The U.K.’s Grave Huawei Mistake

After months of deliberation, the U.K. National Security Council has invited Chinese telecom giantHuawei to build and operate parts of its 5G mobile-network infrastructure. American authorities had cautioned the U.K. against doing business with Huawei, citing the company’s history of unlawful activity and its potential for espionage and warfare. That led Japan and Australia to follow America’s lead in banning Huawei. But British authorities believe they can mitigate these risks by keeping Huawei out of the parts of the “telecoms network that are critical to security” and by capping the company’s U.K. market share at 35 percent.This third way between confrontation and appeasement is a fool’s errand that will jeopardize the U.K.’s national security and undermine the U.S.–U.K. relationship.

As we have previously noted, Huawei has a long and well-documented history of nefarious practices. In January 2019, the Justice Department issued indictments against Huawei for theft of trade secrets and for attempting to evade American sanctions against Iran. These findings were doubly alarming given the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) direct assistance of Huawei. FBI director Christopher Wray said at the time that “the immense influence that the Chinese government holds over Chinese corporations like Huawei represents a threat” to national security.

The British justification for this decision — that Huawei already operates large amounts of the country’s network infrastructure — in fact illustrates the Faustian bargain the U.K. is making. The more the country entangles itself with Chinese companies, the more difficult it will be to extricate itself if they prove malicious.

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See Also:

(1) Germany’s Selective Fight against Anti-Semitism

(2) Nigel Farage gives two year prediction for ‘beginning of the end’ for EU

(3) EU ROW: Spain to confront France and Germany as Brexit exposes huge power vacuum

(4) EU on brink: How bloc is ‘beginning gradual decline’ as UK exit looms

(5) US official brands UK-Huawei deal ‘biggest strategic defeat since beginning of WW2’