Simply banning things causes the price to go up. That alone is good enough to motivate the policy decision.

> Simply banning things causes the price to go up. That alone is good enough to motivate the policy decision.

No twice.

First, banning them doesn't necessarily even make the price go up. If all you have to do to get the product is put someone else's name on the form, that raises the price by a number that rounds to zero. It probably costs your own companies more in bureaucracy and paperwork to try to enforce the pointless rules than it costs the other one to put a different name on the form.

Second, suppose it actually worked somehow. What happens then? The other country pays the higher price temporarily while throwing out some big government subsidies to develop a domestic version of the technology. Soon your own companies have a new foreign competitor in the world market which is receiving large government subsidies.

Export controls are a failed policy.

> That alone is good enough to motivate the policy decision.

This may work when its against an smaller. When deployed agianst a (near) peer - there usually isn't a price to high for a field of national security interest. China could get all the GPUs it wants / the US could get all the rare-earth magnets it wants over the objections of the other country.