Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 16 | August 19, 2020

Export Controls and National Security Strategy in the 21st Century

and interoperability); the impact on our nonproliferation
objectives; and the potential effect upon human rights.

The focus of the CAT policy is upon aligning our
policy on conventional arms transfers with our broader
national and economic security interests, and this
requires what is often an extremely complicated equity-
balancing process as we consider potential sales. Most
people do not usually focus upon such policies as part of
“export control,” but I would submit that they are a very
important one — as well as an aspect that we take very
seriously.

II. Strategy and “Impediments”

But let me now return to my particular focus here
today: the sub-category of “impediments” that have to do
with regulating potential technological inputs to other
states’ military power. This is an area that is getting
increasing attention in the modern policy community,
and with good reason.

The fundamental idea of limiting a potential
adversary’s access to increasingly sophisticated tools and
capabilities is hardly new. As Lhave pointed out, in fact,
it goes back many centuries — to such things as ancient
Chinese efforts to control the export of crossbow trigger
mechanisms that were beyond the capability of frontier
barbarians to manufacture for themselves, the Byzantine
Empire's efforts to safeguard the chemical secrets of
“Greek Fire,” Viking attempts to keep iron swords out of
the hands of indigenous “Skraelings” in North America,
and efforts by the Frankish Empire to keep Rhenish steel
out of the hands of those very same Vikings.

A. The Cold War

In the modern world, the United States acquired
statutory authority to restrict technology exports to the
Soviet Bloc in 1949, with the Export Control Act. In the
1950s, we even established a multilateral consortium of
countries — the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral
Export Controls (COCOM) — that was devoted to
keeping a list of specified commodities and technologies
out of Soviet hands. (Under this system, exports of listed
items to the USSR were prohibited without consensus
agreement by all the COCOM parties.) After the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. officials applied additional
controls on transfers of certain lasers and materials and
equipment related to (then) state-of-the-art
semiconductor manufacture, and from early 1983
President Reagan’s policy under NSDD-75 explicitly

sought “to prevent the transfer of technology and

equipment that would make a substantial contribution
directly or indirectly to Soviet military power.”

COCOM did not long survive the end of the Cold War,
lapsing in 1994 and being replaced in 1996 by the
Wassenaar Arrangement, a voluntary multilateral export
control regime that carefully eschewed any impression
that it was directed “at” any particular country or bloc,
instead simply urging restraint in transfers to
unspecified “countries of concern.” In the post-Cold War
era, Wassenaar did much — along with other new fora
such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Australia
Group — to elicit restraint in dual-use technology
transfers to proliferator regimes such as North Korea
and Iran, as well as to non-state actors such as terrorist
groups.

In keeping with that era’s prevailing (albeit
dangerously false) assumption that with the collapse of
the USSR, the era of great power competition was now
forever behind us, however, Wassenaar departed from
the COCOM model in being neither mandatory nor
intended to serve as a tool of strategic advantage.
(Emphasizing the degree to which it was not engineered
for the challenges of great power competition — at least
not vis-a-vis Moscow, at any rate — Russia has been a
member of Wassenaar from the beginning.)
Nevertheless, the idea of technology-focused controls
designed to slow the development of strategic
competitors’ capabilities did not disappear, and it is
today the fastest growing and in some ways the most
interesting facet of U.S. national security export control

policy.

Unfortunately, it has had to be.

B. “Impediment” Controls and China

Fundamentally, we have come to focus intently upon
transfers of advanced and emerging technologies to the
People’s Republic of China because the PRC has done so
— and because Beijing has adopted strategies in these
regards that present huge threats to U.S. national
security interests, especially if we were not to respond.
One key to understanding these threats can be found in
how PRC strategists have long approached the nexus
between technology and geopolitical power.

For my part, I came to appreciate these issues
through the prism of great power competition during the
course of a project on Chinese views of the West for the
legendary Andrew Marshall at the Office of Net


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Volume I, Number 16 | August 19, 2020

Export Controls and National Security Strategy in the 21st Century

ways in which the CCP has been working to use traveling
students, researchers, scientists, and technicians to
target technology areas identified for priority collection
by the MCF bureaucracy.

