S. government's unsavory partnerships are a relic of the Cold War. Many administrations not only overlooked the crimes of anti-communist partners but also argued that Americans have an active duty to support those forces as a moral good. It's the same story in the Middle East, where the U.S. government has tried to argue that some dictatorships are "models" of tolerance.
"Efforts to spread liberalism often contained the seeds of illiberalism," the historian Patrick Porter wrote in a paper for the libertarian CATO Institute. He argued that the very act of enforcing any kind of world order, democratic or not, requires "the forceful suppression of revolt" and cooperation with local rulers. In other words, trying to become the worldwide "arsenal of democracy" made America into the arsenal of autocracy by necessity.
President John Quincy Adams gave Americans a similar warning on July 4, 1821. America "well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force," he said.
That wasn't to say that the American Revolution had nothing to offer the world. Adams offered an alternative model of America: "Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example."
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