I wrote my high school senior thesis on this topic. My school for some odd reason wanted to look challenging (which it wasn't), so we all had to scrape up a 50 odd page essay and a presentation.

A tad of hypocrisy in American foreign policy is their dual stance of secretive hogging of just about every single type of technology in the world, and their pointless mouthing of pro-disarmament clauses to all the countries that are pissed because they have to disarm and the US doesn't. The latest "incident" (if you can call it that) involves the American pressuring of Israel to keep their weapons to themselves away from China, and at the same time putting American defenses in Israel to (supposedly) defend it against guerilla rocket attacks.

Never mind the fact that the Israeli army is perfectly capable of handling itself against the guerillas, at this moment it barely needs American intervention. But the US rammed its policy down the Israeli's unwilling gullets, put the American techs there, and demands that Israel stop an arms deal to China involving advanced radar equipment. China got very angry and the back-stabbing Americans, because they were promised the same technology (which is really not that new) from the Americans and never got it.

It's been happening for a while now. America never agrees to disarm, despite signing several treaties calling for rapid removal of all chem and bio weapons, the US continues to maintain a very large ready supply of gaseous and bacterial arms, for "research purposes", so they say. It jams its very long arm down the throats of allied nations that are willing to deal with "hostile" nations (that includes China, most Middle East countries, all of Africa). The UK, Russia, France, etc. all have attempted to sell arms to those nations, every time the Americans stop it. Most of the time the technology in question wasn't even developed by the US.

Proliferation is the key term the bureaucrats always use in those papers that explain their actions. Proliferation into hostile parties. Proliferation into terrorist hands. Proliferation to psychos. Obviously, these "what if's" posed by the American suits are fairly far out and unlikely, but they always end with "better safe than sorry".

Not that it matters in the end. America will still reign supreme, because in military technology they are eons ahead of every other nation. Their meddling in other nation's arms sales don't achieve anything but make good headlines for the papers. Clinton has overtly expressed a desire to go down in history not as a pervert but as a peacemaker, his orders to meddle did exactly that. People read USA Today and see "The US has saved the world from war again!" Nonsensical, but it makes Joe Sixpack feel all fuzzy inside, and that is what Clinton wants. Truly inane.