Even as the war in Gaza rages on and the death toll surpasses 35,000, the Biden administration appears set on pursuing its vision of a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal that it sees as the path to peace in the Middle East.
But, the agreement that the administration is selling as a peace agreement that will put Palestine on the path to statehood and fundamentally transform the region ultimately amounts to a U.S. war obligation for Saudi Arabia that would also give Mohammed bin Salman nuclear technology.
As the Gaza War demonstrates, the Abraham Accords — which normalized relations between Israel and other Arab states — did not help bring peace to the Middle East. But instead of pushing for a ceasefire that could end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and limit the chances of a wider regional conflagration, Biden is pushing to continue the legacy of the Abraham Accords in a move that only increases the likelihood of American troops being sent to fight another war.
Learn more in this new video by the Quincy Institute’s Khody Akhavi:
Blaise Malley is a freelance writer and a former Responsible Statecraft reporter. He is currently a MA candidate at New York University. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, The American Conservative, and elsewhere.
Khody Akhavi is Senior Video Producer at the Quincy Institute. Previously he was Head of Video for Al-Monitor and covered the White House for Al Jazeera English, as well as produced films for the network’s flagship investigative unit.
Top image credit: U.S. President Donald Trump holds a chart of military hardware sales as he welcomes Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S., March 20, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Trump is working on delivering what could be a big win for U.S. arms contractors. Politico Pro reported on Thursday that the White House is currently “drafting an executive order aimed at streamlining the federal government’s process of selling weapons overseas.”
The text of the executive order has not yet been released, but a source familiar with the order confirmed it will boost arms contractor interests and reduce congressional oversight by stripping down parts of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), the law that governs the arms export process.
Close observers of the process say the order may track some initiatives promoted by the Biden administration, but worry about the possibility of significant weakening of the AECA. Among the Biden efforts to speed arms sales was the use of a “Tiger Team” to eliminate bottlenecks that were seen as slowing weapons deliveries to Israel. Former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned over continued U.S. arms supplies to Israel despite its campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, criticized Biden’s move.
“This shows that at all levels of government, from policy to implementation, the Biden Administration is doing all it can to rush arms to Israel despite President Biden’s recent explicit statement that Israel’s bombing of Gaza is ‘indiscriminate,’ and despite extensive reporting that the arms we are providing are causing massive civilian casualties,” he said back in December 2023.
The question is how widely a Trump administration initiative to rush weapons out the door will be applied, and how consistently it will be enforced. Given evidence to date from other policy areas, the Trump administration is likely to vigorously implement any pro-industry provisions of the new executive order. But only the formal release of the order will reveal how big a change the new policy will be from the Biden administration’s approach.
The arms industry is “helping shape” the order, according to Politico. Arms manufacturers — who have long criticized the Foreign Military Sales program — now see their opening to push for cutting what they see as red tape, but which may include further reducing essential human rights vetting of proposed sales, spurred by a newfound emphasis on government efficiency.
In January, General Atomics CEO Linden Blue wrote a letter to the Department of Government Efficiency criticizing “buck-passing” in the foreign military sales process and regulations on missiles and unmanned drone exports. Blue said that “execution is fragmented across the Department of State, multiple DoD agencies, and the military services, with none of them able to direct the others.” The new executive order will likely minimize the State Department’s role in the foreign military sales process while giving more deference to the Pentagon.
And it seems like Trump is listening. Out of one side of his mouth, the president lambastes the defense industry and their proponents as war profiteers; “I will expel the warmongers from our national security state and carry out a much needed clean up of the military industrial complex to stop the war profiteering and to always put America first,” he said on the campaign trail in Milwaukee.
Some inside the beltway appear to take this threat to arms exports seriously, namely in response to Trump's decision to pause funding to Ukraine. In an article titled, "How Trump is Killing the US Defense Industry,” an Atlantic Council senior fellow sounded the alarm that the "erosion" of the military industrial-complex had arrived, pointing to Lockheed Martin's stock dropping from $500 a share to $450.
But out of the other side of his mouth, Trump extols his record in enabling the very same warmongers to sell arms to destabilizing regimes. His first trip abroad as president in 2017 was to Saudi Arabia, which was then engaged in a military intervention in Yemen, where he proposed a staggering $110 billion arms sale. Major arms sale notifications reached an all time high, adjusted for inflation, under Trump’s stewardship. The Biden Administration continued the breakneck pace of sales set by Trump, despite policies on paper that acted as little more than a fig leaf to elevate human rights and civilian harm into consideration of the arms exports process.
Back in office, Trump has picked up right where he left off, with over $17 billion in major arms sales approved so far this year. On Thursday, the State Department announced the approval of another 2,000 laser-guided rockets to Saudi Arabia.
The AECA gives Congress authority to block major arms sales by passing a joint resolution of disapproval. This has yet to happen, since Congress would need a veto-proof majority; Congress invoked the AECA in an attempt to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, only for Trump to promptly veto its effort. He justified his continued arming of Saudi Arabia because of the revenue it brought to major U.S. weapons contractors like Raytheon (now RTX) and Lockheed Martin — companies that produced bombs used by the Royal Saudi Air Force that were involved in prominent cases of killing of civilians.
