46 JUNE 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL us to ask: What exactly are export controls meant to accomplish, and what does the historical record tell us about whether they achieve those aims? Conceptual and Legal Foundations of Export Controls In 1958 Nobel Prize–winning economist and strategist Thomas Schelling defined export controls as a tool of economic warfare meant “to reduce the military strength of another country sufficiently to warrant any costs (including the cost of reduced military strength) that the measures may cause to the country that imposes them.” This strategic objective remains largely the same today, but Schelling’s formulation draws from the groundbreaking Export Control Act of 1949 (ECA), which first introduced peacetime export controls. The 1949 ECA established three key objectives for imposing export controls: safeguarding national security, advancing foreign policy goals, and addressing short supply. Short supply was only briefly a concern in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and so the rationale of export controls quickly bifurcated into the two categories of national security and foreign policy, with priority placed first on goods and technologies of clear military utility and, secondarily, on ostensibly civilian items that could, by fortifying an adversary’s industrial base, indirectly bolster its military capabilities. In the ensuing 75 years, there have been only modest refinements to these legislative underpinnings: The Export Administration Acts of 1969 and 1979 incorporated economic considerations like foreign availability and U.S. business competitiveness, while the 2018 Export Control Reform Act (ECRA) further expanded priorities to include preventing terrorism, strengthening the U.S. industrial base, and promoting human rights and democracy. These changes reflect an understanding, articulated by Representative Jonathan Bingham in an influential 1979 Foreign Affairs article, that export controls, much like sanctions, can function not only as instruments to weaken adversaries but also as signaling mechanisms to influence their behavior. Yet, throughout this evolution, the core strategic logic established in 1949—that export controls are first and foremost a tool to maintain a qualitative military edge—has remained fundamentally intact. Although PRC officials have accused the U.S. of using export controls to hobble China’s economy, the statutory authorities and policy rationale behind U.S. export controls remain centered on military-related technology, not the broader drivers of national power. The 2018 ECRA stresses the need to “preserve the qualitative military superiority of the United States,” while the Department of Commerce under both the first Trump and the Biden administrations has emphasized that the top aim of export controls is blocking U.S. technology from aiding China’s military modernization. The Unbearable Unmeasurability of Export Controls Because the strategic logic of export controls has changed little since the Cold War, that era is the obvious benchmark for assessing their impact. Unfortunately, there is not much hard evidence, from either contemporaneous accounts or retrospective analyses, on the effectiveness of U.S. export controls targeting the USSR. The CIA was “consistently bearish” on the effectiveness of export controls because the United States often failed to multilateralize export controls, CIA economist James Noren wrote in 2001, and the USSR usually found substitutes inside the Soviet Bloc. Despite an “enormous appetite” in Washington for insights on illicit Soviet technology transfer, the CIA struggled to evaluate or measure these efforts, Noren acknowledged. The uncertainty was shared outside the agency: A 1979 Office of Technology Assessment study concluded that while “most observers” agreed Western technology had aided the Soviet military, “there is no agreement on the degree or significance of any such contributions.” A 1986 CIA report estimated that the Soviet semiconductor industry trailed the U.S. by eight to nine years, a gap the USSR narrowed by importing Western technology, but judged that export controls were only “possibly” a factor in this gap, assigning greater blame to Moscow’s own production and management failings. The same conclusion applies across most sectors: Analysts widely attributed the USSR’s broader technology gap to bureaucratically stifled technological diffusion rather than to U.S. restrictions. In 1985 economist Morris Bornstein concluded that Western technology transfers to the USSR yielded only modest productivity gains because Soviet industry struggled to absorb them. In one vivid example, a 1975 survey found that years after Xerox sold 4,000 photocopiers to the USSR, many of the machines went unused as 85 percent of Soviet design offices still handcopied designs with tracing paper. As a 1969 CIA assessment put it, “Even when new plants and equipment are imported, licenses acquired, or foreign technologies merely copied, the modus operandi of the Soviet system delays their introduction and reduces their effectiveness.” Perhaps the strongest indirect evidence for the effectiveness
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