Arms and the Very Bad Men

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times

23 October 18

Trump’s rationale for going easy on Saudi Arabia is a shameful lie.

few days ago, Pat Robertson, the evangelical leader, urged America not to get too worked up about the torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, because we shouldn’t endanger “$100 billion in arms sales.” I guess he was invoking the little-known 11th Commandment, which says, “On the other hand, thou shalt excuse stuff like killing and bearing false witness if weapons deals are at stake.”

O.K., it’s not news that the religious right has prostrated itself at Donald Trump’s feet. But Trump’s attempt to head off retaliation for Saudi crimes by claiming that there are big economic rewards to staying friendly with killers — and the willingness of his political allies to embrace his logic — nonetheless represents a new stage in the debasement of America.

It’s not just that Trump’s claims about the number of jobs at stake — first it was 40,000, then 450,000, then 600,000, then a million — are lies. Even if the claims were true, we’re the United States; we’re supposed to be a moral beacon for the world, not a mercenary nation willing to abandon its principles if the money is good.

That said, the claims are, in fact, false.

First, there is no $100 billion Saudi arms deal. What the Trump administration has actually gotten are mainly “memorandums of intent,” best seen as possible future deals rather than commitments. Many of these potential deals would involve production in Saudi Arabia rather than the U.S. And the sales, if they did materialize, would be spread over a number of years.

It looks unlikely, then, that deals with Saudi Arabia will raise U.S. annual arms exports by more than a few billion dollars a year. When you bear in mind that the industries involved, mainly aerospace, are highly capital intensive and don’t employ many workers per dollar of sales, the number of U.S. jobs involved is surely in the tens of thousands, if that, not hundreds of thousands. That is, we’re talking about a rounding error in a U.S. labor market that employs almost 150 million workers.

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