Arms Transfers under Nixon
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Arms Transfers under Nixon

A Policy Analysis

Lewis Sorley

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eBook - ePub

Arms Transfers under Nixon

A Policy Analysis

Lewis Sorley

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About This Book

A model of policy analysis, Arms Transfers under Nixon provides a lucid and lively demonstration of how the Nixon administration combined skillful diplomacy and the adroit use of arms transfers to bring about a remarkable series of American foreign policy achievements.The Middle East provides the most dramatic example. Here, the Arab-Israeli military balance was stabilized, Egypt was persuaded and enabled to forsake its heavy dependence upon the Soviet Union, conditions favorable to peace negotiations were arranged, and important interim agreements were brokered by the United States.

In the Persian Gulf, the promotion of Iran and Saudi Arabia as effective guarantors of regional stability in the wake of British withdrawal, and maintaining the pro-Western orientation of these governments, are shown to have been essential to crucial United States and Western interests. The dramatic reversal with the collapse of the Shah's government is assessed, as are the causes of that post-Nixon debacle.

The battles that accompanied the administration's initiatives—battles with hostile nations, with allies, with the Congress, and even within the administration—and the diplomatic and political moves by which opposition was overcome provide the stuff of an exciting and instructive narrative.

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1. The Inherited Situation

Economic and military assistance as an instrument of policy has long been an important and, given the success of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine in the years following World War II, honorable adjunct of American involvement in world affairs. The idea of helping friendly nations to help themselves, especially where in so doing they were enabled to contribute to blocking the spread of hostile influence, appealed to both the prudence and the generosity in the national character.
While military sales were slender in the early postwar days of impoverished allies trying to rebuild war-damaged industrial bases and reestablish disrupted patterns of international trade, huge amounts of economic and military assistance were readily provided. Even where sales were concerned, however, it is instructive to note that, while foreign military sales agreements totaling some $11.3 billion were concluded worldwide by the United States during TY1950-FY1967, only about $5.6 billion of these, or slightly under half that total, were ever actually delivered.1 That may be useful to recall in the present instance, where a great deal of attention has been focused on multi-billion-dollar agreements providing for deliveries stretching years into the future, only a small part of which has thus far actually been provided. Meanwhile, grant military aid was orders of magnitude greater, reaching more than $33 billion in agreements during the same period, virtually all of which was in fact delivered.2
The direction of the flow of military aid was largely determined by the alliance structure built up by the United States in the decade after World War II, which was in turn a function of efforts to contain the expansion of communist influence or domination. The earliest and largest of the treaty arrangements were the Rio Treaty of 1947, binding twenty-two Western Hemisphere nations for the purposes of mutual security, and the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, linking twelve nations, including the United States, with three additional members joining thereafter. More than half of the military assistance provided in this period went to European nations. Conversely, and contrary to the impression apparently held by many, the flow of military assistance to Latin America was always modest, representing well under 2 percent of the total provided worldwide.3
Two additional multilateral defense treaties were added in 1951, the Anzus Treaty with Australia and New Zealand, and 1954, the Southeast Asia Treaty involving eight nations directly and three others about which we were later to hear a great deal more—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—as associated protocol” states. During the decade 1951-1960 four bilateral treaties were added, between the United States and the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and finally Japan, respectively. Largely as a result of military assistance to these diverse allies, the program reached its all-time high in FY1952, when Congress appropriated nearly $6 billion for grant military aid.4
From that high point the amounts provided in successive fiscal years for military assistance tailed off in a fairly smooth descending curve as economic assistance and peacetime rebuilding enabled more nations to shoulder increasing shares of the mutual defense burden. Foreign military sales on credit terms became increasingly prominent, to be progressively supplanted in many cases of more recent years by outright cash or commercial credit transactions. The crossover point between grant aid and sales is usually pegged at FY1962, the first full year under the aegis of the Kennedy administration. In that year sales (in the aggregate of both cash and credit) exceeded grants for the first time, a shift that has never since been reversed.5
