Going it Alone

The news hit the White House with a deafening thud: the United Kingdom would allow Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, to build the backbone of its next-generation telecommunications network. Known as 5G, the network was expected to be up to a hundred times faster than its predecessor, ushering in a new era of connectivity that would enmesh everything from refrigerators to factory robots to autonomous weapons in a so-called Internet of Things. The Trump administration believed that if this new era were built on a foundation of Huawei technology, China would gain an enormous advantage in its deepening geopolitical standoff with the United States.

It was April 24, 2019. Springtime in Washington was in its full glory. Yet Matt Pottinger, the top China expert at the Trump National Security Council (NSC), was in a dark mood. Over the past two years, he had painstakingly engineered a major shift in U.S. policy toward China — a pivot that was slowly but surely taking hold in the national security bureaucracy. Washington had finally accepted that Beijing’s “peaceful rise” was not so peaceful after all. China was an adversary, and the U.S. was reorienting its foreign policy to confront the threat.

Britain’s decision to hitch its digital future to Huawei imperiled all that. Officially, Huawei was a private Chinese tech company, but it also served as a de facto arm of the Chinese government and as an executor of Beijing’s geopolitical agenda. Any sensitive data traversing Huawei’s 5G equipment — its base stations, antennas and switches — was well within the reach of China’s massive surveillance apparatus. Worse, U.S. officials feared that the global spread of Huawei equipment could one day enable Beijing to disrupt its enemies’ economies and military operations from afar. After much of the world became dependent on Huawei to run its cities, industrial plants and even militaries, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could paralyze whole societies to impose its will.

Britain was the United States’ closest ally, so its embrace of Huawei over strong objections from the White House was bad news. Other Western countries looking to build 5G infrastructure would now feel encouraged to follow suit, attracted by Huawei’s technological expertise and relative affordability. “If we couldn’t persuade the Brits,” recalled John Bolton, Donald Trump’s national security advisor, “we weren’t going to persuade anybody else in Europe.” And if Huawei equipment formed the spine of the world’s 5G networks, the CCP would obtain a geopolitical asset matched only by the U.S. dollar — an economic and political kill switch of global reach.

Read the full article on The Wire China.