Jeremy Warner:

If anything this could be a kind of ‘Sputnik moment’, when the West wakes up to its lost technological lead

First things first; matters of national security must always take priority over commercial and trade considerations. It is obviously the case that if using Huawei equipment in 5G mobile phone networks endangers our security, then it doesn’t matter how much we might want to cosy up to the Chinese in the hope of exploiting its fast-growing markets, it is these security concerns that must determine policy.

The heart of the matter is therefore whether Chinese involvement in 5G infrastructure does indeed amount to such a threat. And even if it does not, whether use of such equipment might nevertheless endanger long-standing Western alliances and intelligencesharing arrangements, and therefore amount to much the same thing.

The second of these questions is easier to answer than the first. The Trump administration regards use of Huawei equipment in next-generation mobile phone networks as a clear and

present danger, and threatens to withdraw co-operation with nations it considers compromised by such use.

But it is equally the case that a sovereign, medium-sized economy such as the UK cannot afford to be drawn into America’s state of overblown paranoia about the rise of China. Our future prosperity is as dependent on Chinese markets as American ones. Even President Trump would recognise that a fully independent Britain does not necessarily have to take the same view as him on all things.

Yet on Chinese containment, he does seem to expect a degree of loyalty. Those who side with the US will be rewarded, his envoys say, while those who don’t will find themselves ostracised. Trade is at the forefront of this growing balkanisation of international affairs. The commercially driven globalisation of the past 30 years is fast fragmenting into a small number of increasingly protectionist trading blocs, the most important of which are the US, China and the European Union, each with its own standards and exclusive way of doing things. Nations are being forced to choose between one orbit or another.

We can argue about who is responsible; to my mind, a stealing, cheating China that doesn’t play by the rules and is hubristically intent on geopolitical empire-building bears a large part of the blame. But whoever it is, the standoff bodes badly for all involved.

It’s amazing how quickly Huawei, a name hardly anyone had heard of six months ago, has turned those who previously knew nothing about the subject into apparent cyber security experts, able with only the scantiest of knowledge of data-driven technology to hold forth on how these systems might and can be compromised.

In the brave new world of 5G, we are told, even the tiniest piece of peripheral Huawei equipment, whether in the core or only in the masts and base stations, is likely to make us vulnerable to Chinese interference and spying. I don’t pretend any such expertise but I am prepared to trust those at GCHQ who do know what they are talking about, and have assessed the risk to be manageable. To ignore this advice is to allow political prejudice and instinct to triumph over impartial expert opinion.

It is unfortunate that Theresa May’s wider loss of authority has allowed what is a perfectly sensible, if ineptly handled, decision to be turned into another supposed instance of Government incompetence and misjudgment. By allowing Huawei non-core involvement it in fact achieves just the right balance.

None of this is lightly to dismiss the concerns of security chiefs about potential damage to relations with our most important ally. This has to be a defining consideration. But the fact is that on almost every front, the 5G phenomenon, which is ultimately about no more than squeezing a lot more data through the same amount of spectrum, has been massively overhyped and is really not as big a deal as widely imagined.

The risk of Chinese spying is easily countered by simply writing into contracts immediate confiscation and exclusion if even the remotest evidence of such activity comes to light. Is it really credible that China would attempt to blackmail the UK by threatening to compromise the network in the event of a wider dispute or deterioration in relations? To do so would be commercial suicide not just for Huawei but for all Chinese companies operating in the West.

If there is one positive out of all this, it is that it might act as what others have called a kind of “Sputnik moment”, the point at which the West finally wakes up to the fact that it is losing its leadership role in the defining technologies of the future, and needs urgently to do something about it. Never mind the security risk, having to rely on single foreign monopoly suppliers, Chinese or otherwise, for critical infrastructure is symptomatic of a much broader Western failing. Trump’s “American AI Initiative”, presumably deliberately named as a symbolic challenge to China’s faltering “Belt and Road Initiative”, flags artificial intelligence as the new space race. All competition is good, so bring it on.