Export controls (the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations, ITAR) have been a major headache for American space engineers for quite some time. They've always been problematic, but it got a lot worse in the late 1990s when a Chinese rocket carrying an American satellite failed. The American engineers helped with the investigation, as they were contractually obligated to do, and Congress went ballistic (so to speak) about it.
All this has done is to encourage the rise of a vibrant non-US spacecraft and components industry who openly advertise that their stuff is ITAR-free.
It makes sense to exclude a few pariah countries like North Korea, but it is pointless to treat other spacefaring countries like the UK, Japan and Germany the same way. There's this incredible conceit that only Americans are smart enough to figure out how to do this stuff. We're not.
When I battled ITAR in the 1990s over controls on public domain encryption software, I got quite far with the line "Apparently, only Americans can type". I discovered it's always helpful to distill your argument into a single sound bite, preferably one that gets a laugh. It always did, including the two times I testified to Congress about it.
