Lemon Drop wrote:
ANOTHER REASON DEMS NEED TO WIN BACK THE SENATE!!

We're helping the Saudis and UAE do this. The Saudis successfully courted Trump, leading to the reversal of an Obama policy not to sell weapons systems to the Saudis due to civilian deaths in Yemen.

The State Department announced the first arms sales of the Trump administration Monday, saying it approved sending various munitions and equipment to four countries, including Saudi Arabia. Approval of the transfers has to be finalized by Congress. The $1.85 billion in sales is a fraction of the $40 billion in transfers the Obama administration agreed to as recently as 2015, but the decision signals continuity in foreign arms sales under President Trump.

Obama’s Administration Sold More Weapons Than Any Other Since World War II
Many were sold to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.

President Barack Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, will leave office in a few weeks with the dubious honor of having sold more weapons than any other American president since World War II

Lemon Drop wrote:
1. Looking at page 17 of the Congressional Research Service report (not the hyperbole in the Vice article linked above) you see that US agreements to sell weapons worldwide DECREASED while Obama was in office.

Lemon Drop wrote:
in 2010, Obama did make a $60 billion deal with SA that was about containing Iran's nuclear weapons program. The size of this deal is an outlier. The Israelis were apparently OK with it because the stuff they buy from us is more sophisticated.

When Donald Trump is asked to justify his trip to Saudi Arabia, he’ll cite that $110 billion in arms sales.
There are a few interesting things about these sales. The first is that many of these sales were already in the works. The Obama administration spent eight years quietly selling a lot of arms to Saudi Arabia: When President Obama left office, for example, the United States still had $100 billion in the foreign military sales pipeline with Saudi Arabia and, in 2011, had inked what was previously the largest arms sale in U.S. history with the Kingdom—a $29 billion deal to sell F-15s to the Saudis.

Obama-era sales to Saudi Arabia were in keeping with sales to other Gulf states: Both Qatar and the United Arab Emirates bought a tremendous amount of U.S. arms between 2009 and 2017. Qatar bought more U.S. arms than any other state in 2014 and, in the waning days of the Obama administration, announced that it would buy nearly $4 billion in Boeing-made F-15s in addition to $19 billion in commercial aircraft, also from Boeing.

Overall, the Arab Gulf states went on a spending spree during the Obama years, and most of the money was spent on American arms.

So why didn’t you hear a lot about this from Democratic politicians during the 2016 election season?

max wrote:
And no, I am not defending Trump, nor am I condemning Obama for this, I have no position in the matter...

Lemon Drop wrote:
1. Looking at page 17 of the Congressional Research Service report