The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

We ran into similar obstacles internationally as we sought to alert our allies to Huawei’s threat and that of other state-controlled Chinese firms. We also spread awareness of how treacherous China’s Belt and Road Initiative was, based on “debt diplomacy,” luring countries with seemingly advantageous credit terms, then getting them hooked financially, from which Third World nations especially couldn’t extract themselves. In December 2018, at the Heritage Foundation, I laid out the Administration’s Africa strategy, stressing our concern for the unfair advantage China had taken of many African nations. In Europe, many countries had done so much business with Huawei, they found it hard to disentangle themselves. With the UK, for example, the discussions were very difficult, although attitudes changed significantly once Johnson became Prime Minister and installed a new Cabinet. But even then, it was hard slogging because of the high level of dependence on Huawei that Britain had built up over an extended period.These legitimate worries should have led us to focus on rapidly getting new entrants into 5G markets, not how we would mitigate the consequences of continuing to patronize Huawei.