American Arms Supermarket

U.S. arms sales to Third World countries rapidly escalated from $250 million per year in the 1950s and 1960s to $10 billion and above in the 1970s and 1980s. But were these military sales, so critical in their impact on Third World nations and on America’s perception of its global role, achieving the ends and benefits attributed to them by U.S. policymakers? In American Arms Supermarket, Michael T. Klare responds to this troubling, still-timely question with a resounding no, showing how a steady growth in arms sales places global security and stability in jeopardy.
Tracing U.S. policies, practices, and experiences in military sales to the Third World from the 1950s to the 1980s, Klare explains how the formation of U.S. foreign policy did not keep pace with its escalating arms sales—how, instead, U.S. arms exports proved to be an unreliable instrument of policy, often producing results that diminished rather than enhanced fundamental American interests. Klare carefully considers the whole spectrum of contemporary American arms policy, focusing on the political economy of military sales, the evolution of U.S. arms export policy from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, and the institutional framework for arms export decision making. Actual case studies of U.S. arms sales to Latin America, Iran, and the Middle East provide useful data in assessing the effectiveness of arms transfer programs in meeting U.S. foreign policy objectives.
  The author also rigorously examines trouble spots in arms policy: the transfer of arms-making technology to Third World arms producers, the relationship between arms transfers and human rights, and the enforcement of arms embargoes on South Africa, Chile, and other “pariah” regimes. Klare also compares the U.S. record on arms transfers to the experiences of other major arms suppliers: the Soviet Union and the “big four” European nations—France, Britain, the former West Germany, and Italy. Concluding with a reasoned, carefully drawn proposal for an alternative arms export policy, Klare vividly demonstrates the need for cautious, restrained, and sensitive policy.

History

Klare, Michael T.

Military

University of Texas Press

War without end: American planning for the next Vietnams

Vintage Books

During the past few years the United States has been at war in many parts of the world. No soldiers are deployed in the conventional sense; no authorization has been passed by Congress. Yet in Central America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa the USA has been increasingly engaged in counter-insurgency, pro-insurgency and antiterrorist campaigns - wars not defined as war. The nine contributors to this book look at the nature and future of American war-fighting capabilities as they are re-oriented towards unconventional conflicts in the Third World - what the Pentagon calls "low intensity warfare. They look at Nicaragua, Afghanistan and the Philippines as well as speculating on the scenes of future conflicts.

Low Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars Without Declaring Them

Politics & Social Sciences

Kornbluh,Peter

Politics & Government

Methuen Publishing, Ltd.

In his pathbreaking Resource Wars, world security expert Michael Klare alerted us to the role of resources in conflicts in the post-cold-war world. Now, in Blood and Oil, he concentrates on a single precious commodity, petroleum, while issuing a warning to the United States―its most powerful, and most dependent, global consumer. 
Since September 11 and the commencement of the "war on terror," the world's attention has been focused on the relationship between U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the oceans of crude oil that lie beneath the region's soil. Klare traces oil's impact on international affairs since World War II, revealing its influence on the Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Carter doctrines. He shows how America's own wells are drying up as our demand increases; by 2010 the United States will need to import 60 percent of its oil. And since most of this supply will have to come from chronically unstable, often violently anti-American zones―the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, Latin America, and Africa―our dependency is bound to lead to recurrent military involvement. 
With clarity and urgency, Blood and Oil delineates the United States' predicament and cautions that it is time to change our energy policies, before we spend the next decades paying for oil with blood.

Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (American Empire Project)

Business & Money

Industries

Holt Paperbacks

From the author of the now-classic Resource Wars, an indispensable account of how the world's diminishing sources of energy are radically changing the international balance of power
Recently, an unprecedented Chinese attempt to acquire the major American energy firm Unocal was blocked by Congress amidst hysterical warnings of a Communist threat. But the political grandstanding missed a larger point: the takeover bid was a harbinger of a new structure of world power, based not on market forces or on arms and armies but on the possession of vital natural resources.
Surveying the energy-driven dynamic that is reconfiguring the international landscape, Michael Klare, the preeminent expert on resource geopolitics, forecasts a future of surprising new alliances and explosive danger. World leaders are now facing the stark recognition that all materials vital for the functioning of modern industrial societies (not just oil and natural gas but uranium, coal, copper, and others) are finite and being depleted at an ever-accelerating rate. As a result, governments rather than corporations are increasingly spearheading the pursuit of resources. In a radically altered world― where Russia is transformed from battered Cold War loser to arrogant broker of Eurasian energy, and the United States is forced to compete with the emerging "Chindia" juggernaut―the only route to survival on a shrinking planet, Klare shows, lies through international cooperation.
Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet surveys the energy-driven dynamic that is reconfiguring the international landscape, and argues that the only route to survival in our radically altered world lies through international cooperation.
"Klare's superb book explains, in haunting detail, the trends that will lead us into a series of dangerous traps unless we muster the will to transform the way we use energy." -- Bill McKibben

RISING POWERS, SHRINKING PLANET

Picador Paper

In this incisive examination of our national security policy, Michael Klare suggests that the Pentagon in effect established a new class of enemies when the Cold War came to an -unpredictable and hostile states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Klare argues that the containment of these rising Third World powers-Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea, especially-became the centerpiece of American military policy and the justification for near-Cold War levels of military sping.

Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America's Search for a New Foreign Policy

Hill and Wang

Examines the development of the American strategy of armed intervention in internal Third World conflicts and recommends changes in American foreign policy

Beyond the Vietnam Syndrome: U.S. Interventionism in the 1980's

Inst. for Policy Studies

Supplying repression: U.S. support for authoritarian regimes abroad

Institute for Policy Studies

A Scourage of Guns: The Diffusion of Small Arms & Light Weapons in Latin America

Federation of Amer Scientists

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