WARSAW, Poland — European governments might have to choose between Beijing and Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned this week, as Chinese telecommunications companies pose an ever-greater threat to Western militaries in air and space, a threat other NATO countries acknowledge.
Pompeo put a particular focus on Huawei and other telecom giants with connections to Chinese espionage services as he traveled through Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland Monday and Tuesday to relay U.S. concern over Beijing’s encroachment in the region. Huawei, the world’s second-largest maker of smartphones, is racing to pioneer 5G, the fifth-generation wireless technology that promises to be exponentially faster than its predecessor and could provide a point-of-entry into America’s most sensitive technologies. Europe is currently the biggest foreign market for Huawei, whose equipment President Trump might soon ban by executive order from U.S. networks.
“With respect to Chinese infrastructure delivered via Huawei, we’ve done here in Poland what we’ve done all across the world: We’ve made known the risks that are associated with that, risks to the private information of the citizens of the country, risk that comes from having that technology installed in network and systems,” Pompeo said in Warsaw in response to a question from the Washington Examiner. “Individual countries then will make their own choices.”
He immediately added, “We’ve also made clear that if they make a certain set of decisions that it will be more difficult for the United States Department of Defense to work alongside of them — that is, we’ll never put our equipment in a place which would present risk to our technology from having Chinese technology collocated alongside of it that presents a risk.”
Poland houses Huawei’s headquarters for Central and Eastern Europe and the Nordics, and a Huawei employee was arrested for spying there last month. But China is increasing its investment all over the region, and the United States has taken note.
“The Slovaks just bought F16s,” a senior State Department official told reporters Tuesday. “We’re working with them on avoiding Huawei in certain areas of their economy.”
Pompeo touted the sale of the 14 modernized fighter jets to supplant aging Soviet-made warplanes as a move that will “open the door to expanded defense cooperation” with the country. But in the same breath he warned against cooperation with the Chinese company in a region where Huawei hotspots seem as common as Xfinity’s in the United States. NATO allies understood the concern even before Pompeo arrived in Central Europe ahead of the Warsaw summit on the Middle East that kicks off Wednesday.
“We have a choice between networks based on U.S. satellites or Chinese satellites,” a European official discussing Pompeo’s trip told the Washington Examiner. “Europe is going to have to make a choice because you can’t have both. … It just makes spying so much easier.”
Pompeo doesn’t have time to lose in beating the drum over Huawei, as space industry observers foresee “an inflection point” in 5G technology developing over the next two years. “At 2020, it is going to get more common globally,” ABI Research’s Emanuel Kolta told Space News in October. The pervasiveness of 5G technology — designed to network numerous existing devices, sometimes through a technique that “cuts out central control of a network entirely,” as MIT’s Technology Review described it — will make it difficult to guard against through half-measures.
A quick round of meetings didn’t get the job done, as one of Pompeo’s counterparts publicly chafed at the idea his government would have to choose between his partners in Beijing and Washington.
“We are NATO allies,” Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto maintained during a Monday press conference. “When it comes to cooperation with Russia or cooperation with the People’s Republic of China, that doesn’t endanger us being a reliable ally to the United States and to NATO.”
Still, Pompeo seemed optimistic that his arguments would eventually carry the day. “Our task is to make them aware of the concerns and risks and show them the data,” he told reporters in Bratislava. “And when they see those, I’m confident they’ll make good decisions for their own nation.”
