'Hardening' the 'Frontier' Is a Recipe for Arms Races and War

If we don’t want to fuel arms races and intensify international rivalries, we should be more cautious about supplying advanced weapons to other states rather than less.

Jakub Grygiel makes some questionable assertions in his article arguing for the virtues of arming “allies”:

Finally, on both the left and the right of the U.S. political spectrum, there is an unjustified anxiety that arming allies means provoking enemies. This fear arises out of the assumption that powers such as Russia or China only react to what the United States and its allies do. Left alone with disarmed, placid states on their borders, so this theory goes, neither Russia nor China would seek to expand their control or build large arsenals.

In fact, the fear that arming front-line states is provocative arises from the observation that it frequently provokes adverse, hostile reactions. The anxiety is hardly unjustified. No one assumes that Russia and China “only react” to what the U.S. and its allies do, but it is clear that throwing lots of weapons into neighboring countries does antagonize these states and can sometimes trigger more aggressive behavior than would otherwise occur.

It will depend on the context in which those weapons transfers take place and the other policies that are being pursued in connection with them, but when such transfers are happening against the backdrop of a generally hostile and confrontational U.S. approach they are much more likely to be perceived as threatening and they will elicit hostile reactions. Russia and China may expand their arsenals for their own reasons, but arms transfers to neighboring countries will give them an additional incentive to pursue larger expansions. If we don’t want to fuel arms races and intensify international rivalries, we should be more cautious about supplying advanced weapons to other states rather than less.