At various times pundits celebrated that US export controls against China scored punishing blows against its technology firms - but the US-China “chip war” won’t be a quick surgical strike. The road ahead is a long, grinding campaign of economic warfare with shifting fronts, unintended blowback, and allies that may be less and less willing to cooperate.
In our new article in Texas National Security Review, Michael Mastanduno and I revisit the Western technology control regime during the Cold War (“CoCom”) to draw lessons for today’s export controls on China. Three takeaways stand out—and they complicate a lot of confident talk about “high fences around small yards.”
For the past several years, Washington has tried to block Beijing’s access to advanced chips, tools, and know-how. The strategy rested on China’s dependence on imported semiconductors, and on the United States’ leverage at chokepoints along the semiconductor supply chain—chemicals, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and EDA (electronic design automation). Washington has relied on a web of rules (Entity List, de minimus rules, and the FDPR (foreign direct product rule) that restrict not only American but foreign firms from exporting to China. Scholars call this textbook “weaponized interdependence”: Washington exploiting control points in global trade and finance to coerce or to degrade a rival’s capabilities. But the Cold War record, and the early evidence from the current contest, suggests that the road ahead is tougher than advertised.
Lesson 1: The “small yard” always expands—and enforcement gets harder as it grows.
The Biden administration sought to pursue a scalpel approach —not a wholesale decoupling from China, but restricting only the most cutting-edge semiconductor technology. The “small yard” would deny China a narrow set of militarily critical technologies while letting ordinary commerce flow. Turns out that CoCom tried that too—yet the yard grew anyway.
During the Cold War, the reality of civil–military integration, the occurrence of foreign-policy crises, and day-to-day domestic politics steadily widened the control lists from end-items toward the broader “design and manufacturing know-how” that undergirds both civilian and military tech. Once you broaden to foundational technologies, the line between military and commercial blurs—and the control regime expands.
The current effort against China reflects similar patterns. Beijing’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy explicitly knits together commercial and defense ecosystems; legislators and agencies in Washington respond by pushing to add more Chinese firms to the Entity List, and to presume denial for entire categories of China-based end-users. Foreign-policy crises also expand the lists outward (think about US outrage during the 2023 Chinese spy balloon episode), and domestic politics reward “better safe than sorry” expansions.
The results are visible: successive rulemakings in 2023–2024 widened chip, tool, and HBM (high-bandwith memory) controls; the FDPR was stretched to cover more foreign-made items with U.S. content; and licensing obligations spread to dozens of third countries to catch transshipment. That’s a bigger yard—which requires a larger administrative apparatus to police.
As the regime sprawls, compliance and coordination get harder.
As the regime sprawls, compliance and coordination get harder. A larger yard creates more licenses to adjudicate, more borderline cases to interpret, and more incentives for firms to seek exceptions or shade the rules. CoCom’s experience shows that over time this weakens enforcement and encourages defections among supplier countries. Expect something similar today.
Lesson 2: Controls are porous—and China is a more adaptive target than the USSR.
During the Cold War, the Soviets found ways around CoCom’s fence: smuggling, espionage, front companies, and third-country transshipment. Intelligence reports from the early 1980s suggested that the Soviets obtained —covertly and overtly — a shockingly large share of militarily significant Western technology. A particularly scandalous case was the Toshiba-Kongsberg sale to the USSR of advanced milling machinery—used to produce ultra-quiet submarine propellers—but many other violations occurred. In what we might call the Jurassic Park doctrine, targets always find a way.
During the Cold War, the Soviets found ways around the fence
Fast-forward to the current regime, and this bad news looks even worse. China is not the 1970s-80s USSR. It is deeply embedded in global supply chains, boasts world-class commercial champions, and—critically—has the innovation capacity to absorb, diffuse, and improve on what it obtains. That’s why pronouncements about knockout blows often age poorly. Huawei, declared by observers “kneecapped” by US export controls, adapted and roared back by stockpiling, rerouting, substituting, and building indigenous alternatives—including software platforms that reduce dependence on Western ecosystems. Although the most effective controls may “throw sand in China’s gears,” they do not seize the engine.
The strategic implication is sobering. The United States can slow China at select frontiers (leading-edge logic, certain tools, advanced packaging), but the competition is about timelines, not absolutes. Lagging a node or two while fielding “good enough” AI chips, sensors, and systems—integrated by a massive industrial base—still yields military-relevant power.
Lesson 3: Partner politics are fragile—and extraterritorial pressure infuriates allies.
Analysts often describe U.S. alliances as America’s secret weapon in this contest. True—but alliance cohesion is a wasting asset under sanctions stress. CoCom operated under unusually favorable conditions (a clear and severe military threat to Western Europe/NATO, and low levels of economic interdependence with the target—meaning export controls demanded less sacrifice and meant less risk of retaliation. CoCom was also multilateral and institutionalized, with regular meetings among partners to coordinate control lists.
Yet even under these favorable conditions, CoCom countries still struggled with mistrust, jealousy, and outright violations. When Washington engaged in “light-switch diplomacy” (tightening controls to punish Soviet behavior or relaxing them to entice arms-control cooperation), partners balked at having security rationales mixed with other foreign-policy goals. Among the United States and its partners, disputes over exceptions, firm-specific enforcement, and U.S. extraterritorial measures spilled into political crises.
Among the United States and its partners, disputes over exceptions, firm-specific enforcement, and U.S. extraterritorial measures spilled into political crises.
Today’s terrain is rougher. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is a vital market of those countries being asked to restrict their exports. Partners have highly varying levels of threat perception toward China. For many of them, the commercial stakes are much higher than security stakes. Japanese and Dutch firms, already rankled by controls that cost their firms dearly, resist the yard widening forther; Washington, frustrated, reaches for extraterritorial tools to force compliance. Such moves may succeed in strengthening the export control regime to some extent—but at the cost of damaging political relations among key US allies and partners. The CoCom lesson is blunt: the more expansive and politicized the regime, the more likely partner fatigue and circumvention become.
Lessons learned
First, compared to the CoCom era, the United States and its partners today are up against a very different kind of adversary. Cold War history shows us that despite CoCom’s efforts to create a high fence, the Soviet Union got its hands on the technology it needed. The saving grace for the West was that the Soviet economic system was so backward it couldn’t innovate (nor, as Jeffrey Ding argues, diffuse innovation). But despite longtime pessimism about China’s innovation capabilities, it’s become clear that it is a far more capable technological competitor: a global innovation leader.
Second, with respect to the export control effort, Americans must remember what success means. As noted, the realistic goal of US-led export controls was to throw sand in the gears—to slow, rather than cease, China’s technology rise. Understanding this is important both for assessing the success versus the failure of the regime and for understanding what the United States should be doing while those gears glitch, grind, and recover. The United States should be investing in its own innovation ecosystem: improving talent, research funding, manufacturing diffusion, and faster commercialization pipelines. Controls can buy some time—and that time must be used wisely.
Third, discipline matters. If Washington wants allied support, it must hold the line on scope, tie measures tightly to concrete security rationales, and resist the temptation to trade export rules as negotiating chits in unrelated bargains. Every expansion beyond the true chokepoints should meet a high burden of proof and a clear sunset or review. Otherwise the small yard expands—and enforcement collapses under its own weight.
Finally, plan for a long haul. Avoid declarations of victory—one success will soon be supplanted by a shock from a highly capable competitor. The U.S.–China tech contest isn’t a one-off knockout; it will be a campaign measured in years, not quarters. China’s economic might, and its interdependence with the United States and its partners, suggests that economic warfare will play a prominent role in the dawning superpower competition.