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
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