Gun control, international style.

• Author: Renner, Michael
• Position: Control of military spending

The Mexican government announced in 1982 that it was unable to repay its foreign debt. Within months, it became clear that numerous other countries might also default on their loans. The causes ranged from mismanagement, or sheer graft, to soaring global interest rates and collapsing commodity prices. But a largely unmentioned factor was military spending.

Military priorities have not only contributed to crippling indebtedness, but also have drained resources from programs that could alleviate poverty and underdevelopment. In the decade since Mexico's action, the situation has only become worse. This squandering of critically needed aid has largely gone unchallenged, at least until recently, by Western lending agencies - including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In recent months, the lenders' Cold War taboo against questioning how many tanks or missiles a country really needs has been broken. Not only demilitarization, but also such related considerations as respect for human rights and the health of the environment, are becoming determinants for the flow of aid.

Rather than apply strictly military-related conditions to their lending, the World Bank and the IMF have opted for an indirect strategy: for a debtor to receive new credits, the country is required to meet certain economic targets, such as getting government budgets under control, that can't be reached without reducing military budgets. And both institutions have issued public statements acknowledging the conflict between military and development objectives.

Individual donor countries - notably Canada, Germany, and Japan - have also begun to explore how to apply conditions to their foreign aid. But the status quo of aid politics still holds. Those governments that have regarded aid primarily as a tool of geopolitical influence - in particular, the United States, Britain, and France - have made no moves in this direction. Of course, it's not a simple issue, since some level of military readiness may be necessary for even the poorest country to protect what meager assets it has. The challenge to lenders is how to define "excessive" military spending. But however it is defined, it appears to be blatantly out of proportion in much of the world. In almost 20 percent of all Third World countries, military spending surpasses the combined public expenditures on health and education. The worst misallocations are those of Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, North Korea, and...