It’s unclear what aspects of the AECA may be stripped, but defense contractors need more oversight, not less. Other Trump administration initiatives that may aid arms exporters large and small were decisions to suspend enforcement of laws prohibiting overseas bribery by U.S. companies, and revealing the beneficial owners of shell companies that are used for everything from money laundering and illicit arms trafficking.
Congress should oppose efforts to make it easier to export weapons by further reducing government vetting. Given the frequency with which U.S. weapons end up with aggressor nations and anti-democratic regimes, this is no time to be rushing them out the door without careful consideration of whether they serve long-term U.S. interests or foster peace and stability in key regions.
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Top photo credit: UNITED STATES - MARCH 17: President Donald Trump is seen on a monitor watching footage of military strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels, as Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, conducts a press briefing on Monday, March 17, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA)
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told Fox News last weekend that the U.S. military had launched operations against the Houthis in Yemen because "ships haven't been able to go through for over a year without being shot at." He then said that in December-ish (not giving a specific date) that "we sent a ship through, it was shot at 17 times."
Military sources who spoke to Military.com are puzzled because there were two attacks they know of in December against a merchant vessel and U.S. warships but "the munitions used didn't appear to add up to 17." Then nothing after that, until of course, March 16, when Houthis launched missiles and a drone against the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier in the Red Sea in response to the U.S. airstrikes on March 15. They were intercepted.
Reporter Konstanin Toropin said as of Thursday, "the Pentagon and Trump administration had yet to fully explain what prompted the resumption of operations against the Iranian-backed rebel group after months of relative quiet in the Red Sea." When he asked specifically, he was directed to public statements by Trump and other officials, but those have been less than clarifying.
Defense officials did tell Military.com that the air campaign could go on for a month "or so" and that there "there is also less reluctance to hold off striking targets based on the casualties that may result." They also said there was "a very clear end state to this." But as Toropin pointed out, the officials he spoke with would not "go into detail about what specific aims they were trying to achieve."
U.S. airstrikes began targeting Houthi infrastructure in Yemen last weekend but are now going into the sixth day and are hitting the capital of Sana'a and residential areas, according to reports. "Dozens of people" were killed in the initial strikes, and there have been reports of civilian casualties, but the mainstream media appears not to have no information on that.
The Houthis had pledged to restart their attacks on Israeli-linked vessels since Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas last week and renewed its incursions and bombardments of Gaza, insisting that Hamas must turn over its hostages before it stops. Some 500 Palestinians have been killed there just in just the last few days.
Meanwhile, a single Houthi missile was reportedly intercepted yesterday, heading towards Israel.
Trump has vowed to "annihilate" the Houthis and link their every move to Iran. The Pentagon, meanwhile, says "Houthi terrorists have launched missiles and one-way attack drones at U.S. warships over 170 times and at commercial vessels 145 times since 2023." The spokesman doesn't say that the vast majority of the attacks were thwarted before they did any damage and no American or anyone else has been injured or killed in the attacks (Houthis did detain a crew of a seized merchant vessel for 14 months but released them in January. No one is diminishing their plight).
Moreover, Houthi attacks have caused economic disruption as merchant ships in a minority of cases have been damaged and global shipping, mostly connected to European commerce, has been rerouted away from the region. The Washington Post says the industry largely doesn't plan on returning to the Red Sea routes anytime soon, but "has largely adapted to the disruption, and has even profited from the surge in shipping rates." Defense Priorities military analyst Jennifer Kavanagh says "freedom of navigation" is a core U.S. interest when disruptions are impeding U.S. economic security, but in this case, it is not.
"First, U.S. vital interests and economic security are not at risk in the Red Sea, even if Houthi attacks continue. Second, U.S. military operations have not deterred or degraded the Houthis in a meaningful way and are unlikely to be so going forward, even if Trump expands the target list."
But the U.S. appears committed to fighting this war alone anyway, and is expending not limitless resources (over $1 billion in the anti-Houthi operations since October 2023) with no congressional war authority, or any obvious oversight at all. Washington is just too distracted.
Interestingly, Trump has all but pledged to "rain hell" on another country (Yemen) to destroy a militant group (Houthis) much like the Israeli government has vowed to relentlessly bomb Gaza to destroy Hamas. "Tremendous damage has been inflicted upon the Houthi barbarians, and watch how it will get progressively worse — It’s not even a fair fight, and never will be," Trump said on his Truth Social. "They will be completely annihilated!"
Analysts have long questioned, however, given the capabilities and guerrilla-like tactics of both groups, whether the goals of "destruction" can ever achieved without crippling the civilian populations of each place and diminishing the resources and credibility of the more powerful states.
“The idea that it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make Hamas vanish — that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in June 2024 before his words were "clarified" by the government. They turned out, so far, to be very prescient.
