Scripting A US Approach For Effective Multilateral Export Controls

The Center for Security Policy today called on the Bush Administration to adopt a stalwart approach to imminent allied consultations concerning controls on technology transfers to the Soviet bloc. In an analysis released today entitled COCOM’s Coming Moment of Truth, the Center described twin challenges to the future effectiveness of vital multilateral restraints on strategic trade with the USSR, its allies and clients.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr, the Center’s director said, "Next week, a most important meeting of the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls — known as COCOM — will take place in Paris. The senior officials representing the United States at this session will face powerful demands from many of their counterparts to liberalize the controls governing the transfer of sophisticated, militarily critical to the Eastern bloc."

Gaffney added, "On both the micro level, where some allies seek to decontrol specific technologies — for example, extremely accurate machine tools — and on the macro level, where an effort is afoot to ease constraints on trade with communist countries experimenting with reform, the Paris High Level Meeting promises to be among the most important in the history of COCOM. The robustness of the United States and the tenacity with which it stands by sound positions in this session may determine the organization’s future viability."

The Center’s analysis focuses on the serious dangers for U.S. and collective security that could ensue should the United States fail to resist allied pressure to weaken the COCOM regime. It recommends specific approaches that, if adopted by the American government in strategy sessions scheduled to begin tomorrow, hold the greatest promise of safeguarding Western security interests.

"The United States must, in particular, resist the temptation to appease its allies in the hope that, by so doing, some vestige of the needed multilateral export control regime can be preserved," Gaffney concluded. "Such an approach would simply make it more difficult to resist future demands for further reductions in the number of controlled technologies and proscribed destinations. It would also terribly undermine the vitally needed COCOM enforcement effort."