These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
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Revenues at the world’s top 100 global arms and military services producing companies totaled $632 billion in 2023, a 4.2% increase over the prior year, according to new data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The largest increases were tied to ongoing conflicts, including a 40% increase in revenues for Russian companies involved in supplying Moscow’s war on Ukraine and record sales for Israeli firms producing weapons used in that nation’s brutal war on Gaza. Revenues for Turkey’s top arms producing companies also rose sharply — by 24% — on the strength of increased domestic defense spending plus exports tied to the war in Ukraine.
The United States remains the world’s dominant arms producing nation, with $318 billion in revenues flowing to American firms in the world’s top 100 for 2023, more than half of the global total. And the five highest revenue earners globally were all based in the United States — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now RTX), Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics.
China ranked second to the United States in arms industry revenues, with nine firms accounting for 16% of the revenue received by companies in the global top 100. Two of the fastest growing countries in terms of revenue growth for top companies were also in Asia, South Korea (plus 39%) and Japan (plus 35%). South Korea’s increase was tied to major export deals with Poland and Australia, while Japan’s was driven by its largest military buildup since World War II.
SIPRI’s analysis takes a “just the facts” approach, tracking sales numbers and correlating them with increases in domestic and export spending tied to specific events. It does not address the dire humanitarian circumstances that underlie the growing revenues of top arms companies, most notably Israel’s unconscionable attacks on Gaza, which have killed over 40,000 people directly and many more through indirect causes, including over 62,000 who have died from starvation. The companies and countries fueling this mass slaughter — including U.S. firms that have supplied a substantial share of the bombs, missiles, and aircraft used in Gaza — should be held to account for their actions, even as they halt the supply of weapons and services that the Israeli government is using to commit ongoing war crimes.
Another major impact of the revenue surge for top arms makers is the diversion of funding and talent from addressing urgent global problems, from climate change to poverty to outbreaks of disease. And the more companies and countries become dependent on the profits of war, the harder it will be to shift funding towards other urgent priorities. The continuing militarization of the global economy has a double cost — lives lost in conflict and devastating problems left unsolved. The situation needs to be treated as far more than a grim parade of statistics about who benefits from a world at war. It should be treated as an urgent call to action for a change in global priorities.
On Wednesday, a Ukrainian delegation led by Defense Minister Rustem Umerov met with South Korean officials, including President Yoon Suk Yeol. The AP reported that the two countries met to discuss ways to “cope with the security threat posed by the North Korean-Russian military cooperation including the North’s troop dispatch.”
During a previous meeting in October, Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelenskyy said he planned to present a “detailed request to Seoul for arms support including artillery and air defense systems.”
So far, South Korea has participated in sanctions against Moscow, has sent Kyiv financial aid, and supplied vehicles and de-mining equipment. However, Seoul has declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, even as North Korean forces are confirmed to be supporting Russian troops on the frontlines of the war.
South Koreans have been resistant to sending weapons to Ukraine. According to a Gallup poll, 82% of the public opposed such measures. While the government has not ruled out sending weapons to Ukraine, experts question whether Seoul is likely to provide weapons at this stage, as President Yoon’s approval ratings are very low, and South Korea has little to gain from such an escalatory action, even when considering North Korean involvement in the conflict.
“This kind of alleged collaboration between Russia and the DPRK only poses a concern for Seoul insofar as it is being used by Western leaders to rope South Korea into taking a more active role in aiding Ukraine,” says the Quincy Institute’s Mark Episkopos. “The ROK must balance any such pressure from the White House with the looming transition to a Trump administration that approaches the Ukraine war in a fundamentally different way.” He adds, “under the circumstances, Seoul has little to gain from radically upending its cautious, passive Ukraine policy in the waning days of the Biden administration.”
For its part, Moscow has responded harshly to the possibility of South Korea supplying Kyiv with arms. “Seoul must realize that the possible use of South Korean weapons to kill Russian citizens will fully destroy relations between our countries,” said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko.
Neither Seoul nor Kyiv have commented on whether any agreements were made concerning weapons sharing but agreed to continue sharing security information related to North Korea and Russian cooperation.
