So, Huawei...

I served this company for nearly 8 years.  I even wrote a book about the experience.

Huawei is getting a raw deal in the U.S., and globally, as a result of U.S. Government machinations.

Yet, Huawei bears not-insignificant fault for the situation.

Western intelligence services have yet to provide the slightest evidence of any untoward Huawei activity on behalf of the Chinese Government.  And, Huawei has done next to squat to prove them wrong.

I am, have always been, an internationalist.

I believe in interdependence as those Westerners did - led by the U.S. - in the wake of the Second World War.  Those that birthed the Bretton Woods Institutions: The World Bank, the IMF, the GATT (now WTO).

Their goal was to create a global system for stable trade and finance to ensure against the type of disruption that contributed so greatly to two damning World Wars.

Those visions have been supplanted by time and, now, old-school Cold War thinking rules the day.  Indeed, our current President almost certainly has no clue what Bretton Woods might be.

Instead of world stability and prosperity, this President is pushing for destabilizing conflict, and, given that he is compromised when it comes to Russia, he has chosen to focus on China.

There is some truth to U.S. concerns being expressed:  Are the Chinese spying on us?  Yes.  So are Russia and many of our allies.  Is China stealing intellectual property? Yeah, but not like 20 years ago - they've emerged instead as technology leaders.

Might China take down our critical infrastructure in times of tension?  Sure, but far more likely with high-altitude nuclear bursts which would spawn EMPs to knock out modernity as we know it, rather than clumsily harnessing ICT firms based or doing business in China.

Thanks to Mr. Snowden, we know how American companies were compromised to allow U.S. espionage and exploits - through service providers, a manageable conspiracy - but not through hardware/software players.  The latter would have been an unsustainable conspiracy in terms of taking down critical infrastructure, although its been successful in terms of conducting espionage.

So, is the West reeling as they wake up to potential Chinese technology leadership on a global basis?

Yes.

But the American jihad against companies like my former employer date back two-plus decades. It's just that over the last year or two the intelligence and defense careerists have stepped-up their efforts at home and abroad because there is simply no rational leadership coming from the White House or its crumbling Administration.

And yeah, Huawei has done itself zero favors.

Arrogance, hubris, pride, the imagination that Chinese national employees know best even when dealing with matters they frankly don't even begin to understand.  They claim to be a global-local company (how trite that has become).  They are not.

Until and unless Huawei diversifies its leadership and learns to trust and rely on non-Chinese national employees - both at headquarters and in the field - they will always be suspect, and they will be increasingly challenged, as we are seeing on a daily basis now.

But the U.S. strategy?  Blackball China-based vendors when all of the non-Chinese competitors are conducting R&D, coding and building in China? Madness.  There is no U.S. industry to do what Huawei, Nokia and Ericsson do.  Bits and pieces, sure, but that's all.

The danger inherent in the U.S. strategy is that we may force the only country on the planet that has the human, financial and technological resources to verticalize an information and communications technology (ICT) industry - China.

Wouldn't America want to have Western inputs into such an industry (Huawei procures over $10 billion dollars annually from U.S. suppliers to fuel its supply chain)?  Cutting them off is not just a commercial and employment headache, it precludes the U.S. from maintaining their own backdoors.

It's time to inject commercially and technologically and national-security based rational thinking into this debate, before it is too late.

Transitions...

Well, after just short of eight years with Huawei, they laid me off in April of this year, about five months ago.

Needless to say, getting laid off was a bit of a letdown after having devoted so many years to defending the company against its many detractors.

Some of my experiences are cataloged in the recently published book linked below.

https://www.amazon.com/Huidu-Inside-William-B-Plummer-ebook/dp/B07DHZDSYG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536171492&sr=1-1&keywords=huidu

Now it's time to find a new gig.

Is the End Game Approaching? Nah. Or?

It’s been a while. 

For anyone who has historically followed this blog, you may have stopped, as I wearied of posting. 

For those who are new to this blog, it began as a series of musings on family and technology, and open markets and an open Internet, and then evolved into an ongoing review of the U.S. Government’s quixotic assault on my employer of the last eight years – China-based Huawei Technologies. 

In the last year or two, I’ve gone relatively – not entirely - dormant.

