Kevin Wolf Quoted on Need for Trade Alliance to Control Exports to China

For its article “Former U.S. Officials Urge New Export Alliance on China,” EE Times quoted Akin international trade partner Kevin Wolf. The article is the product of consultations by the publication on the need to establish a new alliance to control semiconductor technology exports to China in the face of weakening current restrictions.

Kevin, a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration, Bureau of Industry and Security, said that the current effort being led by the United States with Japan and the Netherlands still falls short and that, in the long term, more nations need to ally under a new multilateral regime. He pointed to the Cold War-era alliance known as the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls.

He said, “With any unilateral controls, they will lose their effectiveness over time as foreign competitors come online and are not subject to the same controls. Although the Japanese and Dutch controls will significantly enhance the effectiveness of the goal of cutting off advanced-node production in China, there are other parts of the industry involving lots of other electronics that are currently becoming ineffective and counterproductive because there are [alternative] foreign sources.” He added that the U.S. may adopt restrictions on China’s use of cloud services that have helped it end-run semiconductor controls.

Kevin noted that the three allies’ controls will eventually become less effective: “Competitors will start making comparable tools to substitute from countries outside of the Netherlands, the U.S. and Japan. There’s a constant need for evolution of controls. In the inspection and the metrology space, there are lots of really good companies in [South] Korea and Israel, for example, that could make substitutes.”

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