Other Ukraine News This Week:
Reuters reports that Ukraine launched American-supplied ATACMS twice in the last week. Both strikes targeted Russian operations in Kursk. The Russian Defense Ministry said that “retaliatory measures are being prepared.”
A record-breaking 188 drones were launched by Russia on Tuesday. The AP reports that most of the drones were intercepted, but that damage was done to civilian infrastructure, with no reported casualties. The drones were launched all at once, targeting 17 of Ukraine’s regions.
An analysis of Russia’s Oreshnik missile indicates that it was potentially not loaded with any explosives, or possibly a very small amount. According to the New York Times, the missile launched last week caused less damage than would have been expected had it been heavily armed. Jeffery Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies, said that “the damage to the facility is quite specific — no large explosions, just big holes punched in the roofs.”
Even though the missile was seemingly minimally armed, the Times reported that “Nick Brown, an analyst at Janes, the British-based defense intelligence firm, said it was the longest-range weapon to ever have been used in conflict in Europe.”
Russian state media claims that the Kremlin complied with a 1988 ballistic missile agreement by warning the United States of the launch 30 minutes in advance.
According to Reuters, North Korea has begun to expand a plant that makes Russian-used missiles. The plant makes short-range missiles that are assumed to be used in Russia, but Moscow and Pyongyang have both denied the transfer of North Korean weapons into Russia.
The Financial Times reported that Russia has recruited potentially hundreds of Yemeni nationals to assist in its war against Ukraine. The Houthi-connected recruits were apparently promised well-paying jobs and even Russian citizenship, before being coerced into military service.
The Houthi government and Moscow have been working to deepen relations and secure contracts, according to U.S. special envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking. Additionally, a member of the Houthi movement told Russian media that the Houthi government was in “constant contact” with Moscow.
According to FT, many of the recruits had no military training and were tricked into service by signing contracts that they could not read.
From State Department Briefing on Nov. 25
Spokesperson Matthew Miller said reports about Yemeni nationals being recruited to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine were concerning and reflected the desperation that Moscow was experiencing at this point in the war.
Miller also said that any deterioration of relations between North and South Korea and Russia would be the fault of the Kremlin, not the West or Ukraine. Additionally, he could not confirm whether Russia had begun to supply North Korea with missile defense systems or not.
Miller did not have any comment on the reports that some European officials were discussing the possibility of deploying forces to Ukraine.
In less two months the second Trump administration will begin its work and, as with other administrations over the past four decades, one of the most important foreign policy issues it will face will be Iran, its nuclear program, and its relations to the so-called “axis of resistance” that consists of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, armed Shiite groups in Iraq, and the remnants of the Palestinian resistance forces.
The national security team that the president-elect has nominated consists mainly of hardline Iran hawks. Many of them have spoken in the past about the possibility or necessity of bombing Iran to stop its nuclear program, if not to overthrow the regime.
For example, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the nominee for secretary of state, and Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), Trump’s choice for national security adviser, have both said that Israel should not be discouraged by Washington from carrying out direct attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and infrastructure. Waltz has also suggested in the past that the U.S. could consider conducting its own attacks on Iran under some circumstances. Back in 2020, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, urged Washington to attack targets in Iran in retaliation for Iran-allied militia strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq.
The pressure on Iran increased significantly on November 21 when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approved a resolution sponsored by the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and France that condemned Iran for insufficient cooperation with the agency and ordered its director general, Rafael Grossi, to prepare a comprehensive report by next spring on all unresolved issues between Iran and the agency dating back more than two decades.
The move appears intended to lay the foundation for returning Iran’s nuclear dossier to the U.N. Security Council by next summer, if no breakthrough in the relations between the two sides is forthcoming before then.
Iran reacted relatively mildly to the resolution’s approval, with former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who now serves as Vice President for Strategic Affairs, announcing that Iran will activate some advanced centrifuges that are used for uranium enrichment.
Many observers had expected Iran to take stronger action, such as expelling IAEA inspectors, particularly since its government had only days before offered to halt its production of uranium enriched at 60 percent and impose strict limits on its stockpile, and Grossi himself had reported good progress in his talks with Iranian officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian. But Iran’s offer to unilaterally limit its nuclear program was rejected by the three European powers as “inadequate.”
