The first Conference of States Parties (CSP) to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) opens today in Cancun. Evidently, treaty signatories believe a seaside resort is a suitable location to discuss the international arms trade. Perhaps they’re right. This treaty is so ridiculous, so silly—in a word, so unserious—that it’s fit for beach reading.
The idea behind the ATT is that nations shouldn’t allow arms smuggling, and should show a little responsibility in who they sell arms to. Put that way, it’s a sensible idea. Unfortunately, multilateralism has a way of turning what is basically sensible into what is terribly foolish. Naturally, that’s not dissuaded the usual holier than thou crowd of Europeans and “progressive” (i.e. blame America first) non-governmental organizations from pulling the treaty into existence.
The purpose—at least, the nominal purpose—of the Cancun meeting is to create a treaty secretariat, decide how it is to be funded, and to set out the rules by which future meetings of the states parties (which, as the U.S. wisely hasn’t ratified the treaty, doesn’t include us) will be conducted. What’s really at stake at Cancun is both simpler and much harder: to try to prevent those America-blaming NGOs from taking over the treaty for their own ideological purposes.
What the NGOs demand, vociferously, is “transparency,” both in the conduct of the CSP and in the operation of the treaty going forward. As far as the NGOs are concerned, at least at the CSP, transparency means that they want a status close to that of the nations that are actually party to the treaty, which would be tantamount to giving them co-ownership of it.
I quite see why they want that. But it’s worthwhile to think a bit more carefully about the value and the paradoxes of transparency than the NGOs are inclined to do. There is, frankly, no way to make governments be fully transparent: if you mandate that their meetings at the CSP are open to all, then they will simply talk privately before the CSP. Public meetings are in a sense a performance, and all performances require rehearsals. If the rehearsal is public, there will be a private pre-rehearsal. And so the snake circles, eating its own tail. The idea that governments will and can only discuss matters relevant to the treaty at the CSP is childlike in its simplicity.
Moreover, the demand for transparency assumes that the CSP is a place where serious business will be done. That’s not mostly wrong—the Secretariat and the rules do matter—but it’s not mostly right either. For the last three years, I’ve attended meetings of (wait for it) the U.N. Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, mercifully usually abbreviated as the PoA. Before I went to my first meeting, I naively assumed that, since it was advertised as reviewing how nations are implementing the PoA, it would – well, you know, review how nations are implementing the PoA.
It didn’t. Except for criticizing the U.S., these meetings invariably proceed on the bland and unspoken assumption that nations like Syria, Iran, Russia, and China are responsible opponents of arms trafficking. Unlike the ATT, the PoA isn’t a treaty, but that’s the only difference between them. There is no reason to believe that future CSPs will not proceed just as the PoA meetings do: There will be little if any criticism of anyone except the U.S. (and Israel), and no serious assessment of whether the signatories are implementing their commitments. If you assume all nations are equal—and that is the founding assumption of the U.N. and of multilateral institutions more broadly—then it follows that no one is fit to assess anyone else. The failure of the system to pass judgement on the bad guys isn’t a bug—it is, in a way, a feature.
The NGOs respond to this by demanding that they, in their unelected, self-nominated, and self-righteous majesty, be given a place as judge and jury (fortunately, they dislike capital punishment, so there is no mention of an executioner) of the treaty. Since few of those working at any of these NGOs have any experience in a branch of a government that actually does the hard work of regulating arms exports, or even in industry, which has to cope with the masses of bureaucracy such control generates, their only qualification for this position must be their self-assured moral fervor. It might, just perhaps, be that this is not sufficient.
Their other response is to demand that the national reports of arms imports and exports to be submitted under the treaty be full and complete. This isn’t what the treaty actually requires, but again, this sounds a good idea, and in principle is undeniably right: Democracies should tend towards the full publication of arms exports approved by their governments. But the fact is that most governments do no such thing. We already have two registers, universal in theory, of arms exports: the reports submitted under the PoA, and the U.N. Register of Conventional Arms.
Both tell the same story. Reporting under the PoA has declined relentlessly over the last decade, and more than half the signatories of the ATT do not report under it. The U.N. Register, in operation since 1991, has reports on exports from a mere 59 nations, and imports from 85 – and that leaves aside the question of whether reports from such luminaries as Yemen and Iran bear any relationship to reality. The blunt fact is this: whatever good the ATT will do rests, according to the claims of its advocates, on the national reporting that it will supposedly promote, but nations already have lots of opportunities to report if they want to. They evidently don’t.
And absolutely nothing about the ATT will force them to do so. The text of the treaty (which allows nations to exclude “commercially sensitive or national security information” from their reports) doesn’t require it. Nothing about the way the PoA has gone about its business since 2001 encourages the slightest confidence, as even the PoA’s biggest boosters admit, that the ATT will produce results. The ATT has no enforcement provisions whatsoever. This is a mercy, since they would undoubtedly be abused, but it is also a demonstration of its irrelevance.
In theory, the ATT could be enforced unilaterally—by Israel in Gaza, for example—but progressive NGOs invariably scream with rage at the prospect (never mind the practice) of forceful unilateral action by democracies to defend themselves from arms smugglers, terrorists, and fanatics. And of course, an egregious violation of the ATT could in a nice, multilateral way be brought to the U.N. Security Council, but we don’t need the ATT to make that happen, and the history of the world since 1945 implies it’s unlikely to occur, or to matter if it does happen.
All the hopes vested in the ATT imply that, thanks to the agency of the NGOs acting on those national reports, it will exercise a kind of moral suasion. Either you believe that or you don’t. If you believe that moral suasion matters to Iran, or is likely to trouble the sleep of Vladimir Putin, well, good luck to you. My own view is that, if suasion would work, it would not be necessary, because suasion only works on places that are basically decent. But I would be more inclined to believe in the power of suasion if the NGOs were more willing to criticize regimes like Iran.
Take, for example, this fetid little piece by a former campaigner for the Control Arms Coalition, the big NGO dog at Cancun, which blames the mess in Yemen on a “sea of arms . . . spurred externally from the Saudi-led coalition, and internally from Houthi forces on the ground.” The Houthi are in fact being armed by the Iranians, as the U.S. and even the U.N. acknowledge. But that doesn’t interest the Control Arms Coalition, which can’t even bring itself to say the word “Iran,” and which blames only the “Saudi-led coalition,” armed by the U.S., for the Yemeni mess. This is par for the course: you have to look hard to find an NGO criticism of the export practices of the world’s dictators, but not hard at all to find reams of attacks on the democracies.
And that’s the final paradox of transparency. To the extent that the ATT promotes more of it – and it won’t promote much – the reporting will come from the world’s democracies, which will only enable the NGOs to indulge even further their instinct to beat up on the U.S., Israel and, in the rear, any other democracy that comes to their notice. It is a pity that the sensible idea behind the ATT has come to this, but it just goes to show that good ideas in the hands of the wrong people can do a lot of damage. And most of the people at Cancun are spectacularly wrong.
Ted R. Bromund is the senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations at the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
