The historical precedent is very old. Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not" is Hilaire Belloc, 1898. More recently in the 1980s. ITA

The historical precedent is very old. Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not" is Hilaire Belloc, 1898. More recently in the 1980s. ITAR, the international traffic in arms laws, restricted European digital telephone switch sales to the USSR and allied nations. The US used this to secure contracts for Rolm with special permits. I worked briefly with a company in the UK which was prosecuted for selling Vax 11/780 parts behind the iron curtain, in this time. And of course the entire history of Netscape and encryption leading to Mozilla/Cryptzilla in the early 2000s, export restrictions on Kerberos from MIT, the magic vlsi design tools, you name it. The BBN butterfly router, sent to UCL in London in the mid 1980s had export restrictions on who could operate and see inside it. China is building its own euv capable vlsi, precisely because of the export restrictions. AMSL isn't allowed to sell them the fab machines they sell to TSMC. What justifies this is force majeure: we have the Maxim gun, and they don't.