President Obama has rightly earned praise for signing the international Arms Trade Treaty, which seeks to keep many kinds of conventional weapons out of the hands of terrorists and other criminals who fuel conflicts around the globe. He now risks undercutting that treaty, as well as American laws and national security interests, by loosening regulatory controls on many of America's own military exports.
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Early in his administration, Mr. Obama began an effort to reform export control laws that nearly everyone agreed needed to be simplified and updated. But the new regulatory regime, which started to take effect this week, has raised fears that it could increase sales of American-made military parts to conflict zones and make it harder to enforce arms sanctions, including on Iran.
For decades, the United States, primarily through the State Department, evaluated arms exports case by case to ensure that they did not contribute to human rights abuses and could not be transferred to terrorists and other prohibited users. The new system shifts responsibility for thousands of military components to the business-friendly Commerce Department under more flexible controls. In some cases, companies no longer will have to obtain a license to export certain items.
The first group of American-made equipment affected by the regulation changes includes gas turbine engines and thousands of parts for military aircraft, like propeller blades, brake pads and tires, which could be sold even to countries subject to United Nations arms embargoes, according to the news organization ProPublica, which analyzed the changes. In January, other revisions will be announced that will affect military vehicles and submarines.
The White House has said that the old system strained resources by trying to protect all items on the control lists instead of focusing on the most militarily significant ones. It also said that the system disadvantaged American companies competing with foreign enterprises not subject to rigorous controls. Those are not strong arguments. The United States already dominates the international arms market, with nearly 80 percent of the sales, and the State Department denied a mere 1 percent of the arms export license requests from 2008 to 2010.
The deeper reason for the relaxed controls is that American defense companies, which lobbied heavily for the weaker rules, are scrambling for new markets in an era of plummeting Pentagon budgets. Before going ahead with the next round of revisions, the administration and Congress need to step back and see how the new rules work out. If it appears that military items are falling into the wrong hands, the rules should be redrawn again.
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