The United States is considered one of, if not the go-to nation when conflict strikes somewhere on the globe. The U.S. provides billions of dollars of monetary and military aid to partner nations to address security concerns and to quell threats. By most accounts, the United States has the most adept and the most advanced military capability in the world. Sharing these resources helps bolster alliances while serving critical national security interests.
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The stringent export policy, especially concerning closely held military equipment, has angered private companies who wish to market their products to a wider international audience and members of Congress who wish to aid U.S. allies. “American companies have long pushed for looser restrictions to allow them to better compete with foreign firms,” Defense One reported. According to Rachel Stohl, associate with the Stimson Center’s Managing Across Boundaries Initiative, there was a misconception among the media when the State Department released the unclassified summary for its new drone export policy that the floodgates would open allowing U.S. drones to be exported en mass. “In reality, however,” Stohl wrote recently, “the new policy does not actually loosen export controls on drones as U.S. drone exports were not automatically prohibited in the past.” In fact, two former treasury secretaries pointed to how U.S. export policy for weapons is seen in a bad light internationally, even among the Chinese. “For its part, China castigates the U.S. for…its export-control laws, especially those restricting the export of technologies with potential military applications,” wrote Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin.
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