McNair Paper 36, Explaining and Influencing Chinese Arms Transfers, February 1995

In spite of potential strategic and economic payoffs, a nation may decide to restrict its transfer of arms to another state under any one or a combination of four circumstances:

1) the supplier unilaterally anticipates the transfer may ultimately endanger, or at least not improve its own security, and so displays self-restraint;

2) the transfer, while not imperilling the safety of the supplier, is not in accordance with its laws or norms;

3) another power or coalition of forces compels the prospective supplier to modify its behavior; and

4) the supplier is unwilling to violate the rules of an international regime to which it belongs or observes, and which proscribes the transfer contemplated.

We will first discuss these conditions in general terms, and then examine their applicability to the Chinese case.

In that arms transfers usually increase the military might of recipient states, one significant consequence is the resulting alteration to existing regional, or even global, balances of power. Before a country with vital interests in a certain part of the world delivers weapons to a state within that area, it must anticipate if the cumulative responses of the recipient's adversaries will ultimately outweigh any short-term gains. For instance, throughout the Cold War, both the United States and Soviet Union sometimes withheld advanced military equipment from even their closest allies in order to prevent local arms races and heightened tensions (both sides from their Korean Peninsula allies, and the USSR from Cuba) (Note 81) . Alternatively, a major power may find itself beset with competing requests for weapons from several mutually antagonistic states within the same region. In such instances, selective supplier descretion is ofter exercised (the United States and its Middle East clients). Additionally, nation might decline to transfer weapons if it decided the potential recipient was a serious "security risk." Specifically, if the intended purchaser appers likely to turn its newly acquired hardware against the supplier or the supplier's allies (the anxiety of most Western arms producing nations have regarding Libya), exports will be restricted or forbidden. Another security risk issue is the possible loss of technology through illicit sharing between the recipient and third parties. The reluctance of the United States and former-Soviet Union to provide any ally with their state-of-the-art weaponry reflects this concern. Given the aforementioned dangers inherent in the export of high quality or large amounts of major weapons systems, most nations have intra-governmental organizational structures of differing degrees of complexity to evaluate, control, and monitor arms transfers.

States may also restrict arms exports if the conditions of transfer are inconsistent with domestic regulations and norms that are not necessarily related to issues of national security. For instance, under the Carter Administration, official U.S. policy in deciding on proposed arms transfers included attempting "to promote and advance respect for human rights in recipient countries." (Note 82) While implementation was subject to the political vagaries of the time, and often subordinated to more practical and pressing stragtegic issues, the scope of weapons exports, nevertheless, was affected. Similarly, most other countries have articulated certain standards by which to judge proposed arms sales, even if these are often inconsistently adhered to. (Note 83) An arms producer may also be persuaded or prevented by another nation or coalition, from either transferring a certain category of weapons, or from exporting to a particular state. Those seeking to deny the delivery of military equipment may take initiatives ranging from, at one end of the spectrum, informal negotiations with the targeted supplier, to the imposition of an arms embargo enforced with military power, at the opposite end. Those countries with a large stake in maintaining the security within a given region, will carefully scrutinize the quantity and quality of weapons delivered there. Arms exports that threaten to seriously jeopardize the capacity of a state or its allies to effectively protect their key interests will likely be challenged. Furthermore, transfers of potent weapons for which a major power has no effective countermeasures will frequently be opposed, regardless of the destination, because of the erosion to that nation's military supremacy that unchecked proliferation might entail.

International regimes serve as a final source of restraint on global arms transfers. For members, noncompliance can lead to formal sanctions, loss of reputation, the establishment of bad precedents for others to emulate, or retaliation in another issue area. (Note 84 Even a non-member state, expressly or tacitly observing a widely-recognized regime's norms, may feel considerable pressure to comply. While a majority of the post-World War II international regimes have been primarily concerned with weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological), many others have addressed conventional arms (the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, the Missile Technology Control Regime, various United Nations General Assembly proposals and resolutions, etc.).

In summary, we can say that a power with both vital interests in a given area of the world and a strong sense of accountability for the maintenance of order there, will be more inclined to define for itself a self-legitimatizing role in regulating arms traffic into that region. By extension, a state with global commitments will have extensive concerns about the qualitative and quantitative flow of weaponry worldwide. Conversely, an arms producer with only local security obligations will tend to evaluate transfers far from its shores in mostly economic terms. At the same time, if such a state does not produce any significant world-class military hardware and technologies, it will be relatively unconcerned with the consequences of proliferation and the loss of proprietary rights, and hence, under less compulsion to restrict its weapons exports. Thus, either compelling through external pressure, or securing compliance within the framework of effective international regimes, would seem to offer the best possibilities for influencing a second-tier arms producer's behavior.