Education Quote by Charles Foster Bass

A question like this isn’t looking for an answer so much as it’s staging an indictment. Bass frames the Clinton-era policy as willful negligence: the key word is "even". It turns a technocratic debate about export controls into a morality play about what a responsible government does once it "learned" of theft. The grammar is prosecutorial, designed to compress uncertainty into guilt and to suggest that any continued liberalization wasn’t merely arguable policy, but a breach of common sense.

The specific intent is political leverage. By pairing "Clinton Administration" with "sensitive technologies" and "China had stolen designs", Bass activates a potent late-1990s/early-2000s anxiety cocktail: globalization moving faster than oversight, post-Cold War optimism curdling into strategic regret, and the suspicion that Democrats were too cozy with corporate interests and too trusting of Beijing. It’s also a neat act of narrative bundling: export liberalization (often justified as helping US firms compete) gets rhetorically fused with espionage, so the policy looks less like economic strategy and more like enabling a rival.

The subtext is that elites chose commerce over security, and did so after being warned. That "after it learned" clause implies inside knowledge, ignored briefings, and a culture of denial. It’s the kind of question built for a hearing room or a cable-news chyron: it doesn’t invite nuance about interagency disputes, ambiguous intelligence, or the difference between commercial satellites and crown-jewel weapons tech. It invites a verdict.