Pursuant to the new authorities given us by Congress
in the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization
Act of 2018 (FIRRMA), moreover, the U.S. Executive
Branch has also been working to improve the controls
we use ~ e.g, through the Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States (CFIUS) process — to
forestall foreign acquisition of U.S. companies and other
investments in ways that create national security threats.
For years, PRC entities and others had been honing their
skills in evading traditional CFIUS controls, but FIRRMA
significantly expanded the scope of covered transactions
so as now also to catch such things as property leases
undertaken in proximity to sensitive government
facilities, various types of transaction not amounting to
corporate control but that nonetheless afford access to
material nonpublic technical information in the
possession of a U.S. business, and transactions that are
specifically designed to circumvent CFIUS jurisdiction.

Similarly, the Export Control Reform Act of 2018
(ECRA) — another new statute Congress passed in order
to respond to foreign technology-transfer threats such as
those presented by the PRC’s MCF system — called for
the identification of “emerging and foundational
technologies” that are not yet listed on the Commerce
Control List or subject to multilateral controls but that
are nonetheless important to U.S. national security, and
authorized the establishment of controls on the export,
re-export, or transfer of such technologies where this
should prove appropriate. Under ECRA, we have been
engaged in an extensive interagency process to identify
what technologies it might be both necessary and
possible to control, and 14 “sprint groups” have been
working hard to explore possible controls in fields such
as artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing,
quantum information and sensing, hypersonics,
advanced materials, and advanced computing.
(Additionally, we are evaluating microprocessors,
biotechnology, position/navigation/timing, data
analytics, logistics, robotics, brain-computer interfaces,
and advanced surveillance technologies.) All of these
groups contain constantly shifting components and
emerging technology that the United States is racing to
understand and where appropriate, control.

It is far from clear what specific new controls will
result from this still-ongoing, ECRA-based process, but
the U.S. interagency is now working, for the first time, to

address national security export control issues not just
for today’s technologies but also for tomorrow’s. This,
too, is part of our broad and strategic response to the
technology-transfer challenges with which the PRC has
confronted us.

IV. Conclusion

All of these developments make this moment in U.S.
policymaking history something of a “present at the
creation” point with regard to how the United States
responds to technology transfer threats. We are
approaching these questions both strategically and
systematically, and both on an interagency-wide basis
and, as FIRRMA and ECRA demonstrate, in partnership
with Congress, where there exists wide bipartisan
support for more effective technology controls vis-
China. Mindful of the importance of finding a path in
U.S.-China relations that is in appropriate respects both
competitive and cooperative, thereby finding “a prudent
middle way” between such extremes, we hope to be able
to take advantage of this moment of opportunity to
develop, articulate, and set in place a new policy
community consensus built around the “coalitions of
caution” concept for dealing with Beijing on technology
issues.

is

Naturally, we should expect that the CCP and its
supporters and apologists will decry these moves, and
they do. Ina backhanded way, however, the very
vehemence of their complaints provides a window upon
the success our approach is starting to have in cutting off
some of the foreign technology flows Beijing has sought
to maintain in furtherance of its strategic ambitions. In
fact, as our strategy begins to bite — as long as it is not
turned around by U.S. leaders trying to wish away the
PRC’s strategic ambitions — one can expect to hear such
complaints escalate. We will surely hear additional CCP
propaganda tropes about how U.S. technology controls
supposedly represent a retrograde “Cold War mentality,”
and how they are allegedly being implemented solely for
“domestic political reasons” rather than in response to
national security challenges. Such narratives should be
rejected, and indeed taken as a sign of our progress in
hampering Beijing's strategic self-aggrandizement.

