U.S. defense-export controls: stuck in Cold War.

• Author: Posey, Hugo G.
• Position: Government Policy Notes

The U.S. defense export-control establishment continues to be buffeted from all sides. Depending on the critic du jour, U.S defense trade controls are either too weak and threaten U.S. national security, or too heavy-handed and threaten U.S. economic interests. A multitude of supporting arguments buttress these two core critiques:

* U.S. allies and friends will trade U.S.-developed advanced capabilities to countries that the United States does not want to have access to the technology.

* Restricting U.S. defense trade will only encourage the development of indigenous capabilities, not tied to U.S. maintenance or logistics.

* Restricting U.S. defense trade will only cede the field to competing European and Asian suppliers. This soon may be highlighted, should the European Union elect to lift its 1989 ban on selling arms to China. This is a double-edged argument, feeding distrust of U.S. allies and friends.

What remains curious is that these arguments have remained fairly constant from the beginning of the Cold War to the post 9-11 era despite a radically changing geo-political environment.

The Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) led the charge in controlling defense trade with Communist Bloc countries during the Cold War. in the post-Cold War era, Russia and most of the former Warsaw Pact countries are full participants in the toothless successor organization, the Wassenaar Arrangement.

The rationale for export controls in the international community evolved from restricting trade with the Commmunist Bloc, via the CoCom, to contributing "to regional and international security and stability, by promoting transparency and greater responsibility in transfers of conventional arms, and dual-use goods and technologies" according to the official Wassenaar website, www.wassenaar.org.

While this agreement brought many of the members of the former Communist Bloc into a multilateral relationship with the West (to the applause of free-traders), it unfortunately has no teeth. The "decision to transfer or deny transfer of any item is the sole responsibility of each participating state," the website said. This encourages many in the U.S. government to distrust the ability of the international community--particularly in Europe--to adequately control defense exports to parties unfriendly to the United States.

Further contributing to this distrust is Europe's attitude to the last major bastion of the former Communist Bloc--China.

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