As bombs fall and bodies are buried, another kind of battle unfolds far from the war zones—in corporate boardrooms, government corridors, and international courtrooms. It is a fight for accountability: should the architects of weaponry bear responsibility for the atrocities committed with their products?
The question is not rhetorical. In light of the recent atrocities in Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond, the international spotlight has returned to the long-overdue issue of whether arms manufacturers—particularly those in the United States—should be held criminally liable for war crimes committed with their weapons. The legal, moral, and political basis for such accountability is clear. What remains absent is the will to enforce it.
Legal Foundations: From Nuremberg to The Hague
International law has long recognized that those who enable war crimes may themselves be complicit in them. Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) makes it explicit: individuals, including corporate executives, can be held criminally liable if they knowingly aid or abet the commission of war crimes. That includes providing the tools to commit them.
This is no fringe legal theory. It is a principle forged in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Nuremberg Trials held not only military and political leaders to account, but also the industrialists—men like the directors of IG Farben and Krupp—whose factories powered the Nazi war machine. Their convictions established a precedent: when commerce enables carnage, culpability follows.
Broken Treaties, Abandoned Commitments
Despite these legal structures, enforcement has proven elusive. The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), adopted by the United Nations in 2013, was intended to set minimum global standards for arms transfers, specifically prohibiting exports that could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law.
The United States signed the treaty under President Obama, but the Senate never ratified it. In 2019, President Trump withdrew the U.S. signature altogether. His successor, President Biden, declined to reverse this decision as has his successor President Trump (again). While the administration publicly cites concerns over sovereignty, critics argue the real reason is simpler: preserving the unfettered ability to arm allies—even those accused of grave abuses—without accountability.
Another promising but ultimately hollow measure was the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, first enacted in 1977 under President Carter. It stressed the importance of safeguarding civilian lives as a cornerstone of U.S. arms policy. The Biden and Trump administrations, however, have presided over a dramatic erosion of this principle. Nowhere is this clearer than in Gaza, where U.S.-supplied weaponry continues to rain down on civilian populations.
Gaza, Genocide, and U.S. Arms
In March 2024, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, issued a chilling assessment: “There are reasonable grounds to believe the threshold indicating the commission of genocide has been met.”
Her conclusion was based on documented attacks on civilians, starvation as a weapon of war, and the destruction of homes, hospitals, and infrastructure—carried out with weapons made by the U.S.’s largest defence contractors: Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics.
These companies are not neutral suppliers. They are the core of the military-industrial complex—an ecosystem in which profit, policy, and political power are indistinguishable. In 2023, global military spending surged to $2.4 trillion, with the aforementioned U.S. firms dominating the list of top earners.
Civilian Tribunal: A Verdict Rendered
Recognizing the absence of formal international accountability, a coalition of lawyers, scholars, and activists convened the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal—a citizen-led initiative to investigate the role of weapons manufacturers in global atrocities. Over three years, the Tribunal amassed a damning archive of evidence, including testimony from whistle-blowers, legal experts, and survivors.
In January 2025, ten international jurors delivered their verdict: U.S. arms manufacturers were guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and, in some cases, genocide. The companies were found to have knowingly sold weapons—such as white phosphorus, cluster munitions, and depleted uranium arms—whose use against civilian populations is prohibited under international law.
The Revolving Door of War
One of the most insidious aspects of the arms trade is the revolving door between government and industry. It is not unusual for senior military and political officials to retire into lucrative roles on the boards of the very companies they once regulated—or armed through public contracts.
A 2021 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 1,700 former senior government officials had joined the arms industry in just five years. A more recent investigation by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft revealed that over 80% of retired U.S. four-star generals and admirals had accepted positions with arms companies.
Consider Admiral John Richardson, who joined Boeing’s board just two months after ending his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations. Or General Joseph Dunford, who was appointed to Lockheed Martin’s board mere months after retiring as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And then there is Dick Cheney—former Secretary of Defense, former CEO of Halliburton, and later Vice President—whose career is a case study in the seamless merger of war-making and war-profiteering.
