US invites humiliation over Huawei

The decision by Telefonica Deutschland on Wednesday to pick Nokia of Finland and China's Huawei to build its 5G network flies in the face of the entreaties of the United States, which has tried hard to dissuade its European allies from joining hands with China's Huawei in building their 5G networks, even threatening its allies it would not share intelligence with them.

Cooperation with the network vendors would be subject to both receiving the necessary certification in Germany, Telefonica Deutschland said in a statement.

Although Germany has yet to finalize security rules governing equipment suppliers, this decision, given Huawei's position as the leading supplier of the most advanced equipment for 5G networks, should have been anticipated.

Despite increasing pressure from the US, Germany maintains that it will not exclude any individual company or actor from the bidding process for 5G equipment.

It is not that Telefonica Deutschland has not heard the US claims that Huawei poses a security threat and so it should be excluded from critical network infrastructure. It is because the US has never provided any evidence that Huawei's equipment poses a threat to its national security. The entire world knows what the US is trying to achieve by doing whatever it can to strangle the development of the Chinese company.

It just cannot accept the reality that Huawei's development as the leading supplier of the world's most advanced equipment for 5G networks poses a threat to its hegemony as the leading technology power.

Nor can it accept the fact that Huawei is a company from China, which the US now considers to be a strategic rival, and one that has the potential of overtaking it as a leading power.

It is therefore out of consideration for geopolitics that the US cannot accept the rise of Huawei as a telecommunications technology giant. It simply cannot accept the rise of China as a technology superpower.

National security is anything but a real reason for the US to exclude an increasing number of Chinese companies from its own market.

It should not be hard for its European allies to see what the US is up to. The US' unreasonable requirement that they not use Huawei equipment in their 5G networks constitutes an interference in these countries' internal affairs as they are perfectly capable of deciding on their own whether or not Huawei poses a security threat.

On the question of Huawei, the US is inviting humiliation.