The countries of the ‘axis of evil’ are critically dependent on Western technology. To obtain advanced microelectronics, Russia, Iran and North Korea use a variety of methods to circumvent international sanctions, from shell companies to re-exports through third countries.
‘These massive contraventions of sanctions regimes cannot be regarded as isolated incidents, and the situation demonstrates that a major transformation is needed to give the export control regime its edge back,’ write Olena Tregub, Executive Director of NAKO, and Marс R. DeVore, Senior Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews’s School of International Relations, in a joint article for Foreign Policy.
They refer to scholar Stephen Brooks’ thesis that developed democracies can deter aggressors by withdrawing dual-use components from the global supply chain. This vision has been called ‘pax technica’ and echoes the West’s experience during the late Cold War. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union was unable to fully circumvent the restrictions of the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom), which ultimately comprised 17 members, and gain access to new technologies. As a result, the USSR lost the arms race.
Today, the situation is very different. Despite the expectations of many experts that restrictions on the sale of dual-use components to Russia would weaken its military-industrial complex, this has not happened. The missiles used by Russia against Ukraine contain microelectronics from the United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Japan, Sweden, Germany, South Korea, Spain and Canada. ‘This data indicates that the post-Cold War pax technica is over, but it also provides lessons about what can be done to revive it,’ the article says.
Olena Tregub and Mark DeVore highlight three key failings of the system:
- the lack of an overarching organisation like CoCom to coordinate sanctions and enforcement;
- the lack of repercussions for firms that fail to practice due diligence;
- the lack of consequences for states that allow themselves to become enterports for widespread sanctions circumvasion.
‘The world’s democracies must reestablish the institutional architecture and demonstrate the political will needed to hold perpetrators accountable, no matter how uncomfortable it might be,’ the authors conclude.