Chemical Warfare and the Legacy of Agent Orange
The complicity of industry in war crimes is not confined to bullets and bombs. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. deployed Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant produced by chemical giants like Dow and Monsanto. Despite growing evidence of its devastating effects—including widespread birth defects, cancers, and environmental destruction—the companies lobbied aggressively for its continued use.
Today, more than half a million children in Vietnam suffer from conditions linked to Agent Orange exposure. Three generations bear the chemical’s toxic legacy. U.S. veterans and their families were also afflicted. The continued production and lobbying for this chemical, despite full knowledge of its harm, should have constituted a prosecutable offense under international law. That it did not is a testament to the impunity enjoyed by corporate actors.
New Atrocities, Old Patterns
On May 2, 2025, a civilian aid ship named The Conscience was bombed just outside Malta’s territorial waters. Part of the Gaza flotilla, it aimed to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid. Preliminary investigations suggest the involvement of an Israeli C-130 aircraft, likely deploying drone-delivered munitions. Witnesses aboard the ship reported the sound of drones immediately before the blasts.
No nation—including Malta—has yet called for a formal investigation, despite clear indications of a potential war crime: the targeting of an unarmed civilian vessel in international waters. The flotilla coalition has demanded accountability—not just from the state actors involved, but from the companies that manufactured and sold the weapons used in the attack.
Accountability is Not Optional
The argument that arms manufacturers merely produce weapons and have no say in their use no longer holds up under scrutiny. Their executives often help shape foreign policy, their products are marketed with full knowledge of their likely deployment, and their profits soar in lockstep with global conflict.
To hold the arms industry accountable is not to criminalize commerce—it is to acknowledge that some profits come at the price of human life and international law. If those who order war crimes are to be prosecuted, so too must those who make them possible.
Anything less is an invitation to impunity—and a guarantee that the next atrocity is already being assembled on a factory floor somewhere.
The Business of Peace Is War
There’s a cruel irony that threads itself through every modern-day peace conference, every international summit, and every hand-wringing UN resolution. It’s the dissonance between the world’s loud declarations for peace and its insatiable appetite for war. And until we begin to reckon with this fundamental contradiction—until we admit that war isn’t a failure of diplomacy but a feature of modern geopolitics—we will never, ever know peace. Because peace, in the eyes of those who rule the world, simply doesn’t pay.
Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
We live under a global order where the currency of influence is military might, and arms exports are not mere commodities—they are levers of control. These weapons are traded not just for money but for loyalty, obedience, and silence. Every drone strike, every missile launch, every precision-guided bomb is a geopolitical transaction, not just a battlefield decision. Peace is not profitable. Peace does not boost quarterly earnings. Peace does not sell $150 billion worth of arms to "strategic allies." But war does—and consistently.
This is the paradox at the heart of the modern international system: the most powerful nations are the world’s leading arms dealers. The United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—permanent members of the UN Security Council, legally entrusted to maintain international peace—are also responsible for over 75% of global arms exports. The arbiters of peace are its primary saboteurs.
In 2024 alone, the world spent over $600 billion on arms exports. Much of this military hardware was directed into active conflicts—many of which those same nations either sparked, armed, or fuelled under the guise of counterterrorism, humanitarian intervention, or “restoring order.” The victims of this industrialized destruction are not insurgents or extremists. They are the civilians of Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Haiti—each conflict a front in a global war economy that rewards devastation.
The beneficiaries, meanwhile, are the perennial elite: the defence executives raising toasts at contractor galas, the think tanks funded by weapons makers, the lawmakers whose campaign coffers swell with defence dollars, and the media firms whose revenues spike with every escalation. These are the high priests of perpetual war, cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy and deterrence, delivering profit from chaos.
Empire as Operating System
The United States, more than any other power, has embedded this system into the fabric of its governance. With a Pentagon budget exceeding $1 trillion—more than the next ten countries combined—America has effectively redefined national security as a subsidy program for the arms industry.