The extensive debate and controversy in the Congress that has surrounded administration requests for grant military assistance in recent years has tended to obscure the declining significance of such aid, in contrast with the vastly greater sums of earlier years. Only in the case of special large grants in the form of waived repayments of loans to Israel has this trend not held steady. Such waivers resulted in some $2.45 billion being provided to Israel between FY1955 and FY1976, nearly all of it concentrated in the post-1973 war period of FY1974–FY1976.6 Meanwhile, appropriations for military assistance had declined by the time of the last pre-Nixon budgets to just $375 million, an all-time low to that point and only about 6.5 percent of the peak amount in the early 1950s.7 It should be emphasized here at the outset, however, as it will be again, that these dollar amounts can be taken only as general indications of trends and predispositions, since they lump together arms, other types of military equipment, logistical and construction support, and other categories of assistance and sales. Thus it is important to remember that in discussing such dollar amounts we are far from talking about just transfers of actual arms.
A number of factors account for the crossover to predominance of sales, including the resurgence of foreign economies and the concomitant expression of independent preferences on the part of recipients of arms. Not the least of the influences at work was concern caused in the United States by increasingly unfavorable experience with the balance of trade and balance of payments, the latter aggravated substantially by expenditures for maintaining the overseas military establishment, especially in Europe. The Kennedy administration, having found that, contrary to its campaign assertions, there was no missile gap, turned its attention to problems of conventional force structure. And, along with its interest in developing and fielding modern conventional weapons for United States forces, there was complementary attention to providing, and where possible selling, such weapons to allies abroad.
In the autumn of his first year on the job Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara established an office of International Logistics Negotiations (ILN) to coordinate United States military export sales. One of its sales teams, concentrating on the West German market, was specifically assigned to help offset the costs of maintaining U.S. military forces in that country, which amounted to some $775 million a year. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff study of 1967 documented the success of this effort, West Germany having purchased some $3 billion worth of military equipment in the preceding four years.8 While the worldwide sales promoted by ILN rose manyfold over the levels of earlier years, reflecting what has been characterized as a deliberate policy of increasing arms sales,9 external factors, without which the sales effort could not have succeeded to such an extent, contributed to this result. These factors included proliferation of states, necessity for independent defense capabilities in nations previously reliant upon colonialist protectors, increasing perceptions of security threats, growing availability of disposable resources, and block obsolescence of inventories of military equipment in the hands of many nations.
There was also a set of attitudes in the community of nations that predisposed sovereign states to seek modern arms. Even in the days of the League of Nations such documents as its 1922 resolution on disarmament and security reflected understanding that reliance on armaments for national security would not be abandoned until some other means of providing such security had been found.10 But no effective collective security arrangements of global scope evolved, either then or following the Second World War. The trend was such that preparedness, rather than disarmament, came increasingly to be viewed by nations and their leaders as the more viable means of preserving the peace or of prevailing in the event of war.11 The postwar regional pacts that served to share responsibility for maintaining peace depended preeminently on an adequate supply of arms.
The United Nations sporadically attempted to promote disarmament, but few member nations showed serious interest. As early as 1948 the United Nations Commission for Conventional Armaments had adopted a resolution establishing some general principles, among them the following: A system of regulation and reduction of armaments and armed forces can only be put into effect in an atmosphere of international confidence and security.” Less than two years later the secretary-general, in apparent recognition of the absence of any such guarantees of security or of any prospects for achieving them in the near term, observed that, while disarmament required an atmosphere of confidence, any progress towards agreement on the regulation of armaments would help reduce tension and thus assist in the adjustment of political disputes.”12 The Disarmament Subcommittee of the UN Disarmament Commission first met in 1954; after three years it suffered a complete breakdown. A successor organization, the Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament, lasted two years. In the spring of 1960 Secretary-General Hammarskjöld told this body that the United Nations, like other international organizations, of course reflects only the political realities of the moment.” As if in confirmation of his point, the ten-nation talks collapsed.13 Meanwhile, dozens of new nations were emerging as independent factors in world affairs. Despite their diversity in almost every other respect, they seemed to have one thing in common: they all wanted weapons.
In 1967 the Congress imposed crippling restrictions on foreign military sales after a fierce debate centered on the foreign aid bill. Two amendments sponsored by Congressman Silvio Conte provided that economic assistance must be withheld in amounts equal to that expended by the intended recipient on such sophisticated weapons systems as jet aircraft and missiles and barred the use of military assistance and credit sales revolving funds to help underdeveloped nations finance purchases of sophisticated weapons. A complementary amendment introduced by Senator Stuart Symington required the president to cut off aid to any nation using either U.S. or its own funds for military expenditures that materially interfered with its development. Two sets of hearings conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1967 focused on problems of armament and disarmament and on arms sales to the Near East and South Asian regions, calling into question both the objectives and the methods of U.S. export sales of arms. A staff study done for the committee and published the same year provided additional critical commentary and, in conjunction with the hearings, led to further legislative action the following year.14