During his presidential campaign, Pezeshkian repeatedly said that, if elected, he would pursue direct negotiations with the West and the United States, a position he has reiterated frequently since his election. In this, he appears to have the support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who, after Trump pulled the United States out of the nuclear agreement with Iran — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — in 2018 and ordered the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s, Iran’s top military leader, two years later, had rejected any direct negotiations with Washington.
Evidence for Khamenei’s apparent change of heart is the reemergence of Ali Larijani, Iran’s former chief nuclear negotiator who has also served as speaker of Iran’s parliament and as a longstanding adviser to Khamenei, in the political and foreign policy arenas. Iran’s hardliners had previously isolated him, preventing him from running for the presidency and attacking him and his family for alleged corruption.
But since the death last May in a helicopter crash of Pezeshkian’s ultra-conservative predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, Larijani has returned to the public spotlight. In mid-November, he traveled to Lebanon to assess the evolving situation in the war between Israel and Hezbollah and consult with the country’s leaders. He may also have played a role in advising Hezbollah to accept a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal.
In a recent interview, Larijani declared that Iran is ready to enter negotiations with the United States. “It is said that the incoming United States [Trump] administration rejects JCPOA. All right, let’s negotiate a new one,” he said. “The United States says that it accepts Iran’s nuclear program, provided that we do not produce nuclear weapons. All right, let’s negotiate. We will not move toward making the bomb, but you must also accept our conditions.” In fact, negotiations between Iran and the European troika will begin Friday November 29.
Trump’s advisers have spoken about reimposing the “maximum pressure policy” against Iran, which Trump put in place after exiting the JCPOA. Although the Biden administration mostly retained the same policy, and even imposed new sanctions on Iran, there is now talk of a second Trump administration ratcheting up the economic pressure on Iran even more than under his first term.
While the maximum pressure policy of 2018-2021 greatly harmed Iran’s economy and the lives of ordinary Iranian people, it failed spectacularly in forcing Iran to abandon its nuclear program or terminate its support for its allies in the region.
Indeed, Iran waited a full year after Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in what it called a period of “strategic patience” during which it continued to abide by its obligations under the JCPOA, before it began distancing itself from the agreement, as permitted under the accord’s Article 35. It accelerated its nuclear program by installing new advanced centrifuges, elevating the uranium enrichment level to 60 percent, and reactivating the deeply buried Fordo nuclear facility, which, under the JCPOA, had been converted to a research institution. As a result, it now has about 183 kg of uranium enriched at 60 percent. This implies that under the most favorable conditions, the breakout time for Iran to have enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb has been reduced to less than one month (compared to at least a full year under the limits imposed by the JCPOA in 2015).
If the second Trump administration reverts to its maximum pressure policy or imposes an even harsher version, and if Washington and its European allies push the IAEA Governing Board to refer Iran’s nuclear dossier to the U.N. Security Council and reimpose multilateral sanctions on Tehran, it is quite possible that Iran may exit Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) altogether, expel the IAEA inspectors, and move towards making a bomb.
Iran’s hardliners have long urged such a course. In a letter to Khamenei in 2022, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s former nuclear negotiator, proposed that Iran abandon the JCPOA, enrich uranium at 90 percent— the grade needed for a nuclear bomb — and then, and only then, offer to negotiate directly with the United States.
Calls to abandon the nuclear agreements are no longer limited to hardliners such as Jalili. Kamal Kharrazi, who served as foreign minister under the former reformist president, Mohammad Khatami and as a foreign policy adviser to Khamenei, warned on November 1 that “If an existential threat arises, Iran will modify its nuclear doctrine. We have the capability to build weapons and have no issue in this regard.”
The doctrine to which Kharrazi was referring is based on Khamenei’s fatwa, or religious edict, that banned production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons. Many others across the political spectrum have also expressed reservations about the wisdom of staying in the JCPOA and the NPT if the West increases its pressure on Iran.
For the first time in many years, Iran’s political establishment is ready to directly negotiate with the U.S. regarding its nuclear program and possibly other issues, including the future of the “axis of resistance,” between the two countries. But that same political establishment appears to be moving toward a consensus that if the U.S. and its allies implement a harsher maximum pressure policy, Iran should withdraw from the NPT and accelerate its nuclear program in a direction that the West has long feared.
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