Newsletter

Pickering: War On Terror Fuels Need For Export Reforms, Multilateral Approach

Muradian, Vago

2001

Overview

\"NATO is coming closer together, particularly after Sept. 11 and the war on terrorism. I believe that NATO interoperability would be served by a development that could open up to NATO partners--on the basis of a common understanding of controls on third states and a common effort to ensure uniform export controls are observed--that we could see a broader degree of defense trade among all NATO nations as we have now with Canada,\" Tom Pickering, the former undersecretary of state for political and military affairs who now is Boeing's (BA) vice president for international relations, told Defense Daily International last week during an interview. \"I think it would be useful to examine extending that (type of agreement with Canada) to some or all of our NATO partners and Australia and Japan...We have to be prepared and able to undertake a broader negotiations with a number of partners. Clearly this could be done by a series of overlapping bilateral negotiations, on the other hand, if you could deal with the set of six partners who have, or are moving toward a more open regime, and harmonize that without having to undo things that already have been done, I think that would be advantageous. Having spent my life in the State Department, I think that there is nothing that inhibits or makes more difficult working multilaterally, if you have an equal degree of trust and confidence among the partners.\" According to Pickering, who played a role in formulating DTSI, alliance nations have a unique opportunity to adopt a common export control regime. The day after the attacks, NATO for the first time in its history concluded that the attacks against the United States constituted an assault on the alliance as a whole, and pledged close cooperation in the upcoming campaign against global terrorism. A good starting point for a multilateral export control regime would be the so-called LOI (Letter of Intent) Six nations, Pickering said. In July 2000, Europe's leading defense industrial nations--Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Sweden--inked an LOI pledging to adopt a common export control regime to facilitate the smooth sharing of defense technologies and products, a critical need given the cooperative nature of European defense programs. Pickering indicated that while export control negotiations can be tricky, it is possible to strike an accord that balances the need to protect technologies with wider defense trade that is seen as critical to bolstering interoperability within the NATO alliance. One of the reasons DTSI garnered high-level [Clinton] administration interest was to boost cooperation to help bridge a growing capability gap between the United States and its NATO allies which spend considerably less on defense. Clinton officials feared that should the gap grow wider, the cohesion of the alliance would have been undermined over time.

• Publisher: Access Intelligence, LLC,Access Intelligence LLC
• Subject: Cooperation / Defense / Export controls / International relations / International trade / Interoperability / National security / Pickering, Thomas / Pickering, Thomas (American diplomat) / Technology transfer / Terrorism / Trade policy / Trade restrictions