Donald Riegle: “I rise today in support of a sense-of-the-Senate resolution urging the United States to pursue a policy that would…”

“I rise today in support of a sense-of-the-Senate resolution urging the United States to pursue a policy that would attempt to achieve multilateral cooperation on stemming the flow of militarily critical products and technology to rogue regimes. Such a policy is important to promoting the security interests of the United States and our allies. For over 40 years we cooperated with our allies under the auspices of COCOM, the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Controls, in controlling exports of certain strategic items and technology to the former Soviet Union and other Communist countries. For over 40 years this cooperation worked well in slowing down the acquisition by our adversaries of dual use goods and technologies that could have helped them militarily. But times have changed, and COCOM will cease to exist on March 31. However, this does not mean that cooperation with our allies on expert controls must cease. We have an opportunity to use the experience of our past cooperation to focus on the threat of the future--the proliferation of militarily critical items to rogue regimes in volatile areas such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East.”