This isn’t just a budgetary choice. It is a worldview. The military-industrial complex is no longer a danger to democracy—it is the democracy. Elected officials legislate at the behest of defence lobbies. Policy is shaped not by diplomats but by generals and board members. Elections are won on the promise of strength, which invariably means force. There is no room in this calculus for peace—unless it is the enforced silence that follows subjugation.
From Vietnam to Venezuela, from Kabul to Khartoum, the American empire has never waged war solely for defence. It has done so for markets, minerals, bases, and ideology. And yet each intervention is sold with the same language: liberation, stabilization, protection. The labels change. The mission never does.
Indeed, the war machine does not need truth—it needs narrative. And that narrative is always the same: they are the threat, we are the answer. “Weapons of mass destruction.” “Defending democracy.” “Eradicating terror.” The slogans shift to fit the enemy du jour, but the goal remains: destabilize, dominate, extract.
Africa: The Frontline of Extraction
Few continents have suffered this model more brutally than Africa. Once carved up by colonial powers, it is now mined, militarized, and manipulated under the pretext of “security partnerships.” In the Sahel region, the rise of military juntas in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso has sparked Western outrage—not because of their governance, but because of their defiance. They expelled French and American troops. They closed foreign bases. They demanded control over their own resources.
The response from the West was swift and familiar: sanctions, aid suspensions, and media campaigns branding them as Russian proxies or threats to democracy. But what these nations actually threatened was the post-colonial order—one in which sovereignty is tolerated only when it is compliant, and independence is punished unless it aligns with Western interests.
Western powers are not enraged by instability in Africa—they are enraged by stability they do not control. When African nations pursue resource nationalism, regional integration, or alliances outside the Western orbit, they are met with pressure, interference, or outright sabotage. The aim is not stability but subordination.
Manufactured Enemies, Engineered Chaos
This pattern is not unique to Africa. It is the logic of empire.
In Haiti, a nation with a history of resisting imperial rule, every attempt at autonomous reconstruction has been thwarted. Foreign-imposed austerity, UN occupation, and coup-backed regimes have ensured the country remains in crisis—a crisis that justifies ever more intervention. In Venezuela, democratic elections are dismissed, and sanctions weaponized—not because of human rights abuses (which are ignored in allied nations) but because of oil nationalization. In Iran, decades of interference have culminated in a siege economy, all under the banner of “non-proliferation” enforced by nuclear-armed states.
Each case reveals a central truth: the problem is not dictatorship. The problem is defiance. Regimes are tolerated when they serve markets. They are toppled when they threaten monopolies. It is not tyranny that draws the wrath of empire—it is independence.
Who Is Peace For?
In such a world, we must ask: who is peace for?
Not the ruling elite. Not the shareholders. Not the generals or the lobbyists. Peace is for the forgotten. The displaced families who long not for vengeance, but for return. The children whose futures are incinerated in drone strikes. The nurses tending to the wounded in shelled hospitals. The farmers whose fields become minefields.
These are the people peace was meant for. But they are the last to receive it.
Instead, we get theatre. UN summits with dove-shaped logos. Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to drone presidents. Campaigns that speak of peace while signing arms deals. We teach schoolchildren to believe in peace, even as we teach soldiers to enforce empire. We perform peace; we do not practice it.
No Illusions
This is not to say peace is impossible. But in the current world order, peace is undesirable to those who wield power. It would require dismantling the global military economy. It would mean confronting imperial history—not with platitudes, but with reparations and restitution. It would mean giving up not just weapons, but control.
And for that, there is no appetite.
What is required is not reform from above but revolution from below. Peace will not be granted—it must be demanded. It will not come from those who profit from war but from those who suffer beneath its weight. Peace will rise when conscripts refuse to fight, when civilians resist militarism, when nations break from imperial orbit and build solidarity beyond borders.
Until then, let us at least be honest: the world does not want peace. It wants power. And power, as it stands, needs war.
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