For whatever reason the Hegseth-led Pentagon is doing this, it might want to consider the consequences short and longterm — the limits on our already stretched military and the instability/humanitarian crisis it will cause in Yemen after "a month or so" of airstrikes. If that is not compelling enough, how about the constant danger that this is putting our Navy in, and for what? For shipping costs? For Israel? To send a "message" to Iran, which likely no longer has control over the Houthis anyway?
Perhaps this is too much of a price to pay and we keep our powder dry for actual national security threats, and interests, to come.
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Top photo credit: March 19 2016, Angeles City, Philippines. Rodrigo Duterte campaigning in presidential elections. (shutterstock/Simon roughneen)
Last Tuesday, former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila and taken to the Hague, where he will be tried for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.
From 2016-2022, Duterte’s government carried out a campaign of mass killings of suspected drug users. It’s estimated that 27,000 people, most of them poor and indigent, were executed without trial by police officers and vigilantes at his behest. Children were also routinely killed during Duterte’s drug raids- both as collateral victims and as targets.
While this happened, the United States provided tens of millions of dollars annually to both the Philippine military and the Philippine National Police. The funding flowed mostly uninterrupted while human rights groups around the world called foul.
Duterte made his intention to wage a brutal anti-drug crackdown clear from the very beginning. Before his ascent to the presidency, he served as mayor of Davao, the nation’s 3rd largest city. There he presided over the executions of 1,400 suspected criminals and street children at the hands of a vigilante group known as the “Davao Death Squad.” Duterte initially denied direct involvement in these killings, and then later implied he did in fact support them, saying, “How did I reach that title among the world’s safest cities? Kill them all.”
In 2016, Duterte ran for president as a hardliner on crime, promising to eradicate all criminal activity in the Philippines within six months. In a speech just after taking office, he warned drug users, “I will kill you, I will kill you. I will take the law into my own hands… forget about the laws of men, forget about the laws of international law.” He later compared his violent campaign against drug users to Hitler’s genocide of Jews.
Within months of Duterte’s term the Philippine National Police launched Operation Double Barrel, a nationwide campaign to arrest drug users. A 2017 Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation found that in practice, the operation was, “a campaign of extrajudicial execution in impoverished areas of Manila and other urban areas.”
Many of the killings examined by HRW followed a pattern: a group of plainclothes gunmen would enter the home of a suspected drug user, kill them without ever issuing an arrest, and plant drugs or weapons next to the body. Sometimes the gunmen would self-identify as police officers, and other times they would not. Police would also detain suspected drug users without charges and torture them for bribes.
“Duterte’s outspoken endorsement of the campaign implicates him and other senior officials in possible incitement to violence, instigation of murder, and in command responsibility for crimes against humanity,” stated the HRW report.
Less than a month after Duterte took office, then- Secretary of State John Kerry announced a $32 million weapons and training package specifically to support the Philippine National Police. He made no mention of Duterte’s numerous threats to weaponize law enforcement on the campaign trail, or the fact that 239 suspected drug users had already been killed by police without due process at that point.
Obama’s administration authorized $90 million in military aid to the Philippines in 2016 and roughly $1 billion during the 8 years he was in office. As a growing chorus of human rights advocates criticized the United States for supporting Duterte’s atrocities, the Obama administration suspended some security assistance for the Philippine National Police in November of 2016, but kept military funding at normal levels.
These suspensions were swiftly reversed when Donald Trump took office in 2017. “I just want to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job [you’re doing] on the drug problem,” he told Duterte in a phone call shortly after being inaugurated.
In 2018, the Trump administrationprovided $55 million to the Philippine National Police in aid and arm sales and $193.5 million in military aid to the Philippines overall. This aid package enabled Duterte’s regime on two fronts.
“The war on drugs was primarily implemented by the Philippine National Police, but the attacks on human rights defenders and activists were mainly done by the military,” said Philippine-based human rights activist Judy Pasimio in an interview with Responsible Statecraft.
Pasimio took to the streets in 2016 for a demonstration organized by a coalition of civil society groups to protest the first 100 killings carried out in the drug war. “We understood that this can cross over. This isn’t just about killings in the war on drugs, it will extend to killings of activists in the pretext of the war on drugs,” she said.
Over the course of his presidency, Duterte repeatedly threatened to kill, investigate, and imprison human rights defenders for obstructing his anti-drug campaign. His Justice Department used anti-terrorism laws to place oppositional voices on government watchlists and his state security forces routinely executed activists without trial.
Just last month, the Trump administration clarified that a $336 million aid bundle for “modernizing Philippine security forces” would be among the few packages to be exempt from his foreign aid freeze.
“The United States sees the Philippines as part of its overall policy of countering China,” said Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute.
Duterte’s upcoming trial will hopefully shed new light on the country’s egregious human rights violations, but that will not change the flow of the military aid to the U.S.-Philippines security relationship, not as long as the Philippines remains a regional security ally.
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