However narrow the managers may try to make it, the impeachment inquiry that has finally engulfed the presidency of Donald Trump after nearly three years of malfeasance is a scandalous goulash: a bald attempt to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election, to strongarm a foreign leader into cooperation, to retain power at all costs. But at its heart is an American-made missile that, like the Russian AK-47 rifle, has evolved into a powerful symbol of its producer’s geopolitical reach.

In his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, detailed in a now-infamous whistleblower complaint, Trump appeared to guarantee the sale to Kiev of FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missiles in return for a “corruption” investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Subsequent reports revealed that Attorney General William Barr met with Ukrainian officials, as well as those from four other countries, about the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Vice President Mike Pence, too, was reportedly enlisted to tell Zelenskiy the Javelin shipments depended on a “more aggressive action on corruption,” and Trump is now openly asking foreign countries to help him screw one of his political challengers to the wall, as more evidence of a clear Ukraine quid pro quo emerges by the minute.

The U.S. government is the world’s most heavily-armed protection racket.

But the cretinous foreign policy practiced by the Trump administration at least helps to remind taxpayers of the way in which American foreign weapons sales have reordered presidential priorities, from the War of 1812 to Franklin Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” to the Cold War and today. The Ukraine Javelin affair reflects a sad truth about American foreign policy in general, and the last half-century in particular: Strip away the soaring rhetoric of freedom and liberty, and the U.S. government is the world’s most heavily-armed protection racket—and by embracing foreign military sales, it’s exporting Trump’s fabled “American carnage” abroad.

Foreign military sales have always been a fixture of U.S. history, but the development of the post-World War II military-industrial complex—and the American desire to pull troops out of Vietnam while still maintaining an air of military supremacy—made arms transfers a pillar of U.S. geopolitical power. The Nixon Doctrine opened the floodgates, out of conviction that the U.S. would “assist in defense and development of allies and friends” around the globe, but not with boots on the ground. President Richard Nixon—who, like Trump, shared a penchant for secret and likely illegal foreign-policy backchannels—defended arms-based partnerships to a war-weary nation by arguing that American troops “cannot—and will not… undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.”

Foreign military sales grew even more dramatically following 9/11, as successive administrations used security assistance programs to shore up partners in a Global War on Terror. Owing to that trend, the U.S. remains the world’s top arms exporter today, by a wide and increasing margin: The gap between American exports and those of the next-biggest arms dealer, Russia, has effectively sextupled since President Barack Obama’s first term. And the Trump administration has only hastened the flow of weapons abroad: U.S. arms sales jumped 33 percent between fiscal years 2017 and 2018, to $55.6 billion; through three quarters in 2019, the U.S. has already hit $44.15 billion in sales, putting it on pace for another record year.