Thus, by 1968, a major congressional initiative to achieve even greater control over arms sales resulted in enactment of the Foreign Military Sales Act, a bill actually proposed by the Johnson administration as a response to previous congressional criticism in an attempt to modify the stringent restrictions imposed by statute the preceding year. The new law made sweeping changes in the way the United States went about effecting arms transfers to foreign nations. It kept intact the provisions of the Symington amendment of the previous year, and the Conte-Long amendment as well. It barred loans by the Export-Import Bank, previously a common source of funding for credit sales of arms, to less developed countries, providing that such sales be financed solely from appropriations for that purpose. This put a ceiling on credit sales; it also placed regional ceilings on sales to Africa and Latin America, and it charged the secretary of state with overall policy control of arms sales and with ensuring their integration with other United States initiatives in support of foreign policy.15
The dialogue on this bill, as has usually been the case in discussions of arms sales,” made no distinction between sales that involved actual arms—such things as weapons and ammunition—and those consisting of other types of military purchases, whether construction, supporting equipment, supplies, or whatever. The single exception involved training of foreign military personnel, which was factored out from the rest of the category.
Administration officials lobbied for the bill on Capitol Hill and before other audiences elsewhere. In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford argued that the United States should not—and in the light of free world defense requirements, cannot—avoid continuing to serve as a source of arms supply for those countries whose security is linked to our own.”16 Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke supported credit assistance to nations wishing to buy arms from the United States, pointing out to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that such arms help others defend themselves, contribute to free world defense, and make direct U.S. involvement unnecessary and that if countries friendly to the United States could not buy arms here they would obtain them elsewhere and this meant chiefly from the Soviet Union.”17
Parallel forces were at work in the closely related area of foreign aid. The program proposed by the administration for FY1969 included $420 million for military assistance, which Secretary of State Dean Rusk had called an austere program.18 But in 1968 the question of foreign aid generally, and the included security assistance, was very much entangled with issues relating to the war in Vietnam, particularly the cost of that endeavor. Many argued that the United States could not afford foreign aid, given what it was already spending on the war. Others said that it invited involvement in other Vietnam-type conflicts to provide military assistance to client states. While assistance related to the theater of war was at this time in the Defense Department budget rather than the foreign aid bill, the magnitude of such expenditures was an important determinant of the legislative climate.
The Congress had, the previous year, passed the smallest foreign aid bill in the twenty-year history of the program, the result of an alliance of sorts between those who wanted to restrict the flow of arms and those who wanted to reduce costs.19 In 1968 another new record low was set, with a billion dollars being slashed from the $2.9 billion administration request, which was itself by more than half a billion dollars the smallest amount ever requested.20 When an earlier proposal for a reduction of $765 million was reported to the House Republican leader, Congressman Gerald Ford, he sent back word that the cut was not enough,”21 so a round billion was cut in the authorization process, including a comparatively modest decrease in the military assistance component to $375 million. Then, in addition to this third cut in foreign aid in as many years and the tripling of interest rates on development loans due to congressional action over the past two years,22 there were included in the bill additional restrictive policy amendments. The president was ordered to reduce and to terminate with deliberate speed” military assistance grants to nations that in his judgment could afford to pay their own way.23 In the Senate, William Fulbright was among those opposing the bill, the first time in history that a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee had voted against a foreign aid bill.24
The Nixon policy on arms transfers had, of course, to take into account and work within the constraints of these trends, influences, and attitudes. But it had also to be compatible with and supportive of the larger foreign policy goals and initiatives of the new administration. Those in turn were shaped by and in part responsive to the context of the times, the international and domestic events and contending interests of greatest current significance.
To be the prisoner of one’s time and place is one of our human limitations,” once wrote Arnold Toynbee. However, it is characteristic of our human nature that we rebel against our human limitations and try to transcend them.”25 In the same way a government seeks within its times to achieve goals, devising in the process—if it is to be successful—means of overcoming whatever obstacles stand in the way. It is no exaggeration to say that, when the Nixon administration came into office, the difficulties that confronted it were of heroic proportions. It was a time when international and domestic events and influences presented unusual challenges to a government that sought to shape and to some extent control the evo...

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