Now we wait for the next US government vs Huawei 5G war.

But, by then, when the time comes, the world could be a very different place ...

'We were trying to make the case': Pompeo got nowhere with push to keep Huawei out of the UK

by Joel Gehrke | January 30, 2020 05:17 PM

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to allow Huawei to provide the United Kingdom’s next generation of wireless technology has prompted nervous U.S. officials to raise a new question: How soon can they be replaced?

"These decisions about technology are continuous," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday in London. "Two, three, five years later, you rip them out and put new systems in. You constantly upgrade software — real time. And so, the decision was made on Tuesday, but I am confident as we work together to figure out how to implement that decision that we’ll work to get this right."

Johnson’s announcement this week was a blow for Pompeo, who spent the last year warning countries that Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications giants are tools of Beijing’s spy agencies. Even during his flight to London, Pompeo held out hope that Johnson might change course, but that’s an unlikely prospect, even though the prime minister’s party is deeply skeptical of the Chinese technology company.

“The government is unlikely to face a significant rebellion at this point,” an adviser to a senior Tory member of Parliament told the Washington Examiner. “Now the decision has been taken, there is nothing MPs can do, I think, bar keep pressure on government to get Huawei out of next-generation tech.”

“Make no mistake, we had an objective,” Pompeo said during a public discussion with British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. “We were trying to make the case, as we have made the case to every country in the world, that we think putting Huawei technology anywhere in your system is very, very difficult to mitigate and therefore not worth the candle.”

The new U.K. policy caps the market share of Huawei and other companies at 35% of the 5G market. Johnson’s team hopes that the British economy can be weaned off Huawei and other companies after deriving the initial economic benefits of the cut-rate and cutting-edge technology.

“That’s the plan, but the timescale is not clear — probably deliberately so,” the adviser to the British lawmaker said.

Raab, who unveiled the decision on Tuesday to wary lawmakers, echoed Pompeo’s sentiments about the need for new technology free of Chinese vulnerabilities.

“We ought to be looking to replace, in the future, high-risk vendors with high-trust vendors,” he said. “I mean, we talk about 5G; it’s going to be here for a period. What is the greater challenge for us is as the ongoing technological innovations happen and the evolution happens is that we think a bit more smartly and strategically.”

Raab understates the long-term danger posed by allowing Huawei and similar companies to enter the next-generation wireless market, according to China hawks in Washington.

“Their motivation is to gain leverage over you: leverage over your data, leverage over your economy, and leverage over your political decision-making,” Klon Kitchen, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “And they’ve just left the door wide open to all of that.”