2023-05-19 13:00:00
ARMS SALES – Despite the White House’s agreed rhetoric in favor of so-called democratic countries, the United States sold arms to more than half of the world’s authoritarian regimes in 2022.
Since Joe Biden came to power in 2021, he has used a rhetoric opposing democracies and autocracies, in which the United States would be the great peacemakers in the world. But in reality, the Biden administration has helped many authoritarian countries increase their military might.
According to the website The Intercept, the United States even sold weapons to at least 57% of them in 2022. According to two reports, published by the US State Department on the one hand, and at the end of April by the Pentagon on the other , US arms sales benefited 142 countries in 2022.
Business is business
The University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, carries out a classification which separates the so-called democratic countries, which elect their leaders through free and transparent elections, from the others. Of 84 countries classified as autocratic, at least 48 have purchased weapons from the US state. At least, because more than 10% of sales went to countries that remained secret.
This count contradicts Joe Biden’s presentation of his international policy: a fight between democracies, led by the United States, located in the “camp of peace and security”, in the face of autocracies conspiring against them.
Joe Biden, who said again in Warsaw last year that the fight between democracy and autocracy was the fight of “freedom against repression” and between “a regulated international order and an order governed by brute force”.
Under Donald Trump, who during his first official trip to Saudi Arabia announced a major arms deal, arms sales had flourished. They thrive even more under Biden.
During his first year as president, the total reached $206 billionwhile the median under Donald Trump was around 170 billion. And support for Ukraine explains nothing of this increase, the vast majority of arms deliveries being made up of donations.
Despite his promises to only sell arms to countries that respect human rights, Joe Biden has barely taken office, approving sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and dozens of other countries authoritarian.
France is not left out
On the other side of the Atlantic, the “country of human rights” still occupied third place in the world for arms sellers in 2021 with nearly 12 billion euros in orders.
Among the five biggest buyers, the Egypt of Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, or even Saudi Arabia. Over the past ten years, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have also been among France’s biggest customers.
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