This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 13th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When the US sells weapons to other countries, what happens to them?

Too often those weapons are taken and used to oppress the people the

U.S. was trying to help or fired on neighboring countries and those weapons

are sometimes turned on U.S. troops. Carolyn Dormany is author of a new Cato paper, Risky Business, the role of

arms sales in U.S. foreign policy out today.

Give me the best case scenario for the United States deciding to sell heavy weaponry to governments, to groups

around the world, and give me the best argument for why that is a productive thing for the U.S. to do?

The best argument would be to sell those weapons to close allies.

The countries that we're most likely to have on our side if we end up going to war, you want

interoperability with those forces.

But frequently that's not why the US decides to sell weapons.

Usually we think that we could get leverage over a different country or we could somehow shift the balance of power

in a particular region.

Okay, so historically then, what has been the result of the United States engaging in these

weapons sales?

Certainly some of them have been productive and have enhanced relations that the United States

has had with other countries, presumably at points in history.

It has enhanced security in those countries so that the United States doesn't have to rush

to their aid necessarily?

Absolutely. I mean, a good example of that would be Linliss before World War II as a productive

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