Kevin Wolf Talks Export Controls on ITIF Podcast

Akin international trade partner Kevin Wolf was a guest on the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation’s Innovation Files podcast for its episode “Getting Export Controls Right.” The episode focused on striking the right balance, as the show synopsis noted, “between keeping certain advanced technologies away from adversarial militaries without locking U.S. firms out of global markets.”

Kevin, who formerly served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration, Bureau of Industry and Security, covered the basics of export controls, then delved into specifics. Among the highlights:

• “Export controls are the set of regulations that govern three verbs—the export, re-export and transfer—of four types of things—commodities, which are physical items; software; technology, which is information to do something; and sometimes services which are acts, assistance of people, to specific end uses, specific end-users or specific destinations—in order to accomplish national security or foreign policy objectives.”
• “What really started to change was in the extraordinary allied response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And for the first time since the Cold War, 37 countries started adopting controls that only the U.S. had historically regulated itself, including basic semiconductors and basic civil aircraft parts and basic consumer electronics—things that no country had ever identified before as being a regime-worthy, a multilateral control-worthy type of item if destined to Russia, and then much broader sanctions and export controls if for military end users in China. And the key psychological and policy turning point with that response is that export controls for the first time since the Cold War were being used in a coordinated fashion to achieve strategic objectives.”
• “The history of export controls has always shown that, unless countries work together, and controls are plurilateral or multilateral, over time, at different levels, depending upon the technology, they become less or ineffective. That means the items still make it to the end-user and end-user of concern, and they become counterproductive, meaning that the work and the money and the flow goes to the competitors for the U.S. companies, not the U.S. companies themselves. And, so, that's really the story to watch.”

To listen to the full episode, click here.