The latest US arms sales to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — together reaching approximately $10 billion — have been depicted by some media outlets as a turning point in Washington's export policy toward the Middle East. However, a careful look at their packages reveals that they represent not so much a shift in US policy in the region as the culmination of past decisions.

In the case of Israel, the sales are only one piece of the puzzle in the reinforcement of bilateral defense cooperation. During his April trip to Jerusalem, US Secretary of State Chuck Hagel also confirmed a rise from $2.4 billion to $3.1 billion in foreign military financing to Israel. Historically, this level of US military funding is unmatched. Likewise, he promised that for the next fiscal year, the US would allocate $220 million to Israeli missile-defense systems (complementing the extant $460 million). In other words, the latest purchase only confirms the steady strengthening of Israel-American military relations.

In the Gulf, too, these sales can be considered the prolongation of the US' previous arms-export choices with the GCC kingdoms. In particular, the acquisition of F-16 fighter jets by the UAE (equaling $5 billion) follows the previous sale in 2011 of 84 F-15 jets by Saudi Arabia (a record $29.4 billion deal). At the military level, these sales give Saudi Arabia and the UAE a qualitative edge in air power relative to Iran, but in some ways, it only reinforces their pre-existing air superiority. This gap had been already underlined in 2009 by David Petraeus, then chief of US Central Command, when he declared that the UAE air force could take on its Iranian counterpart by itself, without the need for allies.

In fact, the real novelty with these sales was neither their scale nor their content, but the political message the Pentagon sent through them. When looking at the newspapers covering Hagel’s trip to Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, it seemed almost as if the sales had been negotiated through a common framework, a kind of comprehensive arms-export policy by Washington toward the region. This was no misunderstanding, as Pentagon officials repeatedly briefed the press to convey this narrative, emphasizing that "this trip is underscoring the US security relationship with Israel and also our other Gulf partners." Even the much-discussed price, $10 billion, mentioned by the Pentagon, aggregates contracts in an arbitrary way. Wording and figures matter here; they put aside the very fact that these contracts were discussed through separate bilateral tracks with Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.