We should also expect to have to change our
approaches over time, as the PRC changes its own. Just
as the MCF strategy and the PRC’s methods of technology
acquisition originally evolved in order to target prior
weaknesses in Western technology controls, so will the
PRC’s future approaches surely also be adjusted in
attempts to work around the strictures we are today


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Export Controls and National Security Strategy in the 21st Century

Our bureaucratic mechanisms for administering
such pressures have also grown. The old TEA was
administered by a War Trade Board, the responsibilities
of which passed to the Department of State in 1919, and
eventually the United States built an extensive sanctions
bureaucracy. After Germany invaded Norway in 1940,
the U.S. Treasury Department established an Office of
Foreign Funds Control (FFC) to prevent the Nazi regime
from taking advantage of its victims’ foreign currency
holdings; the FFC played a key role in U.S. economic
warfare against the Axis Powers during the Second
World War. Its descendent — the Office of Foreign
Assets Control (OFAC), established after the PRC entered
the Korean War — continues to play a vital role in the
United States’ employment of economic pressures today.

In the modern era, this category of “impediments”
includes the broad range of measures we — and often
the rest of the international community — impose in
order to punish proliferator regimes for seeking
weapons of mass destruction, or to dissuade third-
parties from trafficking in items or materiel that could
assist such efforts. Significantly, it also includes the
national security export controls we place upon high
technology items in order to prevent them from
contributing to the expansion of Chinese or Russian
military power in the present day.

C. Balances

My third category — which I somewhat awkwardly
call “balances,” for lack of a better term — consists of
restrictions we place upon ourselves in order to
encourage accountability and prioritization by
constraining our ability to pursue one policy goal at the
unreflective expense of another. This is the least
intuitively obvious of the three categories, but it’s very
important, for it is one of the ways in which our system
tries to handle the significant challenges of equity
balancing, particularly (though not exclusively) in the
area of arms sales.

Pursuing effective strategies in the face of national
security threats requires the United States to have
partners, and it often serves our interests to provide
arms to friends who face threats, especially when these
are shared threats. Nevertheless, the devil can lurk in
detail, as the saying goes, and there can sometimes also
be good reasons for caution. In an unavoidably
complicated world, we are unlikely invariably to approve
or wish to support everything that a given partner might
request. For example, it is very unlikely to be in our
interest, to say the least, to transfer arms that will be

used for internal repression, disturb a peaceful regional
balance, be employed in ways heedless of international
humanitarian law, or retransferred to others without our
approval. We also want what we provide to genuinely
serve that partner's security needs, not to mention being
consistent with our own interests, and to be reasonable
and appropriate — rather than either excessive or
inadequate — in the face of those needs. (Nor do we
want one friend to use what we provide it to threaten
another of our friends.) Sometimes, furthermore, it may
simply be unwise to transfer certain types of capability
to a particular recipient at all, or even into its region of
the world.

This is why we have “balance” policies and rules.
Serious policymaking is a challenge of choice-making
within constraint, and since the United States can rarely
be said to have only a single, overriding interest in any
given situation, such policymaking necessarily involves
trade-offs along multiple axes. What I term “balancing”
policies serve to structure how we think about such
challenges, in order to ensure that U.S. decisions are as
carefully and wisely thought through — and made with
eyes as wide open — as possible.

This basic concept is not new. Indeed, statutory
enactments designed to serve such “balancing” purposes
go back many years, such as to the restrictions imposed
by the Mutual Security Act of 1959 upon U.S. arms sales
in order to help ensure that they were consistent with
overall U.S. interests. Other laws, such as the Arms
Export Control Act of 1968 and the International Security
Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, also
tried to limit and provide improved transparency and
accountability for U.S. arms sales in ways designed to
ensure that such transfers were genuinely integrated
with broader U.S. policy equities.

Today, such balancing is not only a part of the
statutory framework governing U.S. arms transfers, but
also a central plank of current U.S. policy. As we
recognize in the current U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer
(CAT) policy, which the President signed in April 2018,
decisions about selling sophisticated defense technology
are rarely straightforward. The CAT policy calls upon us
to carefully consider the effect each potential transfer
will have upon such things as: the regional balance of
power; how well a transfer responds to legitimate U.S.
and recipient country security needs; the protection of
the U.S. technological edge against our own adversaries;
the degree to which the transfer supports U.S. strategic,
foreign policy, and defense interests (e.g, through
increased access and influence, allied burden sharing,


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Export Controls and National Security Strategy in the 21st Century

Assessments at the U.S. Department of Defense —
research that resulted in a 650-page book on that topic.
To my eye, one of the striking things about Chinese
approaches to technology and power is the degree to
which attitudes in Beijing changed radically after the
Qing Dynasty’s encounter with Western imperial power
in the 19th Century.

