Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, at a signing ceremony, New Delhi, India, Dec. 12, 2015 (AP photo by Manish Swarup).

During his visit to New Delhi last December, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, pledged to transform India and Japan’s partnership into a “deep, broad-based and action-oriented relationship.” Behind the lofty rhetoric were several major developments, most of all finally reaching a consensus on the text of a bilateral civil nuclear agreement, long in the works, that would allow Japan to directly export nuclear plants to India. It would be signed, Abe and Modi said, once “technical details” were sorted out. In addition to the nuclear deal, they announced that Japan would provide $12 billion […]

Military vehicles carrying Wing Loong drones during a military parade, Beijing, China, Sept. 3, 2015 (Imaginechina via AP Images).

With a regularity almost approaching that of the tides, there has recently been a frenzy of fevered pronouncements about China becoming a major arms exporter—and perhaps even giving serious competition to the traditionally front-running United States. Most of this is hype, but there is some truth to all the mania. For the most part, China’s arms industry does not seriously threaten U.S. arms exports, at least not in terms of quantity. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China garnered only 5 percent of the total global arms market from 2010 to 2014—good enough to rank third among the […]