INSIGHTFUL OPINIONS
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Huawei vs Trump
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Week of 29th June 2020
Should Trump have banned Huawei and pressured others to do so? To understand whether the US will benefit from the Huawei ban, one needs to understand why the ban took place.
Trump (and previous administrations including Democratic presidents) had always claimed that Huawei was a security threat. From a national security point of view, that is a very justified reason to ban a company from entering the communication networks of a country. However, as mentioned by Microsoft’s President and Chief Legal Officer, it seems that the US government has actually not been able to provide proof that Huawei did indeed pose a security threat. Meanwhile, putting aside Trump’s terrible policy of mixing security with trade negotiations, there are real cost to technology development for banning Huawei.
Please find below interesting arguments as to why countries should not ban Huawei:
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Russell Brandom’s “Trump’s latest explanation for the Huawei ban is unacceptably bad”
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The Editorial Board of FT’s “Barring Huawei from Britain’s 5G is too costly to justify”
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Thomas L. Friedman’s “Huawei has a plan to end its war with Trump”
From the web:
From our Chief Opinionator:
The collateral damage that is Huawei and the Canadians
The Huawei ban has been ongoing for close to a couple of years at this point but it was only recently that after over 500 days of arrest, two Canadians were indicted of espionage. I am not going to argue whether Meng Wanzhou of Huawei did commit fraud, or whether Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor did commit security charges. The timing is just too coincidental to not suspect the high correlation between the two, especially given recent (unfruitful) discussion of exchange. It is therefore clear that these individuals are collateral damage to the war that is ongoing between Donald Trump and China.
You may ask why would Meng Wanzhou be a collateral damage? My first reaction would be that should the US truly suspects Huawei for breaching US sanctions, shouldn’t US be pursuing legal action against the company and not against an individual? Any financial institutions that were found to have breached US sanctions had been fined large sums, not arrest of CFO transiting through another country. So yes, the 48 year old mother of four, is indeed collateral damage in my opinion.
No physical wars have taken place so far since the escalation between Trump and China, but innocent lives are being hurt, from the three above mentioned, to the jobs lost due to the $11bn that is no longer made by US firms due to the Huawei ban.
From the way Trump has handled the pandemic, it’s clear to all that Americans lives don’t matter. But for other countries, they shouldn’t neglect one other consideration on top of competitiveness or national security, that is whether their lives is worth being the collateral damage of Trump’s lunacy.