Students of history may remember the infamously
condescending reply the Qing Emperor gave to the
British envoy Lord Amherst in 1816, who had displayed
the temerity of seeking an audience with the “Son of
Heaven’ and had brought with him gifts representing
some of the products of the Industrial Revolution then
underway in England:

“My dynasty attaches no value to products from
abroad; your nation’s cunningly wrought and
strange wares do not appeal to me in the least... If
you loyally accept our sovereignty and show dutiful
submission, there is really no need for these yearly

appearances at our Court to prove that you are
indeed our vassal.”

This contempt for foreign technology might on one
level be surprising, for the Qing — a dynasty of Manchu
rulers who had invaded and occupied China, ruling it as

increasingly Sinicized foreigners since 1644 — was itself

one of the so-called “gunpowder empires” that had risen
to prominence in Asia during the 15th through 17th
centuries in part through the skillful use of firearms and
artillery against somewhat more traditionally equipped
forces. Nevertheless, contempt for technology it was,
and China would come to rue it, for a quarter-century
after Amherst’s ill-fated mission to Peking, British
gunboats made short work of Qing defenses and won an
easy victory in the Opium War.

That second Qing encounter with Western
technology-facilitated power, in my view, helped change
everything. It convinced all subsequent generations of
Chinese strategists that if China were to return to the
position of geopolitical centrality it had long enjoyed, it
would need to master cutting-edge technology and be

able to apply such technology (as the British had in their

day) to the projection of military power. As I see it,
China’s 19th century encounters with Western military
power provide a crucial context for understanding the

PRC’s present-day “Military-Civil Fusion” (MCF) strategy

and the threats it presents to the United States and the
entire non-Chinese world today. As I explained earlier
this year,

“To understand MCF, it’s vital to remember that
cutting-edge military technology — in the form of ...
British warships in the Opium War — is seen as
having been at the forefront of inflicting this
humiliation upon China. Accordingly, as modern
Chinese strategists see it, military technology has
always been the key to global primacy, with
successive ‘revolutions in military affairs’ (RMA[s])

having helped drive and enforce geopolitical shifts.

“Those gunboats of 1842, for instance, were possible
because Britain led the Industrial Revolution, giving
London its storied empire upon which the sun never
set. In the 20th Century, the United States became
the world’s central power, driven by our
technological dynamism and solidifying our status
with the aircraft, submarines, missiles, and nuclear
weapons of a new RMA that made Britain’s famous
battleships obsolete. Indeed, we are felt to have
cemented an even more dominant position after the
end of the Cold War through another RMA grounded
in our information technology revolution.

“Simply put, itis the objective of MCF to ensure that
it will be the PRC that rides the wave to geopolitical
centrality for the next RMA. Xi [Jinping] has decreed
that China must develop military capabilities
superior to any other military in the world by 2049.
and MCF — the ruthless acquisition and systematic
diversion to military purposes of technologies such
as artificial intelligence, quantum computing,
aviation and aerospace, Big Data applications, and
civil nuclear power — is a central piece of that plan.
If there is to be a mid-21st Century analogue to

Britain’s imperialist gunboats, the CCP intends them
to be Chinese assets.”

Beijing may have lost out on those RMAs that
occurred after the Manchus’ own success in successfully
marshalling gunpowder weaponry to conquer China in
1644, in other words, but it is determined to lead the
next RMA. It is the objective of MCF to fuel this success,
by developing technology indigenously wherever
possible but also buying or stealing from abroad what
China cannot develop at home, and by permitting the
seamless flow of materials, technology, knowledge,
talent, and resources back and forth between the military
and civilian industrial complexes in order to allow the
PRC to build up its “comprehensive national power” and
use this power to achieve the overall objective of
“national rejuvenation” in the world.


