Rather Suspicious Timing

This arrest of Meng Wanzhou doesn’t sit well with me.  I got an email early in the morning and automatically wrote a friend who works in Huawei to say as much.  I don’t know and we may never know all the details of her relationship with this subsidiary Skycom, and whether she had control over it, whether they willfully sought to deceive HSBC, etc.  and to surreptitiously sell to Iran. 

But potential culpability notwithstanding, we can’t get around the fact that is all rather suspicious timing.  The U.S. Checker Player in Chief has meeting with Xi Jinping in Argentina last week and agrees halt further tariffs, so that the U.S. and China can work through some sort of agreement over the next ninety days.  The following week the daughter of the founder of China’s most successful international organization is detained.  We are all told that Trump didn’t know.  Bolton knew.  That’s reassuring.  

We had one Iran policy under Bush.  We had another policy under Obama and now, still another under Trump.  Sanctions were imposed, sanctions were lifted, and re-imposed.  One might suggest there was at least some ambiguity here on what official U.S. policy was.   Even if the policy was crystal clear and Huawei played in a grey area, the notion that you effectively kidnap someone whom you may or may not choose to release as part of a negotiation strategy seems more like the thuggery we’d expect to see from North Korea.  We’re told that the administration’s right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing and it sounds spurious.  Whether Trump knew or not is immaterial.  This was certainly coordinated, and discussed by people involved in the trade negotiations ahead of time.  To suggest otherwise is an even greater slight of unprofessionalism: how could they not have been aware?

A trade war can easily metastasize into a real war.  This is meant as a deliberate slight to China, certainly.  Huawei may have stolen Cisco code in its early years.  Just like Samsung stole from Toshiba and Toshiba stole from the U.S. and New England stole from old England when it first built a textile industry.  But does anyone really believe Huawei won telco infrastructure bids in the Finland, home of Nokia, and Sweden, home of Ericsson, because they were simply cheaper?  No.  They offered a better all-around solution.  They compete well internationally,  leveraging their home market, just like any American company would, and they have developed their own large IP portfolio which, like Toshiba or Samsung, they too now want to protect.  If we continue to rectify imbalanced trade by seeking to destroy companies, first ZTE and now Huawei, we cede any high ground we may once have had when we say we never use our national intelligence for commercial gain.   It feels like we just hit the accelerator on a race to the bottom. 

Thursday 12/06/18