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Huawei: U.S. Gives U.K. Public Warning On Risk To Special Relationship

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On a visit to London this week, U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, left the U.K. government in no doubt as to the potential implications of their decision to allow Huawei into the country's 5G network. "Insufficient security will impede the United States’ ability to share certain information within trusted networks," he said. "This is just what China wants - to divide western alliances."

The U.K.'s dilemma on Huawei had been emphasized again this week ahead of Pompeo's visit.

First came the news that the company "is planning to build a 400-person chip research and development factory outside Cambridge, in the heart of the U.K.’s silicon chip industry and just a 15-minute drive from the headquarters of Arm Holdings." 

This was followed by hints at a delay to the country's critical 5G rollout. "There's certainly a possibility of a delay in the process of the rollout of 5G," U.K. Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright reportedly said during a parliamentary committee. "If you want to do 5G fastest, you do it without any consideration of security. We're not prepared to do that, so I don't exclude the possibility there will be some delay."

"China steals intellectual property for military purposes," Pompeo said in London. "It wants to dominate AI, space technology, ballistic missiles and many other areas. Why would anyone grant such power to a regime that has already grossly violated cyberspace? What can Her Majesty’s government do to make sure sensitive technologies don’t become open doors for Beijing’s spymasters?" Did this taunt include a reference to the Cambridge chip plant that may well also develop AI for Huawei?

According to a report last month, "a partial or full restriction on the use of Huawei equipment or software in the U.K.’s telecoms supply chain could delay the national 5G mobile network roll-out by 18 months to two years, costing the U.K. between £4.5bn and £6.8bn in the process." 

And so it's as you were for the U.K. balancing the commercial and economic realities of a telecoms industry that is banking on imminent 5G deployments, which realistically will need some level of Huawei inclusion, versus the global security implications of a cooling relationship with the U.S.

"With respect to 5G," Pompeo said in London, "the United States has an obligation to ensure that the places we will operate, the places where American information is, the places where we have our national security risks, that they operate inside trusted networks... Each country has a sovereign right to make its own decision about how to deal with the challenge... I have great confidence that the UK will never take action that will break this special relationship."

While in London, Pompeo attended an event to mark the 40th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power, and he suggested that the "Iron Lady" would never bow to Chinese influence in the way the current government looked set to do. 

In response to Pompeo's comments, his U.K. counterpart, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, denied that a final decision had been taken, emphasizing that nothing should be allowed to compromise the U.K.'s intelligence-sharing arrangements with the U.S. Hunt was adamant that "we would never take a decision that compromised our ability to share intelligence with our Five Eyes colleagues, or particularly with the U.S. We are absolutely clear that the security relationship that we have with the US is what has underpinned the international order since 1945… the preservation of that is our number one foreign policy priority."

Further frank discussions continue within U.K. government today, one can assume.

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