Assuming that people care about the Big Picture is misguided — consider Frank Vogl and Stephan Richter's curiously blind perspective regarding American arms dealing

© 2020 Peter Free

 

20 January 2020

 

 

Missing the point makes subsequent action ineffectual

 

Here is a segment of a Globalist essay.

 

It illustrates how to miss insight by stating what's obvious and no more than that:

 

 

Lockheed Martin (the world’s largest arms exporter), Boeing, and Raytheon are among the leading U.S. companies approved by the U.S. government to export equipment and knowledge to enable the Saudis to build their domestic arms manufacturing capacity.

 

As these buyers develop their own factories, so they will not only become less dependent on the United States, but they will also be able to export weapons to anyone they like.

 

It used to be said that the last thing the Middle East needs is more weapons.

 

What the Middle East needs even less is its own arms production facilities.

 

[T]he very idea of major U.S. manufacturers transferring arms production facilities to the Middle East is just about the last thing the world needs.

 

© 2020  Frank Vogl and Stephan Richter, US Tech Transfer: First to China, Now to the Middle East, The Globalist (20 January 2020) (excerpts)

 

 

The above statement of strategic principle is correct . . .

 

But Vogl-Richter's implicit assumption that Big Picture thinking guides anything American is self-defeatingly mistaken.

 

Therefore, the authors' appeal to exercising Common Sense as a remedy to bad strategy falls ineffectually by the wayside.

 

The authors miss the core point, which regards why arms manufacturers and the United States do what they do.

 

Money.

 

 

The moral? — At its base, capitalism is not about sound geopolitical strategy and national interests . . .

 

It's about ethics-lacking greed.

 

And in the imperialistically super-power United States — capitalism and its subset, corporatism, are about killing, maiming or de-homing people for profit.

 

When the Vogl-Richter team writes about the stupidity of providing Middle Eastern malevolents with the knowledge to make sophisticated armaments — they simultaneously avoid adequately identifying who the real bad guys — and the System that spawns them — are.

 

One cannot helpfully change behavior, without first recognizing why the negatively targeted behavior acts in the ways that it does.

 

Analysts who ignore this, are not being intelligently perceptive.

 

Perhaps that's the meaning of "pundit" these days.