The Exiling of Huawei Marks The Start Of a Multipolar World

“Bullying builds character like nuclear waste creates superheroes. It’s a rare occurrence and often does much more damage than endowment.”
― Zack W. Van

The Shift East

Under Trump, the US has taken to bulling many of the non-aligned governments, both from an economic and security perspective.

The most recent and well-cited case is of sanctions on Iran, but it also includes Venezuela, as well as her regional allies Nicaragua and Cuba, North Korea, Russia. It has also increased trade war tensions with Europe, ramped up tensions with geostrategically important Turkey regarding its weapons purchases from Russia, and, last but not least, most recently extended a gratuitous hammer blow to chances of recovering its trade war with China.

These countries aren’t being targeted at random, but represent an anti-US loose alliance bonded together by an increasing leaning toward Eastern influences — principally Beijing — vs Washington. It is clear, then, that the US is — and “must” — play a divide and conquer strategy to try to individually isolate, delegitisime and ultimately bring about US-friendly regime change in the countries which it opposes which fall into Beijing’s orbit.

How the world’s economic centre of gravity has changed over the past century goes a long way in explaining just how important Asia has, and will, become. This is no small matter. As Bloomberg points out, countries will increasingly have to choose between two geopolitical spheres — that of the US, or that of China.

Isolating the most populous nation on the globe is a geopolitical oxymoron. Aside from its own population and tightening regional ties being brought about by its Belt And Road Initiative, the country itself boasts some of the best infrastructure on the planet as it avoided legacy taxes: it has almost 10x the amount of high speed rail to the next country (the US doesn’t even figure on the list), with mobile payments in 2018 totalling almost USD 13 trillion vs the US at just 50 billion, to name but a few. It also commands a high-tech and widespread industrial base, something which the US can no longer offer.

Geopolitical miscalculation or acceptance of multipolar world?

The “security concerns” surrounding Huawei are the most obvious reminder of just how compromised Western technology companies are by the US intelligence community. This explains why the US is doing all it can to dissuade its geopolitical friends to adopt the technology as it would lose its well-groomed software & hardware back doors, whilst giving the Chinese the ability to eavesdrop on network traffic.

Huawei has a long history of being targeted by the US, whilst the most recent sanctions take the confrontation to fever pitch. However, it is either an acceptance that this multipolar world is materialising, or a huge strategic mistake made by an empire in decline desperately flailing to maintain its power, just like a bully whose reign is coming to an end.

Just by the sheer size, industrial and technological output, two important things happen. Firstly, it will have a natural gravitational pull, just as described above. Secondly, China’s and Huawei’s inherent ability to ride the storm exist.

The announcement that it will launch its own OS, codenamed HongMeng, and that all Android apps will be directly compatible with it cannot be overplayed enough. With the largest smartphone market on the planet — 4 times that of the USA — it is highly unlikely that foreign companies wouldn’t launch their applications on the company’s new Play Store equivalent named AppGallery.

Expect lots of articles about how “poor” the software is upon its launch. As any software company will attest, usability issues in the first release of the software will always have significant issues. These will be resolved over time. The supply chain issue of chip development is still in question, although with the country’s manufacturing base and its affiliate HiSilicon make it look like the company, again over time, will likely overcome this barrier.

Whilst some argue this stunts Huawei’s growth, this is short-term thinking. With this move, as the company is now forced to fully develop the hardware and software technology and source new supply chains with aligned countries, the US may well be accelerating the inevitable: the shift to a multipolar world.