The Doomsday Clock – founded in 1947 by a group of concerned scientists led by Albert Einstein and J Robert Oppenheimer to mark how far humankind is from the midnight of apocalypse–is a sluggish thing.
In 1999, it was set to two minutes to midnight – and the world panicked. In 2022, it was reset to 100 seconds to midnight. In 2023, spooked by the Russian threat to employ nuclear weapons in Ukraine, it was set to 90 seconds to midnight.
There it remains obdurately – despite that, with the Israel-Palestine war rippling outwards from Gaza, humankind is closer than ever to going terminally ballistic.
Perhaps it is beyond the pale of boffins in charge of the doomsday dial to gauge the speed of deterioration. Maybe this warning system has gone politically unobjective. By many reckonings, the clock should now be at a minute to midnight.
But here is Joe Biden, the increasingly inchoate US president, fuelling long-distance conflicts in West Asia and North Africa. His administration has chosen to rock the boat again after a longish period of relative regional balminess. What is the advantage of Levantine disequilibrium to the US? Where will America stop the current reanimation of its spectres?
Oil can no longer be viewed as the main driver of US interventions in West Asia. It has almost been a century of US interventions in West Asia, with every oil-producing country there experiencing crude war. The oil-centred involvement of the US began in 1928 with the discovery of oil in Iraq, then to Saudi Arabia in 1933, and landed on Iran in the 1940s, where it has remained ever since.
In 2012-18, Saudi Arabia and Iraq alone accounted for 20 percent of US oil imports from the Arab world. By 2022, this quantum had dropped to 12 percent. And by the end of 2023, it fell to 10 percent. Oil imports crested in 2005, and then went into a decline until 2014, rose again until 2017, and have thereafter been falling. Today, the US imports most of its oil from a friendly neighbouring bro country, Canada.
So, if it’s not oil driving the ongoing US interposition in the Arab world, it must be something just as economically impactful to the American economy – because, clearly, the US is shonkily deploying hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to keep the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region stoked and in a parlous state.
And the interventions do not stop at the MENA. Since its intercession beginning February 2022 in the Russo-Ukraine war – in short, its literal arming of Ukraine to the tune of $46 billion – the US (specifically, the Biden administration, whose most significant flub has been the handing over of Afghanistan to the Taliban) has roped Iran and even China into its zone of military attention.
There is every indication that this is the beginning of another arms race that could surpass the original one, which began when the US took astonished notice, from its vantage of nuke monopoly, of Russia exploding an atomic bomb in 1949.
That Cold War – often referred to in caps despite that there were actually several cold wars with different nations at play – lasted four decades. Aside from the precarious advantages of détente, there were entities that raked in the profits: the military-industrial complex, a term coined by US president Dwight D Eisenhower in 1961 during his farewell address, a decade-and-a-half after the Cold War’s minting machine had been working diligently.
The profits of US armaments companies are predicated on a continuation of the dynamics of conflict – by any statal means: incitement, insidiousness, participation, or even just a promise of war, which is where we are at today, with the possibility becoming more promising by the minute.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global arms exports by the US shot up, relative to the previous five-year period, from 33 percent in 2018 to 40 percent in 2022. This is also the period that the US stepped into the Russo-Ukrainian war arena – not so much with men but with an unending flow of topnotch weaponry. The new foreign military sales of American defence corporates went up by $81 billion in 2022–$51 billion to Ukraine alone –50 percent more than the year previous.
We can calculate the gargantuan size of the US armamentarium by considering that the military spending of one of the country’s bêtes noires (by now, the US has racked up several, on the way to making them many), Russia, is 8.2 per cent of the US’s. This is a monster that has to be fed constantly to keep its profit-making astronomical.
A little more than a week after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the shares of the leading American arms-manufacturing companies Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman spiked by 7 percent. RTX, the owners of Raytheon, which manufactures missiles used in Israel’s Iron Dome, spoke about the “benefit of…restocking” and the Israel-Palestine war as a “bonus”. General Dynamics was faced with an unnerving situation – a four-fold increase for artillery deliveries and the “upward pressure on…demand”.
While this is quotidian armament economics, Biden is doing what has long been considered the militarily inadvisable – opening up simultaneous new fronts. He is goosing China vis-á-vis Taiwan even as he tips the table on a hot war with Iran. Meanwhile, the US is in the middle of a losing standoff with Russia (but one copiously fed with arms). His administration is also talking excitedly about a new Russian space weapon, which also seems, by all reckonings, an illogical doomsday weapon: a space-based electromagnetic pulse nuke with the ability to blow the fuses in all satellites, American, Russian, Chinese, British, German and Indian alike (more than 80 countries are present in space) and end global modernity. Any pulp reader will recognise this as quasi-sci-fi junk,but it has nonetheless engaged conspiracy theorists and militarists worldwide.
The problem with profits from armaments is that they tend to even out. In the first weeks, of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Blackrock-managed iShares defence ETF (exchange traded funds) rose by 5 percent. The shares of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman leapt by 11 percent and 7 percent respectively - but plateaued soon. Within six months, most of their gains were lost.
The Israel-Palestine war came right on time to refresh the profit margins, but the war gravy must be continuously replenished. Biden has at several points made the case that arms sales boost the economy. On the contrary, it is a truism that little from arms sales percolates down to the general economy.
Fattening the coffers of arms manufacturers, and keeping the wheels spinning long-term, not just from conflict to conflict, is, ultimately, behind the Biden administration’s MENA adventurism.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist