British Prime Minister Boris Johnson decided to side with the Chinese dictatorship and sever its special relationship with the United States and her allies with his decision to allow Huawei to help build portions of the U.K.’s 5G network.
The U.S. has been aided in its aim to lock the Chinese tech giant out of its global national security apparatus by most allies, with nations such as Australia and Japan already forbidding Huawei from any sort of public or network projects. But the Trump administration has struggled to convince key European allies to ban the national security threat from crucial communications apparatuses.
Under the Chinese National Intelligence Law, even so-called “private” firms such as Huawei must comply with the Chinese government in cooperating with state intelligence work. This means that if Huawei were allowed to help develop portions of the U.K.’s 5G infrastructure, Beijing could compel the firm to hand over network data that would threaten Britain’s national security.
Thus, Johnson’s decision not to stick it to the Chinese could prove fatal to our longstanding national security ties across the pond. The U.K. says that it’ll still limit Huawei’s reach in theory, barring them from work on safety-related and safety-critical networks and capping Huawei’s market share at 35%. But Huawei has the ability to build cybersecurity back doors, and biometric and individual location data are already valuable to the Chinese government. At worst, Huawei will now gain the ability to hack British intelligence outright and disrupt infrastructure connected by 5G’s internet of things. At best, Huawei will have the ability to conduct mass surveillance abroad.
Tie this in with the fact that China is already imprisoning millions of its Muslim citizens in concentration camps, subjecting all 1.4 billion of its own citizens to authoritarian rule, and actively attempting to attack American sovereignty and that of our allies. Johnson has made a horrible mistake, one that surely means the Trump administration will have to curtail its national security correspondence with the U.K., a decision that’s overwhelmingly justified, given the reality of our increasingly evident cold war with China.
