Arms for the poor : President Carter's policies on arms transfers to the Third World

Abstract

As a candidate for President, Jimmy Carter railed against the hypocrisy of America being 'the world's leading champion of peace' while exporting more arms than any other nation. Whether or not these claims were true, such rhetoric suggested that the future President was planning major reductions in American arms transfers. In May 1977, President Carter's Administration produced a policy document outlining the restraints on arms exports to be henceforth adopted. Although not as extreme as Carter's pre-election statements, it still proposed a more comprehensive set of restraints than had previously existed. But by 1979, it seemed that the United States' relative position in the arms trade had not been transformed. Nor had the more modest ambitions of May 1977 been fully achieved. At the same time, President Carter was being assailed from both sides for either doing too little or too much. In this study, an attempt is made to consider the extent to which Carter has lived up to his promises, and whether those promises should have been made at all. The lather mixed results that emerge reveal the problems of a reforming regime in an unreformed world.