Download

Download Full Text (105 KB)

Description

Any discussion of export controls needs some context. How did the current system evolve? What is it intended to protect? More than two decades ago, during the height of the Cold War, a well-placed spy told us that more than 5,000 Soviet war systems depended on U.S.-made parts. To throw sand in the communist machine, Richard Perle, then in the Reagan administration, conceived of a system of export control licenses, with accompanying stiff financial and jail penalties, to stop American companies from exporting anything that might conceivably be of technological value to the Soviets. A bureaucracy of hundreds of people at Defense, State, Commerce, Justice, and Treasury was put into place to enforce this policy. Most people, and I am one of them, believe Perle's system worked and was precisely the right system for that time.

But times change, and bureaucracies, once in place, do not atrophy for lack of relevance. Outside stimulus is required. The people put in place during the Cold War have since worked diligently to perfect their system. Not only were they determined to prevent gun running and the export of items to construct nuclear weapons but also, with the passage of time, they began to ensure nothing of possible military value crossed our borders. This bureaucracy has become increasingly more complex and stifling. Three years ago, when a U.S. company imported a key component for a satellite control station from France (a traveling wave tube), and, when the tube was found to be broken, the U.S. company was denied permission to send it back to France to get a refund! The bureaucracy knows not what it does. The Berlin Wall has fallen, the Soviet Union has collapsed, Kosovo has come and gone, but nothing has changed in the bureaucracy's warren of regulations, reviews, and delays. Working on a Cold War course, the bureaucrats have succeeded in digging a regulatory pit so deep as to cripple the most powerful arm of U.S. foreign policy--trade--as well as the international relationships and friendships that come from commerce.

As soon as they hear the word trade, most Americans lose interest. We have mixed feelings about industry. We worry whether there is sufficient (if any) patriotism in the boardroom of a multinational corporation. In addition, we do not like to think of America as an arms merchant. We are not interested in making some fat-cat American industrialist rich at the expense of a shopkeeper in Brazil. But the real issues for America are much, much larger. With our current export control policy, we limit and hurt friends and weaken the U.S. military and our allies.

Document Type

Policy Brief

Publication Date

12-2001

Publication

Defense Horizons

Publisher

National Defense University Press

City

Washington, DC

Current Export Policies: Trick or Treat?

Share

COinS