Donald Trump tried to prod Germany to ban the Chinese tech giant, but former Chancellor Angela Merkel defied him. As Germany grows increasingly anxious about China, Biden is trying to do the same with Merkel’s successor.
Four and a half years ago, former President Donald Trump’s crusade to pressure U.S. allies into banning the Chinese tech company Huawei ran into a wall of resistance in Berlin.
What followed was a burst of lucrative contracts between the Chinese tech giant and German telecommunications firms: Huawei is in the midst of constructing 5G infrastructure throughout the country, connecting Germany with Europe and the U.S. “To believe that the installation of Huawei technology is unproblematic is infinite naivety,” one senior German intelligence official said in an interview.
Those warnings have intensified in severity and broadened in scope since 2019, an investigation by POLITICO and WELT has found. But there is serious concern on both sides of the Atlantic that Huawei — which has a multibillion-euro business in Germany — is already so embedded in German telecommunications networks that the government will resist taking strong action against it.
For its part, Huawei — whose European headquarters is in Germany — vigorously denies the notion that its gear is uniquely vulnerable to subversion, and that it is beholden to Beijing. In March, Germany’s Interior Ministry launched a probe of gear made by Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese equipment maker, in the country’s telecommunications networks, and signaled the review could lead to tighter restrictions on the two companies.
“Pounding your fists on the table and saying, ‘My way or the highway,’ is not always the most effective diplomatic strategy,” a senior official in the U.S. State Department, granted anonymity to discuss a matter of national security, told POLITICO. “But make no mistake, the pressure, if anything, has ramped up.”
Those dependencies have led the country’s mobile providers to warn that removing Huawei equipment nationwide would hamper German economic growth, costing roughly four-to-five billion euros. There is also a fear that strong action on Huawei could invite blowback from China — and not without good reason.
Most of U.S.’s closest allies have banned or restricted Huawei. That includes all five members of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing partnership — the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, along with the U.S. — and Japan, Taiwan and France. The European Commission is also urging more EU countries to curb the firm’s access to their markets, with 10 EU countries having done so already.
“It was clear to me always that the Germans were actually not afraid we’d cut off intelligence to them,” said Turpin, now a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “If China has an advantage in the infrastructure layer, that confers an advantage in all the other application layers that are built on top of it,” Gorman continued. “And that’s why this decision is so critical.”The Trump administration launched its pressure campaign against Huawei in 2018 due to three overlapping concerns.
Finally, backed by dirt-cheap prices and increasingly competitive manufacturing, Huawei was gobbling up contracts to build those networks across the globe — thus extending the risks of data theft and cyber-physical disruption deeper into the capitals of key U.S. allies, like Berlin. Germans felt their telecommunications network was “an embarrassment,” Steinman said, and that Huawei’s bargain deals offered the quickest route to fixing that. | Arne Dedert/AFP via Getty ImagesBy 2018, Huawei already had a large footprint in Germany’s older telecommunications networks. Barring it from the nation’s 5G — as the U.S. wanted — meant mobile operators would slowly have to phase out older Huawei equipment, too.
If Trump was asking a lot of the Germans, he did the same elsewhere across Europe. And in Prague, Paris, and — after significant hesitation — London, U.S. allies agreed the risks stemming from Huawei gear could only be addressed through targeted restrictions against it. Often, the costs of boxing the firm out of 5G networks weren’t nearly as bad as the firm had warned.
The Germans defended their approach, in part, by arguing that the U.S. had no evidence Huawei did anything wrong. “For such serious decisions like a ban, you need proof,” Arne Schönbohm, Germany’s then-top cybersecurity official, told news weekly Spiegel in December of 2018. Huawei denies that that law — China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law — mandates that it assist the country’s intelligence services. “Huawei has obtained various legal opinions on the subject, all of which agree that it is not subject to any legal provisions that could bring it into conflict with German laws,” Berger, the Huawei spokesperson, said in an email.
For Turpin, the former NSC official, Germany’s apprehensions of Chinese bullying were proof of the very point the U.S. was trying to make. Whether it was blunt economic pressure or technically sophisticated cyberattacks, relying heavily on Huawei meant making yourself vulnerable to Chinese coercion. “Merkel is looking at this through the lens of, first of all, I’m not going to side with Donald Trump. And second of all, I am not going to jeopardize our economic relationship with Beijing,” he said.
The letter, which leaked to reporters, was followed by repeated public warnings from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, when the two were in Germany. “When one of your major trading partners, when one of your major military allies, is doing things that are contrary to their national interest — and as an ally, things that are contrary to yours, too — you say something,” he said. “I wouldn’t call that brash, I would call that honest.”
“The idea that a solemn monument that is supposed to look at the full crimes and challenges of the Second World War had turned into an advertisement for Huawei, it was like, ‘Guys, this is what we mean,’” Turpin said. “The Ukraine invasion has prompted this realization that depending on autocrats for critical infrastructure is just not sustainable,” said Gorman, the former member of Biden’s national security council.
Merkel and the former German cybersecurity chief, Schönbohm, had previously argued that mobile operators could mitigate the risks of using Huawei gear through rigorous testing and security monitoring, especially of equipment used in the most critical part of the network, known as the “core.” In separate interviews for this story, the two senior German intelligence officials likened the country’s continued reliance on Huawei RAN to its disastrous investment in the Russian natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream II.
German security authorities have presented alleged evidence of vulnerabilities in Huawei gear to German parliamentarians only one time, during a classified session of the Bundestag’s Digital Committee in April, two individuals familiar with the meeting told POLITICO and WELT.
But the German government has bypassed every opportunity to invoke the law against Huawei or ZTE since then. It has declined three separate opportunities to block new critical components from the Chinese firms from being introduced into critical parts of Germany’s mobile network, as documents disclosed in a September parliamentary inquiry revealed.
“With each new installation, it becomes more difficult to remove these Chinese components from our mobile network,” Reinhard Brandl, a member of the opposition CSU party, said in an interview. Barclays has estimated a requirement to replace all Huawei RAN would cost all three major mobile operators $2.6 billion. The German national railway company Deutsche Bahn, whose deal with Huawei covers a different mobile communications technology than 5G, has said a blanket ban on its gear would cost it $420 million.
“Unfortunately, these networks take so long to change, it’s almost harder to turn them off than to reverse course on something like Nord Stream II,” she said. “And that’s why the planning needs to happen now, before we get into a crisis scenario.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai have attended each ministerial meeting, where they met with European Commission Executive Vice Presidents Valdis Dombrovskis and Margrethe Vestager. Publicly, cabinet-level officials within the Biden administration — and the president himself — have not talked nearly as much about Huawei as their predecessors in the White House.
Several former U.S. officials question whether President Joe Biden’s quiet outreach to Germany is sufficient to move the needle on Huawei. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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