U.S. Space Program Losing Partners Fast Due to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)

The same legal regime that has been preventing the licensing of SpaceShipOne technology to Virgin Galactic has now chased off the European Space Agency.
ITAR--International Traffic in Arms Regulations--was intended to protect militarily sensitive U.S. projects from any foreign government, foe or ally. Now, through some strange circumstance, it is suddenly being used to prevent cooperation on Space projects.
Despite prior agreements, NASA may be faced with abandoning the International Space Station partly because of its inability to share information with its international partners, Russian, Europe and Japan, and also because it wants those countries it shares with to promise not to share at all with certain other countries.
A true political quagmire disguised as an effort to protect our security when all it's doing is making us more isolated and causing more distrust among what few allies we have left.