PRESS ROOM

If there was ever a time to rethink America’s budget priorities, this is it. Yet a large part of the national security establishment continues to push for massive Pentagon budgets at the expense of spending needed to address the COVID-19 pandemic. A budget battle is brewing that will play out not just for the rest of this year but for years to come.

The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down a lot of things, but U.S. arms sales are not one of them. Since March, the Trump administration has made over $9 billion in major offers in 15 separate deals. But it’s not just about the money, it’s about whom we’re arming.

For the past several months, the Trump administration has been picking fights—using cold war rhetoric regarding China and applying a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. The editorial writers of the Washington Post for the past few weeks have written a series of pieces that support a hard line against China, and on May 24th the Post’s lead article was a chauvinist attack on Iran that had the rare attribute of being both counterfactual and counter-instinctive.

William Hartung at the Center for International Policy has a report out that throws a bit of cold water on President Trump’s claims that the Saudi arms sales that he cooked up with Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman will create “over a million jobs.”

A report from the left-leaning think tank Center for International Policy looks at Trump’s major weapons sales last year and concludes that “the President’s claims of up to 500,000 jobs from arms sales to Saudi Arabia are more than ten times the actual total of 20,000 to 40,000 jobs.” The report also finds that on the whole the impact of arms sales across the US economy remains relatively minor. Using data from the Defense Department’s Foreign Military Sales program, the researchers found that arms sales in one year generate only 189,000 jobs in the United States, equivalent to “roughly one-tenth of one percent of the total US job market.”

As the national-security analysts Joseph Cirincione and William Hartung recently noted in The National Interest, the U.S. spends $740 billion a year on the military and $11 billion on global public health. Hospitals teeter on the edge of bankruptcy while the Pentagon spends about $500 million a year on marching bands.

The Washington Post’s senior diplomatic columnist, David Ignatius, has done it again. He has a well-earned reputation as an apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency and a defender of increased defense spending and the newly-created Space Force. Now, Ignatius has added a new plaque to his personal Hall of Fame—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Trump is “a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine,” as they said of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. His administration has brokered nearly a quarter-trillion dollars through the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales program, according to a Center for International Policy study released May 21.

Just as the coronavirus has exposed systemic rot, this moment also reveals how obsolete common conceptions of U.S. warfare truly are—raising core questions about the holiday devoted to its sacrifices.

President Donald Trump has claimed as many as “over a million” American jobs were created by U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia that are facing fresh scrutiny this week, but don’t take that to the bank, according to a new think tank report. The actual number of jobs likely ranges from 20,000 to 40,000, according to the Center for International Policy, based in Washington, D.C. Its new 38-page report, released Thursday, comes amid a new focus on the administration’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Trump’s firing of the State Department’s inspector general, who was probing those sales.

The coronavirus has brought most industries in our nation’s capital to a screeching halt. DC’s celebrated restaurant scene is largely shuttered. The World Series champion Washington Nationals aren’t defending their title. Even the Beltway’s notorious traffic has disappeared. But, one industry in DC is thriving: lobbying.

Scott interviews Ben Freeman about his report, “The Qatar Lobby in Washington D.C.” Freeman goes over the recent history of Qatar’s efforts to influence U.S. policy, including their apparent success in winning over the Trump administration to their side in a dispute with Saudi Arabia.