That an expansionist, revisionist Russia is violating international agreements—including United Nations sanctions—by importing weapons from two rogue states should give the world cause for alarm. Worse, however, is what the debris from North Korean, Iranian, and Russian missiles has revealed: They are filled with newly produced Western electronics.

In other words, the world’s most dangerous regimes are building their most lethal weapons using electronics from advanced industrial democracies despite supposedly stringent sanctions.

These massive contraventions of sanctions regimes cannot be regarded as isolated incidents, and the situation demonstrates that a major transformation is needed to give the export control regime its edge back.

Even the largest states need to import electronic components to build sophisticated weapons. Brooks reasoned that advanced industrial democracies could thwart aggressors by withdrawing these components from the global supply chain. Without modern weapons, the aggressor would either have to moderate its military objectives or suffer defeat.

Under Brooks’s hypothesis, great powers’ dependence on complex supply chains would have a pacifying impact, deterring would-be revisionist states such as Russia or China from acting on their worst impulses. This vision of a pax technical was compelling because it echoed the West’s experience during the late Cold War. The micro-electronics revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s propelled breakthroughs in radars, precision weapons, and avionics—made possible using semiconductors produced by Japanese, U.S., Taiwanese, and European companies.

Despite its best efforts, the Soviet Union couldn’t fully circumvent the multilateral export control regime—the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom)—which ultimately comprised 17 members, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan.

And because the Soviet Union could not import cutting-edge electronic components, its weapons fell technologically behind. Awareness that they were qualitatively losing the arms race shaped Soviet leaders’ decisions in the late 1980s, when they allowed Eastern Europe to escape their control and signed unprecedented arms control agreements with the United States.

Thus, there were powerful reasons to expect that aggression would prove to be self-defeating in an era of technological interdependence. Russian data supported this view, emphasizing its military’s dependence—estimated between 80 percent and 85 percent—on imported electronics in the years prior to its 2014 seizure of Crimea.

Many experts, therefore, anticipated before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that sanctions on dual-use electronics would weaken its defense industries.

However, a few skeptics doubted Brooks’s hypothesis. They argued that states could forgo the most cutting-edge electronics or substitute them with Chinese components. These analysts shared Brooks’s belief that advanced industrial democracies would effectively sanction an expansionist state’s ability to import dual-use components, but they believed that illiberal states produced adequate substitutes.

The table below details all the long-range strike systems that Russia is using against Ukraine for which data is publicly available on their components. This data was compiled from a report published by the Institute for Science and International Security, documents referenced in a February 2024 U.S. Senate hearing, and data from the Ukraine-based Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (NAKO). Collectively, these missiles and drones account for the vast majority of strikes on Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure, with only three known systems unaccounted for—the Kh-55 and Kh-55 cruise missiles and the Oniks hypersonic missile.

The table summarizes the foreign electronics contained in each weapon, including their inertial navigation systems, satellite navigation systems, and key semiconductors. The list of advanced industrial democracies comprises the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member nations as well as Taiwan.

From this data, it’s clear that Russia has failed to onshore its production of semiconductors, which guide missile systems’ precise navigation toward targets. In 2022, as the world’s most advanced semiconductor producers halted their shipments to Russia, Russian officials confidently invested in plans to build new semiconductor fabrication plants within the country. Yet not a single Russian semiconductor was employed in any of the missile guidance systems examined.

Likewise, it is striking how few Chinese electronics are present, given that China is a major semiconductor manufacturer and was well known for poorly enforcing sanctions long before Russia’s war in Ukraine began. Only two missiles—the Kh-101 and Kalibr—contain metal-oxide transistors manufactured by a Chinese company, which is identified in the U.S. Senate report as VBsemi.

Otherwise, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean missile designers all opted for superior electronics manufactured in the United States, Europe, Japan, or Taiwan. Researchers from NAKO, the Ukrainian nonprofit, examined 2,500 components in Russian weaponry and found that the largest single point of origin for electronics is companies headquartered in the United States, which produced 64 percent of the parts that were assessed.

Switzerland is the second-most-common supplier of weapons components, contributing electronics to all of the weapons analyzed, save one. Switzerland’s alleged disproportionate role within Russian supply chains is partly caused by the fact that one Swiss company, u-blox, specializes in manufacturing satellite navigation systems. These are used for cars and electric bicycles and forbidden by the company from being used in weapons. Russians have reportedly discovered that if disassembled, these systems can be harvested and are compatible with the Russian military’s GLONASS satellites. Foreign Policy has reached out to u-blox for comment.

