> What's the publicly stated/marketing reason for capitalist America to put companies on the Entity List?

“Capitalism” is (as a result of propaganda by its defenders after it was named and accurately described by its socialist critics) often mistaken for a dedication to free trade, but capitalism is a regime characterized first and foremost by society being organized around the interests of the capital-holding class, the first of which is the preservation of the situation in which society is organized around the interests of that class. The reasons companies are put on the Entity List is because they are broadly seen as a threat (long-term or immediate) to the continuation of that regime. That’s what the “foreign policy and national security interests” that form the official basis of the Entity List ultimately, generally, boil down to, in one way or another.

(They don’t always boil down to that, because why the US is basically a capitalist system, it is not purely one, and even in a more pure capitalist regime, individual influential decision-makers may have other interests that they act on besides the implementation and preservation of capitalism that end up getting reflected in policy.)