LOOKING BACK: Multilateral Arms Transfer Restraint: The Limits of Cooperation
As the United States and Europe wrestle over European plans to sell conventional arms to China, many Americans would like to see a new transatlantic treaty regime. They disparage the existing regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement, which coordinates export policies on conventional arms and related industrial technologies. European officials also acknowledge the limitations of the current arrangement; British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has even proposed a new arms trade treaty. Yet, it is unlikely that any replacement or change to the Wassenaar Arrangement can provide meaningful restraint in conventional arms transfers and still be acceptable both to the United States and Europe. The negotiations during the early 1990s that led to the creation of the Wassenaar Arrangement made clear that mutual restraint in transfers of advanced technology and arms is impossible when foreign policies diverge. And with the end of the Cold War, any Atlantic consensus was fast eroding over sales to commercially important nations in Asia and the Middle East.
The Wassenaar Arrangement, established in 1996, replaced NATO’s Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM). Created in the 1950s, COCOM blocked technology transfers to the Soviet Union and its allies. It had three lists of controlled goods—arms, industrial equipment, and “atomic” technologies—that members “embargoed” to the Soviets. To ensure that an export of a listed item was consistent with the embargo, COCOM procedures required the review and consent of all members. This gave the United States extraterritorial authority to “veto” exports to the Soviet bloc.
The EU’s Code of Conduct for arms transfers will have the greatest influence. Despite uncertainty over the future of a common European security policy, EU members look to Brussels—not Washington and its partisan debates over China—to set the agenda. The code calls for respect for human rights and avoiding sales “if there is a clear risk that the intended recipient would use the proposed export aggressively against another country or to assert by force a territorial claim.” Some but not all European countries take the code seriously. The dilemma lies in national discretion. Each country individually determines whether an export is consistent with the code. National discretion means that, if the EU lifts its embargo, transfers of advanced military technology (more useful to China than weapons) are inevitable. Making the code legally binding does not change this, unless committee decisions in Brussels replace national discretion on whether a transfer runs counter to the code. This is a step the major European powers will not accept. It is no insight to say that key U.S. allies and other major nations disagree on many issues: Iraq, UN reform, and the response to terrorism. The experience of the Wassenaar Arrangement suggests that this is not a temporary aberration due to one administration’s policies. Foreign policies diverged in the 1990s and have not grown closer since then. Effective restraint requires more than agreed upon procedures and guidelines. It requires common approaches to foreign policy and security. Absent this commonality, any new arrangement will be hollow and ineffective. European arms sales to China would be a callous mistake, but pursuing some new agreement on restraint is unlikely to stop them.
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