Export Controls Don't Need to Be Perfect to Bite, Experts Say

Export controls may not stop all illegal shipments, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. and others should not work to improve cooperation and coordination, experts agreed during a June 27 Brookings Institution panel.

Clamping down on manufacturers of dual-use technologies has practical limits, said Emily Weinstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, pointing to the fact that Russia is still able to source U.S.-origin chips and other controlled goods. Just as third-party companies in China look to buy U.S. goods and resell them to the Chinese military, there is a strong possibility entities are doing the same in Russia, Weinstein said, with little the U.S. and its allies can do in a practical sense.

Policymakers shouldn’t be too concerned if controlled items end up in Russia, said Chris Miller, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He said that export controls don't need to be, and likely never will be, watertight -- what matters is whether exports are slipping through control regimes in high enough numbers to be used in actual research production. Miller said that Russia has a long history of technology theft and has an existing infrastructure for "parallel imports" that evade sanctions.

The U.S. also doesn’t have "great maps of the networks we need to control," said Henry Farrell, an international affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University. He said semiconductors “might be the only exception" because there are so few suppliers, but in many other key industries, the effects of export controls on the networks are not well understood. There are a lot of policy people weighing in, but "we need to bring in more product experts," he said, "people that understand the actual end uses of technology products and the supply chains."

Although the implementation of Russia-related sanctions and export controls has so far been unprecedented, panelists were less sure of future efforts. European countries were "not thrilled" to follow the U.S. lead on multilateral restrictions, Weinstein said, but felt they had no other choice with a war in their “backyard." We cannot expect this level of cooperation in the future, she said.

Farrell said European countries are concerned the U.S. attitude toward multilateral sanctions may change if a new American president is elected in 2024. "They don't want to be locked into a regime of cooperation with the U.S.," Farrell said, because in the case of a second Trump term, that binding cooperation might be leveraged against them. Almost everything done in the U.S. has to be at the executive level, which could be reversed by a different administration in just a few years, he said.