December 29, 2018

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.

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