"U.S. and Russia Still Dominate Arms Market, but World Total Falls," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 30 August, p. A7.

"China, U.S. Near an Accord on Nuclear Technology," by Charles Hutzler, Wall Street Journal, 2 September, p. A2.

Arms transfers are down globally, but up with regard to the Gap buying from the Core, with the U.S. and Russia still number 1 and 2 in terms of market shares. My, how little have things changed from the Cold War.
Meanwhile, China and the U.S. are close to new agreements that would send nuclear technology to the mainland in unprecedented flows. Hmm, that does seem like a big change.

When I was in college, the biggest global security issue was strategic arms control among those great powers now identified by me as belonging to the Core. Because they now belong to the Core, all that effort at controlling nukes is OBE. That's right. No one cares about it anymore. Wanna sell nuke technology to the Chinese? Be my guest.

As for conventional stuff, including missiles, there we're talking the Core's big powers selling whatever they can throughout the Gap. Why? That's where all the violence and danger is, so that's where the market is. No one is talking about limiting those flows either. Why? Too much money to be made.

It's amazing to me that the Core's great powers can see the win-win on sharing military-related technology among themselves but can't see the utility in restricting the flow of dangerous stuff to the Gap. It's like we think we can have our Kantian cake in the Core and somehow chow down on arms transfers to the Hobbesian war zones of the Gap. The two simply don't go together, but rather reflect the bifurcated nature of the global security environment today. Until, we get Core-wide understanding of the fundamental differences between the security rule set that dominates the Core and the lack of one in the Gap, this schizophrenic approach to fostering global "stability" will continue.

Don't get me wrong: I don't believe you can really restrict the flow of dangerous technologies from the Core to the Gap, because there will always be people and regimes in the Gap who will do whatever it takes to get their hands on the stuff. Those people I simply preempt when the time comes. Instead of that classic approach to high-end arms control, I think the Core as a whole should focus as much as possible on the little stuff, meaning the great flow of conventional small arms to the Gap. But here, like with abortion, we see the internal rule set clash in the U.S. hampering our ability to see the big-picture job that needs to get done. Our internal fight over abortion ruins much of our foreign aid on birth control inside the Gap, just as our insane fights over limiting access to dangerous small arms inside our own country makes us a laggard in pushing for similar restrictions globally.