Beltway Confidential

How the US should respond to Britain’s Huawei 5G decision

By Tom Rogan
Published January 28, 2020 4:30pm ET
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How the US should respond to Britain’s Huawei 5G decision
A man walks past a Huawei retail shop in Shenzhen, China's Guangdong province, Thursday, March 7, 2019. Chinese tech giant Huawei is challenging a U.S. law that labels the company a security risk and would limit its access to the American market for telecom equipment. | (Kin Cheung/AP)

Britain made a bad decision on Tuesday to allow Huawei to build out its 5G network, but the United States can mitigate the damage.

The central concern: Huawei is not actually a communications provider in the vein of Verizon or AT&T. It is actually a Chinese intelligence cutout. Correspondingly, Huawei’s ultimate authority does not begin and end with its CEO Ren Zhengfei and its executive board but rather with Xi Jinping. And Huawei’s strategic objective is not maximized profit and service delivery, but the provision of that service as a cover for Chinese intelligence service interception and disruption of communications.

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Tag:

Boris Johnson Britain China Huawei NSA Xi Jinping