{"id":200728,"date":"2019-02-03T22:47:32","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T03:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=200728"},"modified":"2019-02-03T22:47:32","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T03:47:32","slug":"huawei-fades-from-u-s-headlines-but-still-looms-large-over-trade-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2019\/02\/03\/huawei-fades-from-u-s-headlines-but-still-looms-large-over-trade-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Huawei fades from U.S. headlines, but still looms large over trade talk"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cHuawei has been made exhibit No. 1 in a China-U.S. trade war and struggle for technological supremacy, and the criminal indictments are just kind of on the ground floor,\u201d he said. (File Photo<\/a>: York Region\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 A Canadian reader of U.S. news reports about last week’s trade talks with China could be forgiven for wondering: what the heck happened to Huawei?<\/p>\n

After all, the week began with the U.S. Department of Justice unsealing two damning indictments against the Chinese tech giant, including one that names chief financial officer and telecom scion Meng Wanzhou, whose arrest in Vancouver two months ago dragged Canada into an escalating battle of ideologies between the two largest economies in the world.<\/p>\n

And yet two days later, as President Donald Trump and Vice Premier Liu He sat across from each other in the Oval Office after two days of high-level, high-stakes trade talks, the eyebrow-raising U.S. allegations of fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice against one of the world’s fastest-growing telecommunications firms elicited barely a mention.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven’t discussed that yet,\u201d Trump said Thursday when asked if Huawei had come up during the talks. \u201cIt will be, but it hasn’t been discussed yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat, actually \u2014 as big as it might seem \u2014 is very small compared to the overall deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Geopolitical observers and trade analysts alike aren’t buying it.<\/p>\n

When Trump talks trade, America’s transactional, deal-hungry president tends to be less focused on bigger-picture issues than the messages he can sell to his supporters. Thursday’s Oval Office exercise, for instance, was all about radiating mutual goodwill \u2014 like when Liu disclosed, seemingly to the surprise of Trump’s aides, that China would buy five million tons of American soybeans.<\/p>\n

\u201cWow,\u201d said Trump, visibly impressed. \u201cThat’s a lot of soybeans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not really; China used to buy six times that every year from the U.S., which produced about 138 million tons of soybeans in 2018. Tariffs changed all that. But the president is in dire need of a political win in short order on trade with China, which he won’t get by talking publicly about what’s really going on \u2014 a broader, multi-pronged, long-term American effort to blunt its economic, geopolitical and military might.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s a lot of tension within the U.S. administration about China policy,\u201d said David Dollar, a senior fellow in foreign policy, global economy and development at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center in Washington.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne school of thought is, ‘This is a Communist dictatorship, it’s a potential threat to the U.S., we can’t get along with this country’ \u2014 ‘decouple’ is the word they use. To the extent they’re gaining ascendancy, then you don’t want a trade deal. You just want to slap on big tariffs, you want to penalize Chinese companies, Chinese citizens, and reduce the economic relationship.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen there are other members of the administration who \u2014 I think correctly \u2014 understand there’s a lot of benefit in U.S.-China economic exchange, and they would like to improve the terms of that and in some sense deal with these security issues, but ringfence them so that other economic exchange can go on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canada shares that latter approach, a delicate high-wire act made all the more awkward by the swirling diplomatic updrafts of Meng’s Dec. 1 arrest and former ambassador John McCallum’s public assessments of her chances in court.<\/p>\n

It would be \u201cnaive in the extreme\u201d to think that the Huawei controversy can be divorced from the U.S.-China trade discussion, said Wesley Wark, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in matters of national security and foreign relations.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuawei has been made exhibit No. 1 in a China-U.S. trade war and struggle for technological supremacy, and the criminal indictments are just kind of on the ground floor,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

China is determined to diminish U.S. influence and extend its own economic, political and military reach around the world with \u201ca distinctly Chinese fusion of strongman autocracy and a form of Western-style capitalism,\u201d Dan Coats, the U.S. director of national intelligence, warned last week in a briefing with the Senate intelligence committee.<\/p>\n

Trump’s trade and economic emissaries will resume talks in Beijing later this month, and the president himself will sit down with counterpart Xi Jinping before March 1, when U.S. tariffs on some $200-billion worth of Chinese goods are scheduled to jump to 25 per cent. It will be during those presidential talks where Huawei returns to the agenda, observers say.<\/p>\n

Trump used the all-caps word \u201ccomprehensive\u201d in a string of tweets last week about his high hopes for a trade deal with China \u2014 a sentiment he repeated Sunday in an interview with CBS’s \u201cFace the Nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo two leaders of this country and China have ever been closer than I am with President Xi,\u201d the president said. \u201cWe have a good chance to make a deal … and if there is a deal, it’s going to be a real deal. It’s not going to be a stopgap.\u201d<\/p>\n

That means Huawei and help with North Korea more than it does more soybeans, said Dan Ujczo, a trade lawyer and Canada-U.S. specialist with Dickinson Wright in Columbus, Ohio.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuawei is what it’s all about at the end of the day,\u201d Ujczo said. \u201cThat’s what comprehensive means. The meeting between the two leaders \u2014 trade will just be one of the three major components, with Huawei being probably at the top of the list and North Korea right after.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trade, Huawei and the world’s broader concerns about China’s at-all-costs global ambitions are closely intertwined components of the U.S. strategy, said Wark. Whether that strategy will work is another question.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it’s a very aggressive American policy that has to be rooted in an assumption that it’s possible to change Chinese behaviour through force. That critical assumption \u2014 that you can force, in a relatively short time frame, a change in Chinese behaviour through these tactics \u2014 that’s the critical thing that we should be speculating about: is this a good policy?<\/p>\n

\u201cMany people would argue it doesn’t have a chance in hell. But lots of voices need to weigh in on that one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 A Canadian reader of U.S. news reports about last week’s trade talks with China could be forgiven for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":199865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-news-w","mauthors-james-mccarten","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}