One doesn’t have to read the last eight years of posts to follow this one, but it might help.

Huawei is an almost-30 year-old China-based tech company. 

It’s grown from a reseller of other company products, to researching and developing and producing it’s own product – an innovation and intellectual property powerhouse.

It’s now the world’s largest telecommunications equipment provider, the third largest smartphone provider globally, and, pretty much, the world’s leading information and communications technology (ICT) company.

Huawei doesn’t do it alone. 

Huawei, like every global ICT company, relies on a global supply chain, conducting R&D globally, partnering globally, procuring over $10 billion annually from U.S.-based suppliers alone.

But this ain’t about that.

This is about the U.S. Government having recently fired up an all-new campaign to block Huawei from the U.S.

Why?

Because Huawei is perceived as a threat to U.S. national security.

Bullshit.

Oh dear, Huawei is based in China and thus must be vulnerable to Chinese Government manipulation.

So too are Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, Microsoft and on and on, all of the U.S.-based and other Western companies that employ tens of thousands of Chinese in China to code and produce their solutions.

But the U.S. Government knows that.

They also know that they’ve penetrated all of these companies themselves, to compromise their solutions to enable espionage, intellectual property theft, etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations). 

Go figure.

They also know that the ICT industry is global and interdependent.  They know that there is no ICT company that is not researching, coding and building in China.

They know this.  They mourn this.  They want yesterday.  But that was then, this is now. 

America can choose to embrace the global ICT industry, or reject it and let it all gradually verticalize, likely in China, perhaps the only country which can currently afford to do that in terms of human, capital and technological resources.

That, of course, would NOT be in our national security interests.

But arrogance abounds.

Let’s recap how the U.S. Government has, over the last 10 years, deterred Huawei's market access, and, indirectly, adversely impacted U.S. telecom carriers, investors, suppliers, and consumers.

• In early 2010, National Security authorities pressured AT&T executives away from selecting Huawei’s network gear for its 4G upgrade project.
• In late 2010, the then-Secretary of Commerce similarly pressured Sprint’s CEO to stop considering Huawei from purchasing Huawei gear for it’s network upgrade.  This cost Sprint billions, and factored into its ultimate sale to a foreign-based owner.
• In 2011, CFIUS further chilled Huawei’s prospects by unwinding a transaction which posed "national security" concerns due to a "sensitive technology" which the Government later declined accepting as a donation as the technology was of no interest.
• In 2012 Huawei suffered humiliation as a result of a sham of a national security Congressional Investigation that The Economist best captured at the time as "written for vegetarians."
• The machinations got more clever in 2014-2016, e.g. in the CFIUS approval of Softbank-Sprint, which called for sweeping Huawei from Clearwire, but more importantly requiring Government approval of “new” venders.  
• The FCC put a similar provision in the Metro PCS-T-Mo spectrum license transfer.
• More recently, in December 2017, a passel of Congressfolk wrote to the FCC warning against the sale of Huawei smartphones to AT&T. Nonsense.  And they knew it.  A PR stunt.  It worked, AT&T scuttled the deal rather than risk rejection of its Time Warner acquisition.
• In early January, 2018, the House introduced HR4747 which, in part, would ban government entities from contracting with any commercial entity that contracts with Huawei - an effective de facto ban.
• And just this week, Reuters reported that unnamed Congressional aides said that the intent on the Hill was to block all AT&T (and presumably other U.S. carrier) dealings with Huawei.

What a load of crap (much of which has been detailed in this blog over the years).

As referenced above, and reflected ad nauseum in this blog over the years, the ICT industry is global, interdependent and transnational – whatever vulnerabilities that may exist are universal, and suggestions otherwise are outright ignorant, and dangerously misleading.

Look, I’m not saying that the Chinese are not spying on us, or us on them, or the Russians on both us, or the Israelis on all of us, or any other State on any other.

I’m just saying that the U.S. Defense and Intelligence community has seemingly abandoned reality.

They are the ones driving this absurdity.  They know better.

The U.S. founded a system of fair and open markets and trade in the wake of the second World War, in large part to bolster global security, our national security.

The U.S. is now in the process of undermining the very global and national security we hoped to secure.

But that’s just my opinion.