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Communist leader Vladimir Lenin reputedly predicted that Western capitalists would sell the communists the rope they would use to hang us. Recent events suggest that he may have been right.
by F.R. Duplantier
Exploiting the willingness of Western nations to "disregard legitimate security concerns" when selling military technology is "a time-honored practice" among our enemies, says Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. Totalitarian regimes thereby acquire "advanced equipment and know-how" that they are incapable of developing on their own, which they then use "to field militaries capable of posing powerful threats" to the United States and its allies.
Gaffney says the U.S. Government is becoming increasingly rash about selling our enemies the "rope" they could use to hang us. In September the Clinton administration set in motion a plan that would make Russia "a formal member of a new international technology transfer control mechanism -- the so-called 'New Forum.'" Beginning next year, "Moscow will have an equal say about the length and strength of the high-technology 'rope' to be sold -- and who gets it." Gaffney warns that "bringing Russia inside the tent in this fashion ensures that it will be given access to detailed information about sensitive Western technology."
As a member of the New Forum, Russia will be "in a position to block . . . a Western consensus against selling dual-use equipment or know-how to the world's rogue nations," says Gaffney. "Moscow can be expected to serve as the middleman for transfers of any technology" that might otherwise be denied to nations like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Gaffney says that "decisions about what to control and how rigorously to enforce such controls" will be left to the "national discretion" of New Forum members. Such a policy, he argues, "amounts to a license for wholesale national indiscretions with respect to the exports of sensitive technology to rogue nations."
The Clinton administration has also "undercut its own leadership position by engaging in some of the most irresponsible technology transfers on record," says Gaffney. "Washington has, for example, unilaterally and greatly expanded the performance standards of supercomputers available for export." These computers have "enormous military potential," he warns, and can be used to design nuclear weapons and conduct undersea warfare, among other things. The administration's decision to sell supercomputers to China "has persuaded the other advanced industrial nations that literally anything goes."
Making such potentially lethal technology available to Russia and China is especially foolish when "both countries are actively hawking everything from ballistic missiles to nuclear hardware to anyone with cash," says Gaffney. Both nations are also "engaged in behavior that makes future conflict with them possible, if not inevitable," he adds. When it comes to export controls, "national security considerations" should take precedence over "trade promotion," says Gaffney, arguing that the responsibility for export licensing belongs in the Defense Department, not in Commerce. Gaffney calls for "hearings into the cumulative, detrimental impact of the administration's technology transfer policies."
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