After the United States and Switzerland, the remaining components are provided by the companies from the Netherlands, Taiwan, Japan, Sweden, Germany, South Korean, Spain, and Canada—all of which provided at least one key electronic component. Most of the components included in this data are categorized as Tier 1 or Tier 3 controlled dual-use systems under the 1996 Wassenaar Agreement, under which 42 signatories agreed that these components should not be transferred to states that would use them to “undermine” a shared goal of “international security and stability.”

By prohibiting dual-use components exports to Russia, advanced industrial states have at least superficially behaved as Brooks anticipated. But the evidence from the Ukrainian battlefield suggests otherwise.

Three key failings of the system stand out: the lack of an overarching organization like CoCom to coordinate sanctions and enforcement; the lack of repercussions for firms that fail to practice due diligence; and the lack of consequences for states that allow themselves to become entrepots for widespread sanctions circumvention.

CoCom played a vital role in coordinating technology controls among its members. This meant that governments could sanction the same entities and stop Soviet efforts at circumvention at roughly the same time. The group’s members, however, voluntarily abolished the organization in 1994. The much weaker Wassenaar Agreement theoretically superseded CoCom in 1996—incorporating Russia, South Africa, India, and many of the former communist states that the former agreement once targeted—but without its predecessor’s regular meetings and enforcement mechanisms.

As a result, today’s democratic governments individually implement sanctions policies, providing ample opportunity for Russia and its enablers to access controlled electronics.

Another NAKO study identified 58 major Russian companies that import critical components via third countries, illustrating the failures of such an approach. The United States, which has the world’s largest bureaucratic sanctions workforce, had sanctioned 34 of the 58 companies as of March 2024. Ukraine had sanctioned 30. The United Kingdom, European Union, and Switzerland have each sanctioned four or five. Asia-Pacific partners—Japan, Australia, and New Zealand—had each sanctioned only one.

This rather haphazard approach is compounded by governments’ hesitancy to prosecute companies within their own countries that, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitate sanctions evasion.

The British government, for example, did not fine or sanction a single company or individual for two and a half years for circumventing sanctions on Russia following the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The first fine, levied in September 2024, amounted to a paltry 15,000 British pounds (about $18,500).

Governments have also failed to hold other states accountable for circumvention. Almost as soon as sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2022, new shell companies reportedly emerged in Kazakhstan, Armenia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. Individual Western countries were loath to punish these states, which are considered partners in other domains. Critical component shipments to these countries soared, even as those imports declined in Russia. When the world’s mature democracies did nothing in response, China allowed entities based in mainland China and Hong Kong to follow suit.

History, however, provides clear precedents for combating such practices. During World War I, Germany attempted to circumvent the Allied powers’ blockade by importing key inputs—steel, explosives, and machine tools—through the neutral Netherlands. Allied governments responded to this attempt at circumvention by imposing import quotas on the Netherlands.

This meant that the Dutch were permitted to import the same quantities of critical commodities during the war as they did during the last year of peacetime, 1913. This decision put the onus of sanctions enforcement on the neutral party, the Netherlands, which had to choose whether Dutch or German industries would benefit from what little they could import.

During the Cold War, nonmembers of CoCom—such as Switzerland—had to abide by its export controls if they wanted access to dual-use technologies.

Experts and policymakers have recognized the Wassenaar Agreement’s inadequacies for nearly two decades and called for reform. If anything, the inescapable evidence should prompt policymakers to create a multilateral organization—more akin to CoCom than Wassenaar—to prevent expansionist states from using technologies produced by advanced industrial democracies to attack them.

Though these problems are on display in Ukraine, they will not be isolated to it. North Korea recently tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile, achieving a greater altitude and duration than ever before. In June 2023, an Iranian-built missile launched by the Houthis in Yemen nearly struck a U.S. aircraft carrier. What these troubling developments have in common is their dependence on imported components from advanced industrial democracies.

If they hope to reverse this process, the world’s democracies must reestablish the institutional architecture and demonstrate the political will needed to hold perpetrators accountable, no matter how uncomfortable it might be.

If successful, a pax technical might not be just a thing of the past.