Mario Daniels and John Krige’s new book Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America (2022) contextualizes Commerce’s recent actions. The first complete history of dual-use export controls, the book maps the evolution of these regulations throughout the twentieth century. During the high Cold War, US trade in scientific and technological knowledge was oriented towards securing strategic lead-times over the Soviet Union and increasing the nation’s techno-industrial base— this was what the authors call a “national security” control regime. With increasing global competition in semiconductors during the 1980s, market shares in high-tech products were prioritized in the hopes of circling private-sector gains back into innovation—a regime of “economic security.” The book, thus, offers an invaluable insight into an arcane and understudied topic. At the same time, however, Krige and Daniels’ conceptualization of these security regimes relies on too simple a distinction between military and economic concerns. In reality, the history of export controls has navigated these two modes of reasoning, often at one and the same time.
An era of national security
The US’s first peacetime export controls were ratified under the Export Control Act of 1949. This legislation gave the Department of Commerce’s Office of International Trade, a predecessor of the BIS, jurisdiction over the export of critical commodities and technical knowledge. Later that year, Congress established the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) for Western nations, which synchronized a US-led blockade. States like Germany historically held deeper trading relationships with Eastern Europe than the United States. This meant that if the export controls were going to work, the US needed West-Central Europe on board.
For Daniels and Krige, this unprecedented imposition of export regulation can only be understood in the context of the Cold War and the ideological concerns that emerged from it. In their words, this “new approach to trade…[signaled] the redirection of the American ideological compass toward national security.” National security, as an ideology, located state power and military preeminence in government-led techno-scientific development. Moreover, it encouraged federal investment, largely from the Defense Department, in strategically significant technologies that, down the line, commercialized as they diffused. “This new way of thinking,” as Daniels and Krige explain, “established a close link between security, economy, and ceaseless technological innovation.”