How Trump won over Europe on 5G
The former US president’s tactic of cutting China out of next-generation cellphone networks has paid off.
www.politico.eu
"When we took it over in March, the Huawei president announced 91 deals, half of them in Europe, and it looked like they were going to run the table," Keith Krach, the former U.S. undersecretary of state who led the Trump administration’s effort to convince countries to drop Chinese players, told POLITICO. "The objective was to take away the momentum through a rolling thunder of announcements."
In truth, some EU countries had already become increasingly skeptical about including Chinese telecom equipment-makers in their 5G networks. European national security agencies had grown alarmed about how Huawei in particular gobbled up significant global market share against competitors like Sweden's Ericsson and Finland's Nokia.
Even if EU officials agreed with the stance, many didn't like Trump's aggressive approach, which included threats to hold back intelligence cooperation if the bloc's members didn't reassess their reliance on Chinese firms.
"The approach had been to pound on the table and tell people, don't buy Huawei. It was a confrontational style," Krach told the Digital Bridge, POLITICO's transatlantic tech newsletter. But he said the approach changed somewhat after his involvement: "I said, why don't we treat countries like a customer, and the customer is always right. You need to have a value proposition. For countries and telcos, what's in it for them?"
