Clinton Legacy Watch # 25: Reagan, Bush Didn’t Do It, Too

(Washington, D.C.): Steadily, day by day, the Clinton Administration’s defense of its
indefensible
efforts to improve China’s space launch/ballistic missile capabilities has been evaporating as
scrutiny of the relevant facts intensifies. In particular, in recent weeks President
Clinton’s
claim to the effect that his approvals of the transfer of strategic dual-use technologies to the
PRC was of a piece with the policies and procedures of his Republican predecessors —
Presidents Reagan and Bush⁽¹⁾ — has become ever more
untenable. In fact, a succession of
former officials and independent analysts have now established that the current administration
departed from past practice significantly, notably by significantly disregarding vital national
security interests.

Just The Facts, Ma’am

Among the more noteworthy of these critiques are the following:

• Henry Sokolski, who served as a senior official for non-proliferation
  issues in the Bush
  Defense Department and now runs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, has
  identified a number of areas in which the Clinton team deviated from the national security-minded
  approach of the previous two administrations. In an article in the 1 June 1998 edition
  of the Weekly Standard, Mr. Sokolski wrote:

“In 1995, U.S. law still required government monitoring agents, and compliance reports
were
still being filed…until 1996. That’s when President Clinton quietly removed virtually all
commercial satellites and related technology from State Department munitions controls (which
required official monitors). The responsibility was transferred to the Commerce Department,
which (no surprise) trusts industry to monitor itself….This was no simple ‘change.’ It was
tantamount to a complete overthrow of the old export control regime.”

“Whe[reas] before, senior State and Defense officials took action, now little or nothing
happened.
Word got out: Increasingly, industry officials disobeyed government guidance, shared
their
know-how with the Chinese, and discovered that contempt for the law paid off.”

• Last week, a noted specialist on the proliferation of dangerous dual-use technology,
  Professor
  Gary Milhollin testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He identified
  three
  decisions of the Clinton administration that significantly altered Bush policies and facilitated
  proliferation by China: 1) “The decision…to transfer control over satellite exports from
  the
  State Department to the Commerce Department. href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾ 2) “The Administration[‘s]…
  suspension of the implementation of our sanctions laws…[was] without any
  basis in law.
  And 3) the Administration has decided to invite China to join the Missile Technology
  Control
  Regime. “If the Chinese were to accept that invitation [it] would give total immunity in
  the
  future to Chinese firms that might be found guilty of missile proliferation.”

• The thrust of Dr. Milhollin’s testimony on this score was confirmed by the Committee’s
  Chairman, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). As Senator Helms observed:

“George Bush never did what the current president of the United States has done.
Never. I
was here. And I watched it fairly carefully. Now, President Bush agreed with what I consider to
be my own strict interpretation, which I gave, incidentally, as the author of the Arms Export
Control Act missile sanctions; George Bush agreed that all satellites were covered by US missile
sanctions laws regardless of how they were licensed….Bush didn’t do it the way Clinton is doing
it. Clinton reversed the Bush policy….”

• In yesterday’s Washington Times, yet another Bush Administration official —
  Tina Silverman,
  who served as the principal advisor on defense trade in the office of the United States Trade
  Representative (USTR) from 1991 to 1993 — offered her own unique perspective. In an
  op.ed. entitled “Technology Transfers Unlimited?” (see attached),
  Ms. Silverman argued:

“[The transfer] of jurisdiction over export approval…to the Commerce
Department…was highly significant in that it sent a clear signal to the Chinese government,
U.S. industry and our own bureaucracy that a major shift in U.S. policy had occurred.
Commercial interests would take precedence over U.S. security concerns in technology transfer
decisions.

“…The agreement to allow exports of U.S. commercial satellites for launch by the Chinese
was
initiated by Republicans….But the parameters with respect to balancing American commercial
interests and national security were well defined. National security was foremost in the
policy
calculations….Any comparison [between the Republican and Democratic
administrations’
approaches] should be viewed as a transparent and cynical attempt to minimize the potential harm
[that has been done under the latter] to national security and the damage to the non-political
interagency review process used to approve such transactions.”

The Bottom Line

The jury is still out on the precise extent of the damage done by the Clinton Administration’s
strategic technology transfer policies toward China (and other potential adversaries). It is getting
harder and harder, however, to argue that no harm has been inflicted on U.S.
economic and/or
national security interests by dint of the help the United States has given over the past five years
to the Siamese twins of the Chinese space launch and ballistic missile programs.

From now on, though, it should be simply impossible for the Clinton team and its
apologists to
lay off the blame for damage done in this area on its watch onto the Reagan and Bush
administrations. The latters’ policies were not always perfect, or perfectly executed. Still, the
policy and procedural changes adopted by the Clinton Administration translated into differences
of kind, not just of degree — differences that are, in a word, inexcusable.

– 30 –

1. The President has been joined by numerous officials in making this
claim, including National
Security Advisor Samuel Berger and Commerce Secretary William Daley. Among other outlets
for this disinformation, Mr. Berger has advanced this line in an op..ed. article in the Wall
Street
Journal on 3 June 1998; for his part, Secretary Daley used the editorial page of the
New York
Times for a similar article entitled “Commerce Can do the Job,” 5 June 1998.

2. Dr. Milhollin put the significance of this change as follows:

“The State Department defines a missile-related item as an item that has been
defined by the MTCR as such regardless of whether it’s embedded in a satellite,
commercial satellite. According to the State Department, even if an item is embedded
in a satellite, it’s still missile-related. The Commerce Department, however, defines
missile-related differently. The Commerce Department views a missile-related item as
losing its identity once it is incorporated into a satellite. The practical effect of that is
that once you transfer the satellite and all of the items associated with it to the
Commerce Department, sanctions no longer prevent it from being exported.”