Trump Admin. to Extract Military, Intelligence Assets from U.K. over Britain’s Huawei Deal
The Trump Administration’s National Security Council
launched a review this week of what military and intelligence assets will be
withdrawn from Great Britain if the U.K. goes ahead with its 5G deal with
Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
U.S. officials told Bloomberg’s Eli Lake that the assessment
is being conducted in response to Huawei “putting smart antennas and computers
run by the Chinese Communist Party all over our closest ally.”
In January, Boris Johnson’s government announced that the
U.K. would allow Huawei — which is charged in the U.S. with racketeering,
fraud, and intellectual property theft — to help build the country’s 5G network,
despite intense diplomatic pressure from the Trump administration to resist the
Chinese.
President Trump reportedly “tore into” Johnson in a phone
call over the deal, as the U.S. has warned allies in the past that there would
be consequences for dealing with Huawei, but has struggled to come up with 5G
alternatives to the Chinese giant.
“If a country adopts this [Huawei technology] and puts it in
some of their critical information systems, we won’t be able to share
information with them, we won’t be able to work alongside them,” Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo said last February. “In some cases there’s risk — we won’t
even be able to co-locate American resources, an American embassy, an American
military outpost.”
Britain has insisted that Huawei will not have access to
sensitive intelligence and the core network “control plane,” but U.S. officials
are still worried that proximity risks posed to U.S. assets in the U.K, and are
looking at potentially halting deals over military and intelligence equipment
over the move.
In the wake of Johnson’s announcement, a group of
parliamentarians from his own party have voiced their opposition to the Huawei
deal and may scuttle it entirely, according to Financial Times.
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