U.S. weapons transfers make up the lion’s share of the global arms trade. Increasing political pushback against arms deals with countries like Saudi Arabia suggest an interplay between public discourse, national politics and consequently arms trade. Nonetheless, little is known about the kind of discourse that accompanies such deals. 

This project looks at Reddit discourse from 2008-2021 alongside public data on U.S. arms transfers during the same period to fill this gap. We analyze themes of discourse using a topic model and the framing of them using a novel neural network classifier. In particular, we look at the relative moralization of discourse about weapons transfers, as moral frames have been shown to affect perceptions of bias and hence empathy in contentious domains.

The only period during which moral frames constitute a majority of the comments is 2008-2010. Given that the lion’s share of Reddit discourse comes from the U.S. (Harrigian, 2018), this could reflect the impact of Obama’s second term on the foreign policy discourse in the U.S. However, as figure 1 demonstrates, the number of relevant comments is much smaller in earlier years, suggesting that weapons transfers were not discussed much early on, moralized or otherwise. 

2012 and 2015 mark massive increases in the volume but there is no corresponding trend in the moralization estimate. 

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The topic about military aid is largely focused on Israel, while deals with Saudi Arabia loom large in discussions of international arms deals.

The focuses contrast with the list of countries that received the greatest volume of weapons from the U.S. within the studied period, which includes Australia, Japan, the U.K., South Korea and India, among others.***