Wanna Buy a Weapons Platform?

 

As the fentanyl crisis continues to explode, taking an accelerating toll of human life, funny how the MAGA right blames insecure borders as the culprit. They completely side-step that the south-of-the-border criminal cartels would not be able to function if they were not able to buy so many weapons, from AR-15s to semiautomatic pistols, without the slightest difficulty in the United States. You’d think Mexico would want a more secure border, but the US emphasis is virtually entirely northbound traffic. The US is the primary source of those cartel weapons, well over 90% according to some official estimates, with many of the guns emblazoned with images of infamous Mexican bandits and “heroes,” leaving little doubt about the awareness of American gunmakers of one of their biggest markets. US demand enforced by US-made guns.

But it truly is a good time if you are an arms manufacturer. Demand has never been higher as arms sales conventions can attest. Civil wars are good for business, but the war in Ukraine has become a weapons bonanza. Not just supplying military hardware to that conflict, but also in connection with an escalating fear of autocratic regimes seeking to expand their borders. As much as Western Europe fears Russia, Taiwan and India fear the People’s Republic of China. Governments facing insurrection – from Iran to El Salvador, the nations battling internally and externally in and around the Horn of Africa, Nigeria facing Boko Haram, Turkey battling a Kurdish separatist movement – and to the demand for more weapons. Demand for guns has never been higher.

As Nabih Bulos, writing from an arms fair in the UAE on behalf of the March 2nd Los Angeles Times, reports, new fortunes are being made by munitions manufacturers all over the world: “Signs of those shifts abounded at last week’s [end of February] International Defense Exhibition and Conference, or IDEX [pictured above], the biennial arms bazaar held in the Emirati capital, Abu Dhabi. This year’s show was the largest in the event’s 30-year history, organizers said, bringing in 1,350 companies, 350 delegations and about 130,000 attendees from 65 countries.

“They flooded Abu Dhabi’s national exhibition center with enough armored vehicles, attack aircraft and air, land and sea drones to equip a not-so-small army… Defense spending is surging in European nations seeking to keep up stocks at home while helping to arm Kyiv with rocket launchers, missiles and tanks. The German government has shaken off its usual hesitancy regarding military matters and pledged to spend $100 billion on reequipping its armed forces, though no money has yet been spent on weaponry.

“In Asia, Japan and South Korea are boosting military spending in response to China, whose defense budget grew by 7% in 2022. That translates into Beijing’s largest-ever annual increase in absolute terms — $16 billion, adjusted for inflation, according to a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“Weapons companies are seeing their shares rise on the stock market to their best level in years, with indexes for the defense sector outperforming those tracking the broader market by a wide margin, experts say. That reverses a trend before the year-old Ukraine war of people putting their money in so-called ESG investments — those focusing on the environment and social and corporate governance — rather than the defense industry, said Kevin Craven, who heads the ADS Group, a trade organization representing British aerospace, defense, security and space companies.

“‘Now, one year on, you find people remembering that a government’s first duty is to defend its citizens, and actually the freedoms that we have require a strong military capability and defense industry,’ Craven said… He added that Britain’s robust support for Ukraine — it’s the second-largest contributor of military assistance after the U.S., supplying antitank missiles, artillery and armored vehicles — has generated interest in those products from prospective buyers.

“Emirati officials insisted that the event was about commerce, not geopolitics. During his visit to the fair, Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan said it highlighted the Emirates’ ‘approach of building bridges of communication and cooperation’ so as to achieve ‘peace, stability and a better future for humanity,’ according to local media — despite the lethal nature of the merchandise.” Yup, the best prospect for peace is the ability to blow your enemy to smithereens. Perhaps having a big military is a deterrence… just a whole lot less of a deterrence than we have seen for over three quarters of a century.

Bulos continues: “Even Ukraine, despite being under attack by Russia for more than a year , was represented in Abu Dhabi. Stanislav Shyldskyi, a business development manager with drone manufacturer Ukrspec, described the moment when Russian journalists came to check out the Ukrainian pavilion in the main convention center… ‘They told us, ‘You guys don’t have anything.’ They wrote an article the next day that the Ukrainian pavilion is very small,’ Shyldskyi said. ‘It was pretty childish, and we told them to stop filming.’.. He said most of what Ukrainian firms were producing was going toward domestic consumption, but it was still important to be at an arms show such as IDEX.

“Not far from the Ukrainian pavilion, Belarus, which has sided with Russia in the conflict, occupied a larger corner stand with several meeting rooms. One of the half-dozen sales representatives there said sanctions had done little to hamper their trade… ‘We actually got more interest after sanctions. If someone wants to sanction you, it means we are strong,’ he said, adding that the prohibitions had been an impediment only in the first two months of their application. He spoke on condition of anonymity to comment on geopolitical matters… ‘We expected it would be more difficult to do business, but when there’s interest, a client will always find a way to make it work.’” War is hell… but not for everybody.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as we try and reinstate the START strategic nuclear containment treaty with Moscow, the ability to reinstate peace around the world seems as elusive as it has ever been.