Former US Official: US-China Export Control Negotiations Are a First
The U.S. appears to have departed from its long-standing policy of keeping national security-related export controls off the negotiating table during trade talks with China last week, said Brad Setser, senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Treasury Department official.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
“I think for the first time, the U.S. has entered into a negotiation over export controls,” Setser said, speaking during a conference in Brussels hosted by the German Marshall Fund. “Historically, the U.S. has been unwilling to do” that.
Setser was speaking after a senior Trump administration official said last week that the U.S. is willing to lift export controls on certain chips in exchange for China approving exports of rare earths and other critical minerals (see 2506090033). After the talks between the two sides in London, the U.S. reportedly agreed to lift certain controls over ethane and jet engines (see 2506110044), although Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Congress there was “no quid pro quo in terms of chips for rare earths” (see 2506120046).
Setser suggested he viewed the U.S. comments differently.
“Export controls are matters of national security. We don't negotiate national security with our adversaries,” he said. “My guess is we've just changed that.”
He also noted that China has developed its own set of export controls over the past five years, which it appears to also be using to its advantage in trade talks. Beijing has “consolidated state control over the rare earths industry and developed a system of export controls very much modeled on the American system of export controls,” Setser said, and it used the controls “in a way that gave it leverage.”