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Export Controls and National Security Strategy in the 21st Century

putting in place. There is no room for complacency in
security strategy, and we must be sure — in this ongoing
game of “cat and mouse” — that we continue to adapt
our methods to the threat as that threat changes.

Nevertheless, while there is an enormous amount of
work left to do, this is fundamentally a hopeful story, for
while we have awakened to it somewhat belatedly, we

Arms Control and International Security Papers

have recognized the threat and are presently mobilizing
to meet it. I hope that this brief outline has helped you
appreciate both the novelty and the importance of these
challenges. I can assure you that we are working hard to
answer them.

s Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms
nd International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-
accessible format compatible with “social ancing” during the COVID-19 crisis.



Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I | Number 16
August 19, 2020

Export Controls and
National Security Strategy in
the 21st Century

by Christopher A. Ford

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-
accessible format compatible with “social distancing” during the COVID-19 crisis.



Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 16 | August 19, 2020

Export Controls and National Security Strategy in the 21st Century

This, then, is what makes the national security
export control category of “impediments” so crucial. It is
important beyond peradventure to United States’
interests — and likeminded nations — that the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) not be able to succeed in
positioning itself atop the 21st century world in the way
the Qing “Sons of Heaven” positioned themselves above
that of 17th and 18th century Asia.

Careful control of high-technology exports, not just
by the United States itself but by all non-PRC technology
possessors, is therefore essential to forestalling such a
grim Communist Party imperium, for despite the PRC’s
huge progress in recent years — progress fueled, for
instance, by systematic cyber-facilitated intellectual
property theft on an epic scale that has been said to
represent “the single greatest transfer of wealth in
history” — the PRC still remains dependent upon foreign
technology in some critical areas. With their MCF
strategy and technology theft, CCP leaders are working to
close those technology gaps, but they have not succeeded
yet, and this gives us the opportunity to slow them down,
hopefully to a rate of military-technological advancement
slower than our own. This is where grand strategy and
export controls come together, and it is in some ways the
cutting edge of U.S. national security policymaking today.

III. Our Responses

Having awakened to these challenges after decades
of slumber induced by happy post-Cold War visions that
unfortunately failed to materialize — dreams of putting
great power competition behind us, and of global
convergence upon norms of liberal democracy — the
United States is now working to address the challenge
presented by the CCP’s strategic ambition and the critical
role of technology acquisition in Beijing’s strategy. As
Secretary of State Pompeo has noted, the goal of the
PRC's MCF strategy is

‘to ensure that the People’s Liberation Army has
military dominance. And the PLA’s core mission is to
sustain the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on
power — that same Chinese Communist Party that
has led China in an increasingly authoritarian
direction and one that is increasingly repressive as
well. ... [W]e need to make sure that our companie:
don’t do deals that strengthen a competitor's
military or tighten the regime's grip of repression in
parts of that country. We need to make sure
American technology doesn’t power a truly
Orwellian surveillance state. We need to make sure

American principles aren’t sacrificed for prosperity.”

This is most emphatically, therefore, a national security
threat as well as an economic and trade problem.

Early in the current administration, we began raising
awareness of these challenges. In July 2018, | drew
attention to the problems MCF created for traditional
approaches to export controls, highlighting that “some
recalibration” would be necessary in order to keep
Beijing from diverting U.S.-origin technology to support
the PLA. In October 2018, we duly announced a new

policy that dramatically cut back civil-nuclear technology
transfers to the PRC, but this was merely a first step.

