Trump’s decision to withdraw from the UN Arms Treaty could pull US into more foreign wars, critics claim

Decision comes after NRA broke its campaign spending records to support the president in 2016

Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States from the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty could lead the country into future foreign wars and exacerbate the immigration crisis at the southern border with Mexico, critics have claimed.

Speaking at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Indianapolis, the president said he was withdrawing US support from the accord because it gave a degree of US sovereignty to other countries.

But some critics decried the move, saying it would create more problems, rather than solve them.

“If you look at it downstream, I think it creates real risk that the we are drawn into conflicts that are filled with guns manufactured and sold in the United States to these entities,” Kris Brown, the president of the national gun safety group Brady, told The Independent.

Ms Brown explained the UN Arms Trade Treaty was designed to forbid the sale of firearms to dangerous foreign actors and human rights abusers, and that the deal was supported by 100 countries across the world, including America’s European allies.

Pulling out of the deal essentially allows the sale of US firearms to foreign actors, which could then be used in wars that threaten American interests abroad, and then pull the US into those conflicts.

“We’ve seen this movie before many times over,” Ms Brown said.

During his speech on Friday, the president said that he decided to remove America’s signature from the treaty because he believed the deal hands over some sovereignty to foreign decision makers.

That announcement represented a major policy victory to the NRA, which broke its own record for campaign spending to support the former reality television star in 2016.

“We will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your Second Amendment freedom,” Mr Trump said. “I’m officially announcing today that the United States will be revoking the effect of America’s signature from this badly misguided treaty.”

But proponents of the treaty — which was first developed during the administration of George W Bush and finalised during Barack Obama’s presidency — say that the treaty would have no impact on US domestic firearm laws.

Ms Brown said that pulling out of the treaty could even fuel the kind of violence that has sent thousands of migrants north from Central American to the US, seeking asylum. She said the idea was pretty simple: US guns are sold with less regard to whether the weapons are getting into the hands of human rights abusers, and those weapons are used to spread fear among populations who are then forced to flee.

That flow of migrants has prompted Mr Trump to declare an emergency in the US, and provided reason for Mr Trump to push for a border wall on the US-Mexico border.

“That’s an impact and quite frankly the logical outgrowth of this is you also have many people in those regions who are displaced as a result of the conflicts that are fuelled with these weapons, and we see often in countries neighbouring the Untied States the impact on many of those people is to flee,” Ms Brown said.

She continued: “It increases strain and stress around immigration. All of these issues are connected to one another.”