The Diplomacy–Arms Paradox

The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the body charged by the UN Charter with the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, are collectively responsible for approximately 74 per cent of global arms exports. The United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China design, manufacture and sell the weapons that equip the armies, navies and air forces of states across the world, including in many of the regions where conflict is most active and where the Security Council most frequently debates peace and security resolutions. This is not a coincidence. It is the operating logic of the international system as it has actually evolved, in which the states with the greatest institutional investment in the architecture of collective security are simultaneously the states with the greatest commercial and strategic interest in sustaining the demand for advanced military hardware that collective insecurity generates. The diplomacy-arms paradox is not a malfunction of the international order. It is one of its defining structural characteristics.

Global arms transfers reached their highest volume in the post-Cold War period during the 2019 to 2023 interval, driven by the combination of rising threat perceptions following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, long-standing demand in the Middle East and South Asia, and the accelerating military modernisation programmes of states across the Indo-Pacific responding to China's expanding military capabilities. SIPRI's Arms Transfers Database, the most comprehensive publicly available record of major conventional arms transfers, recorded a 12 per cent increase in the volume of international arms transfers between the 2014-18 and 2019-23 periods. The United States consolidated its position as the dominant exporter across this period, accounting for 43 per cent of global arms transfers. France surpassed Russia as the second-largest exporter for the first time, reflecting both France's active export diplomacy and the collapse of Russia's export market following the 2022 invasion, which made Russian equipment a reputational liability for states concerned about spare parts availability, Western sanctions exposure and the signal sent by purchasing weapons whose battlefield performance had been comprehensively documented and found wanting.

Arms transfers are instruments of diplomatic influence whose effects extend far beyond the immediate transaction. When a government sells advanced military systems to another state, it creates a set of dependencies that structure the bilateral relationship for decades: maintenance contracts, spare parts supply, training programmes, upgrade pathways and the institutional relationships between military establishments that develop through sustained engagement. The recipient state's air force learns to fly the supplier's aircraft, trains on the supplier's simulators, relies on the supplier's technical support for sustained airworthiness and eventually faces the choice of either remaining dependent on the original supplier for the next generation system or absorbing the significant cost and capability gap associated with switching to an alternative platform. This dependency is not accidental. It is engineered into the design of export-oriented defence systems as a deliberate feature of export strategy.

The United States' Foreign Military Sales programme, through which the US government manages arms transfers to allied and partner states, is the most extensively documented example of this logic operating at scale. FMS transfers in fiscal year 2023 totalled approximately $80.9 billion, a record level driven primarily by demand from NATO allies responding to the Ukraine conflict and from Middle Eastern partners seeking air defence, strike and maritime capabilities. But the financial value understates the strategic significance. Each FMS agreement creates an ongoing relationship between the US defence industrial base, the US military and the recipient state's armed forces that shapes alliance politics, burden-sharing dynamics and strategic alignment in ways that persist long after the initial transaction is completed. States that operate US equipment vote differently in UN forums, maintain different alliance relationships and make different strategic choices than states that do not, not because they are compelled to do so, but because the institutional relationships that sustain their military capability create structural incentives for strategic alignment with the supplier.

The diplomacy-arms paradox manifests in specific, documented ways across multiple bilateral relationships and regional contexts. Examining these cases illustrates not only the abstract structural tension but the specific mechanisms through which states manage the coexistence of peace rhetoric and arms supply in practice.

The structural compulsion to export arms derives not only from strategic logic but from the economics of defence industrial production. Modern weapons systems are engineered products of extraordinary complexity, built in low volumes at high unit cost by specialised industrial ecosystems that cannot be sustained on domestic procurement alone in most countries outside the United States. A fighter aircraft programme requires sustained production runs to amortise the enormous fixed costs of development and to maintain the manufacturing skills, supply chain relationships and institutional knowledge that make production viable. When domestic orders are insufficient to sustain an economically viable production rate, export orders become essential not merely for commercial reasons but for the survival of the industrial capacity itself.

The United Kingdom's Eurofighter Typhoon and Airbus A400M programmes, France's Rafale, Germany's submarine and armoured vehicle industries and the Swedish Gripen programme all depend on export sales to maintain production at rates that sustain the underlying industrial capability. When the UK government faces a decision about whether to approve a controversial export licence, it is not weighing abstract humanitarian principles against abstract strategic interests. It is weighing those principles against the employment of tens of thousands of workers in constituencies whose MPs sit in Parliament, against the survival of industrial capabilities that take decades to rebuild once lost, and against the competitive disadvantage of ceding the export contract to a French, American or South Korean competitor who will face fewer constraints. These are not easily dismissed considerations, and the fact that they consistently produce export approvals in ambiguous cases reflects their political weight rather than the absence of ethical principles in the governments making the decisions.

The international legal framework for arms export control is extensive in its architecture and inconsistent in its application. The Arms Trade Treaty, which entered into force in 2014 and has been ratified by 113 states, establishes binding obligations for states parties to assess the risk that arms transfers will be used to commit violations of international humanitarian law or human rights law, and to deny transfers where a substantial risk of such violations is assessed. The EU Common Position on arms exports establishes eight criteria against which EU member states must assess export licence applications, including respect for human rights, regional stability and the risk of diversion. The US Arms Export Control Act establishes conditions under which the President may suspend or terminate arms sales.

In practice, all of these frameworks contain sufficient flexibility to accommodate the strategic and economic interests of exporting states in the vast majority of cases. The "substantial risk" assessment required by the Arms Trade Treaty is a qualitative judgement that governments with strong export interests are structurally incentivised to make in ways that permit the transfer. The EU Common Position criteria are assessed differently by different member states for the same recipient country, producing the inconsistency visible in Gaza-related export decisions across EU members. The US Arms Export Control Act has been used to restrict arms sales primarily in cases of serious diplomatic rupture, not as a systematic human rights accountability mechanism. The gap between the normative architecture of arms export control and its practical application reflects a fundamental feature of the international system: states write rules that preserve their freedom of action under the precise conditions where applying those rules would impose the greatest costs.

The Global South's position in the arms trade is evolving in two simultaneous directions that are rarely analysed together. As importers, developing states account for a significant and growing share of global arms demand, driven by rising threat perceptions, military modernisation programmes and the availability of competitive financing from multiple supplier states competing aggressively for market share. The Middle East and South Asia are consistently the largest importing regions, accounting for approximately 45 per cent of global arms imports in the 2019-2023 period. Africa's arms imports, while smaller in absolute volume, have grown significantly, driven primarily by demand for counter-insurgency and internal security equipment in Sahel states dealing with jihadist insurgencies and in East African states dealing with regional conflicts.

At the same time, a small number of Global South states are emerging as significant arms exporters in their own right. India, historically one of the world's largest arms importers, has set an explicit target of reaching $5 billion in annual arms exports by 2025, driven by government policy to reduce import dependency and develop an indigenous defence industrial base. Brazil exports armoured vehicles, aircraft and ammunition across Latin America and Africa. Turkey has become a significant exporter of armed drones, with Bayraktar TB2 systems deployed in Ukraine, Libya, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan and multiple other conflict environments, generating both revenue and strategic influence for Ankara. The diversification of the supplier base has complicated the geopolitics of arms control, because each new significant exporter reduces the leverage that any individual major supplier can exercise through export licence conditions, and because new exporters typically enter markets with fewer pre-existing normative commitments and less domestic political pressure to apply human rights criteria to export decisions.