So, Huawei (v2)...

I am no apologist for Huawei.

My tenure with the company damaged my reputation and career.

That aside, let’s face it, the company has proven itself unequipped to master its own global destiny, to own its own narrative.

Sure, Huawei will dominate China in terms of information communications technology (ICT).

And Africa.

Success in that latter market is almost certainly a result of collaboration with China’s government to develop and deploy the energy, transport, communications and financial infrastructure for the next generation source of low-cost labor.

(C’mon America, we used to do the same thing all over the planet, back when we had money and respect).

But, Huawei will be shunned elsewhere (well, maybe not their phones).

Why? 

Because America.

The American jihad to crucify the company is unjust and, ultimately, will result in terribly bad tidings for the U.S. ICT industry.

I’ve blogged for years about the hypocrisy of the American assault on the company, given that all ICT firms operate outside old-world geographic borders and are all equally subject to penetration and compromise.

The most recent Huawei development? The comical “criminal” investigation of the “Tappy” case that was settled in civil court years ago.

Did $100 billion dollar company Huawei really conspire to “steal” T-Mobile USA’s silly little robot technology that, literally “tapped” on cell phone screens to quality-test their functionality? 

Please.

Did Huawei screw up? 

Yeah, a couple of linear-minded engineers apparently “borrowed” the robot’s “finger” to determine why it produced results different than the Huawei robot finger.

Dumb. 

Crime of the century?  Hardly. 

Proof of Chinese theft of American “intellectual property?”  Oh for f*ck’s sake, of course not.  It’s a robot finger that taps on phone screens.  It ain’t rocket science.

So, what’s America doing?  And why?  I mean, it’s not like there’s a domestic industry to protect (sure, Cisco builds bits and pieces, but not full networks).

Is the U.S. so tight with Finland and Sweden that they need to nurture their ICT industries?  Nah.

So, WTF is going on?

Hard to tell, but, if I had to guess…

The Tappy case is just a momentum-builder. 

The early December detention of a Huawei executive (CFO Sabrina Meng) in Canada – and the more recent formal extradition request – have saturated the media, with daily updates, and as people have become numb to the Meng media overload, the Government needed to goose the Huawei witch-hunt again. 

Hence reviving the Tappy case.

The Government needs to keep the momentum hot because the next step, I believe, is almost certainly a conclusion to the two-plus year-old Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) investigation of Huawei’s purported illegal activities conducted through alleged shell partners in Iran ten years ago.

Timing is key.

The annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona is scheduled for the end of February.  MWC is the show to end all shows when it comes to the global wireless industry.

My guess (again): Between now and MWC, the U.S. will wrap up the BIS investigation with a negative finding and issue an order placing Huawei on the “Designated Entity” list, precluding U.S. companies from exporting to Huawei without license, requests for which can be expected to be denied.

In other words, if I’m right, they plan to humble and hobble Huawei going into the annual event in which many if not most major mobile industry deals are struck.

It’ll likely be a temporary measure, as it was with ZTE two years ago, but, again, timing is key, and it will hurt.

Or maybe I’m wrong…

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.