More broadly, as part of our effort to build
coalitions of caution” on technology-transfer issues vis-
a-vis China, we stepped up our diplomacy with
likeminded partners, both bilaterally and multilaterally
— including through the Multilateral Action on Sensitive
Technologies process — to raise awareness of these
threats and to compare notes on “best practices” that
countries can follow in response to them. In the wake of
the indictment (not just once but twice) of the PRC
company Huawei by the U.S. Department of Justice for
stealing U.S. technology and helping Iran evade
nonproliferation sanctions, we placed Huawei on the
Commerce Department's “Entity List” of foreign actors
engaged in “activities contrary to U.S. national security
and/or foreign policy interests.” In May 2020, the United
States changed its export control regulations in order to
restrict Huawei’s ability to circumvent controls by
designing semiconductors and having them produced
abroad using software-based design tools and equipment
of US. origin. Additional adjustments were also
announced on August 17, which will prevent Huawei
from circumventing U.S. law through alternative chip
production and provision of off-the-shelf chips produced

with tools acquired from the United States.

Informed by a clear understanding of the ways in
which the CCP’s MCF strategy has been systematically
eroding prior distinctions between what is “civilian” and
what is “military” in China, U.S. export control rules were

also expanded in April 2020 to cover “military end-
users” (MEUs) in the PRC, including commercial entities
when their functions are intended to support defined
“military end-uses.” (The list of Export Control
Classification Numbers [ECCNs] that are subject to MEU
licensing requirements was also expanded.)
Additionally, in May 2020, the United States announced a
significant new change in its approach to granting visas
to certain applicants from the PRC who wish to study or
conduct research in the United States — a measure
directly responsive to our evolving understanding of the


Arms Control and International Security Papers

Volume I, Number 16 | August 19, 2020

Export Controls and National Security Strategy in the 21st Century

Export Controls and National Security Strategy in

the 21st Century

by Christopher A. Ford!

This ACIS Paper reprints the full text that Assistant Secretary Ford prepared
for his presentation to the Center for a New American Security on August 19,
2020, as a part of CNAS’ new Project on Export Controls and National

Security.

Good day, and thank you for the chance to talk to you
about one of the more complex — and, | think, more
interesting — challenges we face in the U.S. national
security community today. Specifically, I’d like to say a
few words about the arena of national security export
controls, and about the importance of approaching them
strategically, especially with regard to the challenges
associated with advanced and emerging technology.

In some respects, U.S. export control policy is
extraordinarily difficult to study, inasmuch as
policymaking and implementation involves a convoluted
labyrinth of statutes, regulations, authorities, and
stakeholders, all of which can affect the various ways in
which cross-border economic activity is constrained or
otherwise regulated for national security reasons.
Adding to this opacity for those trying to study it from
the outside is the requirement for multi-disciplinary
classified discussions of strategy that cross agency lines,
resulting in myriad tactical deliberations that are rarely a
matter of public record. Though it is not untrue, as the
saying goes, that “economic security is national security,”
to keep this discussion from becoming entirely unwieldy,
I will not be talking here about trade or economic policy
per se, nor about other issues not directly related to
national security in the more traditional sense. Nor will I
have much to say here about technology promotion —
such as the ways in which we use sales of defense articles
and targeted investment in critical areas to enhance the
resilience and vigor of the U.S. Defense Industrial Base

and what the 2017 National Security Strategy called our
National Security Innovation Base — though these
questions clearly implicate national security, too.

Even when one limits discussion to restraints upon
commerce undertaken for specific national security
reasons, however, it is still a daunting landscape — a
sprawling corpus of rules and practices that has been
built up over the decades in response to a great variety of
challenges, concerns, and opportunities. Under these
circumstances, it would be too much to expect thematic
unity, simplicity, or a lack of duplication, and indeed it
can take a great deal of experience to be able to follow
the relevant cast of characters, authorities, and
precedents. Nor is this task getting easier, for the
Executive Branch and Congress frequently add new
measures and authorities to the mix.

I. A Typology of Measures

To avoid getting bogged down in such complexities
here, I thought I would try to break down national
security export control measures into some very broad
conceptual categories, before focusing upon where |
think some of the most interesting intellectual and
strategic work is being done today. One could parse
things in different ways for different purposes, but I like
to think of national security commerce constraints as
falling into three very broad groups:

1 Dr. Ford serves as U.S, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and is additionally performing the
Duties of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to the President
and Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation on the U.S, National Security Council statt.


