Agencies Don’t Agree Yet on Path for New Multilateral Export Control Forum, Estevez Says
The U.S. and its allies need a new framework to coordinate export controls on advanced, critical technologies, Bureau of Industry and Security Undersecretary Alan Estevez said. But he also said there is some disagreement within the U.S. government about the best way forward.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
“I do think we need a new dynamic -- whether you want to call it a fifth regime, a framework, whatever you want to call it, it’s irrelevant [what it's labeled],” he said during an event last week hosted by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
He added that creating a new forum doesn’t mean abandoning the four major existing multilateral export control regimes, including the Wassenaar Arrangement, a consensus-based regime that has been hobbled by the fact that Russia is a member (see 2310050026). Estevez called those regimes “key parts of the export control world.”
“I’m not trying to divest any of those,” Estevez said. But “I think in certain areas, especially in the high-tech areas, where we need to move at the speed of tech in order to make decisions,” the U.S. needs something new. “It has to be multilateral,” he said. “It has to be with us and the people who matter that are producing tech.”
BIS has “started to have those discussions with our allies and within the interagency,” Estevez said, although there isn’t yet a consensus within the administration on next steps.
“There's, frankly, not full agreement on what's the best path for doing that,” he said. “That's OK. I mean, that's the way the interagency works.” But he said there is a consensus that we “need to do something. And frankly, when I talk to allies on the trips that I've taken, there's acceptance that we do need to do something.
“How to do it is the question.”