Selling the rope - Clinton administration's support for exporting high technology without regard for national security interests - Editorial

National Review, August 1, 1994

ONE OF the sleeper issues of this historical period is the congressional battle over export controls--maintaining the restrictions on exports of sensitive, militarily usable advanced technology. A crucial skirmish in this battle is about to take place.

With the end of the Cold War, the temptation here (as in allied countries) has been to scrap such restrictions as bad for business. It is easy to forget that a new class of outlaw nations (North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya) is vying hard to replace the old Soviet Union as Enemy Number One--and doing so by attempting to acquire military technology.

Sure enough, the Clinton Administration has allowed COCOM (the NATO Cold War--era export-control system) to lapse and is backing a feeble new version of the U. S. Export Administration Act that gives priority to promoting U.S. high-tech exports, with little regard to the hands into which they might fall. Unfortunately, many Republicans have been just as bad. The instinct to help U.S. firms and jobs needs to be tempered by an equally strong instinct for national survival--to be sure that in the next confrontation with a rogue state, be it North Korea or Iran or Iraq, American troops do not find themselves mauled by lethal weaponry that American companies helped build. No U. S. company should want to be in that position; nor should any American politician forget the political retribution that was wreaked on the Bush Administration after the Gulf War for its laxity in this area before that conflict.

HR-3937, as reported out by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is by that standard a formula for national disaster. Its "reforms" would hamstring the U.S. Government in its efforts to restrain sensitive exports. The House Armed Services Committee has recommended some improvements--which are barely adequate but which would at least avoid a historic blunder. These changes would, inter alia, restore some of the Pentagon's traditional role in interagency deliberations on export-control cases. An amendment by Representative John Kasich (R., Ohio) would require the President to compile a list of the "most sensitive" technologies--and require special licenses for any export of such items to any destination. An amendment by Representative Duncan Hunter (R., Calif.) would make it harder for the secretary of commerce to waive through a militarily usable export on the claim that it might at some time in the future be available from foreign manufacturers. These strategic-minded Republicans have been joined by a group of commendably serious liberal arms-controllers. This odd but valiant coalition is struggling to plug the hole in the dike. It deserves support. The stakes might prove much higher than they look today.