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Volume I, Number 16 | August 19, 2020

Export Controls and National Security Strategy in the 21st Century

1) Pressures: Measures to inflict some cost or pain
upon another country or entity in order to change its
behavior in support of some national security or foreign
policy objective;

2) Impediments: Measures to limit or shape the
development of capabilities with which a country or
entity could threaten our security; and

3) Balances: Measures to constrain our own ability
to transfer funds, goods, or technology to others in
pursuit of some policy objectives in ways that may be
inconsistent with other policy objectives.

I'll briefly explain each of these in turn, before
dwelling a bit more on the strategy that is increasingly a
part of our approach to the second category, that of
“impediments.”

A. Pressures

The category I will call “pressures” covers some of
the most traditional forms of economic pressure,
including many sanctions and embargoes undertaken in
order to advance policy goals. Here, for instance, one
might find the limited sanctions temporarily placed by
the League of Nations upon Italy for its invasion of
Abyssinia in the 1930s, the petroleum embargo the
United States placed upon Japan after its invasion of the
countries of South East Asia in 1941, President Carter’s
embargo of agricultural exports to the USSR after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. sanctions imposed
against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in response
to the massacre of students and workers on Tiananmen
Square in 1989, and the sanctions adopted by the United
States and the European Union in response to Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine in 2014 — all of which were
intended to punish, and to encourage the cessation of,
lawless and barbarous behavior.

In this category, too, might fall economic pressures
aimed less at changing behavior than at changing a
foreign regime itself, such as the U.S. embargo on Cuba
that began in 1960, United Nations sanctions on lan
Smith’s breakaway white supremacist government in
Rhodesia from 1965 until 1980, various measures
imposed against the apartheid regime in South Africa,
and modern-day U.S. pressures designed to induce the
Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela to negotiate a transfer
of power. Arguably, moreover, this may also cover the
economic policy envisioned against the Soviet Union by
National Security Decision Directive 75 (NSDD-75) of
January 17, 1983, under which President Ronald Reagan

hoped, inter alia, to keep the USSR from obtaining foreign
economic relief in ways that would “dilute pressures for

structural change in the Soviet system.”

More familiar still — but also “pressures” in the
sense that I use the term here — are many of the
sanctions measures that have become the “go-to” tools of
first resort in American foreign policy during the last two
decades. This category, moreover, also includes
measures employed not merely to constrain the
resources available to spend on mischief by rogue
regimes such as North Korea and Iran, but also those
pressures employed in order to give them incentives to
relieve the pain these measures create, by coming to the
table to negotiate the elimination of weapons of mass
destruction threat programs.

B. Impediments

As I'll explain in a moment, my second category —
“{mpediments” — includes what are in some ways the
most strategically interesting sort of controls. For now,
however, let me just note that this category includes a
range of measures designed to limit a potential
adversary’s ability directly to threaten U.S. national
security, such as by constraining the sophistication of its
military capabilities.

The most basic of this sort of constraint upon trade
relates to ensuring that potential adversaries are not
freely able to buy arms and munitions with which they
could threaten us. In U.S. statutory form, such measures
go back at least to the Trading with the Enemy Act (TEA)
adopted at the beginning of U.S. participation in the First
World War, which tried to limit the flow to our wartime
adversaries of the arms, money, metals, and machinery
that had become the lifeblood of industrial-age warfare.
In the 1930s, the Neutrality Acts idealistically tried to
restrict the flow of arms to all belligerents, but President
Franklin Roosevelt’s eventual shift toward support for
the United Kingdom by means of mechanisms such as the
“lend-lease” program eventually undermined the blanket
nature of these rules and left them primarily as
impediments to potential adversary capabilities. But it
has always made good sense to deny arms to one’s actual
or potential opponents — as, for instance, we did in
ending Kuwait’s U.S. defense trade license permissions in
1990 during its occupation by Iraq, in order to prevent
American arms from being provided to Saddam Hussein
before we ourselves went to war to save Kuwait by
expelling his armies.