National Security and Technology Transfer: The Strategic Dimensions of East-West Trade by Gary K Bertsch

Author:Gary K Bertsch [Bertsch, Gary K]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429705465
Goodreads: 44598141
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

While the U.S. has, at one time or another, used controls for one or a combination of these six purposes, U.S. allies have tended to view the objective of the policy and of the multilateral COCOM mechanism as more strictly confined to delaying the East's acquisition of "critical" military technologies and have refused to use them for political maneuvering or bargaining. This difference of approach between the U.S. and its allies has at times become quite acute as illustrated in the 1982 U.S. attempt to bar the sale of large-diameter pipes and related equipment for a natural gas pipeline between Western Europe and Soviet Siberia.

Assessing the effectiveness of either the Act's declared policy objectives or of the rationales sketched out above is a difficult task subject to all the definitional, empirical and perceptual complexities considered in the first chapter. The effectiveness of U.S. national export control policy is moreover inextricably linked to that of the multilateral mechanism (COCOM). As an informal organization, COCOM is at the heart of the implementation of any western strategic trade policy. Many have felt its viability was short-lived, that it was the wrong kind of structure for the task at hand. Yet, precisely because of its very flexibility, it has survived,8

Western Europeans and Japanese tend to separate economic interests from conflicting political considerations and base their own East-West technology transfer policies primarily on economic/commercial considerations. Even in the U.S., Armco Chairman William Verity has sounded the alarm, warning that East-West trade cannot unfold in an environment "dependent upon the perception of a few people of the political situation at any given time."9 Such oris du coeur on the part of U.S. industrialists have prompted European observers to note in 1978 that

COCOM is quite a hindrance! What if all of a sudden it were to vanish, what a magnificent opportunity for U.S. firms exporting high technology.' Fortunately, the political moralism of Mr. Carter protects the industrial competitiveness of European firms."10

Indeed, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk noted that U.S. firms are "trying to race for foreign markets wearing infantry boots and full packs while competitors are wearing track shoes and shorts."11 These stern warnings may well have fallen on deaf ears if one considers the increasing use made of trade as a weapon for foreign policy reasons by the U.S.

A number of scholars have focused on the effectiveness of the policy. A. Sutton, for example, has argued that both U.S. and COCOM strategic trade control policies have failed because of their intrinsic leniency and that the enforcement is thoroughly lax and inadequate.12 Adler-Karlsson argues also that the policy has failed but for drastically different reasons, adducing that U.S.-Western European divergencies on what is strategic and what should go in a multilateral control list has meant a collapse of the embargo in.the 1950's and a crumbling consensus of policy resolve.13 Carrick and Wiles, among others, do not share such views.14 They argue that the effectiveness of national and multilateral strategic control policy can only be assessed

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