Export Controls Are Valuable Tool If Used Right, Experts Argue
The future effectiveness of U.S. export controls will depend on which technologies the government targets, how it collaborates with allies, and how well the U.S. is able to resource the Bureau of Industry and Security, said Navin Girishankar and Matt Borman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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In a commentary published Aug. 13, they acknowledged that “export controls are not perfect,” but said they are helpful in slowing down the technological advancements of China and other adversaries, which has allowed American companies to maintain competitive leads over foreign firms.
The success of export controls will “depend on targeting technologies where the returns to national security are greatest, establishing metrics to evaluate impact, monitoring their impact in near-real time, and coordinating with allies,” wrote Girishankar, president of the CSIS Economic Security and Technology Department, and Borman, a former senior BIS official and now a non-resident technical expert with CSIS. “It will also require adequate resourcing for the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security to expand technological expertise, enforcement capacity, and engagement with allies.”
But they noted that those efforts “will be diminished if export controls are used as bargaining chips in trade talks,” referencing the Trump administration’s decision to loosen export restrictions over Nvidia’s H20 chips as part of trade talks with China (see 2507150013 and 2507160046).
“For this reason, the Trump administration’s recent reversal on restrictions on chips in response to China’s easing of its rare earth restrictions, as well as reports that licenses are being provided to U.S. companies in exchange for a share of export revenues (see 2508130039), is worrying,” they wrote. “Such moves suggest that this vital tool in America’s economic security arsenal is transactional rather than principled, negotiable rather than inviolable.”
Girishankar and Borman were responding to arguments made in the same CSIS commentary by Marco Macchiavelli, assistant professor of finance at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who said export controls harm the profits of American firms. He also suggested that they may be pushing China to decouple from the U.S. “even faster.”
If the U.S. “wants to maintain leverage on China,” Macchiavelli said, “export controls are clearly a self-inflicted wound as they reduce domestic leverage and instead boost Chinese independence from the U.S. economic orbit.”