The UK Treasury fretted again about what this meant for the country’s delicate economic situation, which—for all the public bluster from Conservative ministers—they knew would be squeezed harder once the withdrawal from the EU was complete. So, in January, NCSC duly issued its second remarkably-close-to-the-political-consensus finding that Huawei should be permitted in UK networks but—in a concession to the Americans—restricted to 35 percent of the radio access network.[20] On 28 January, the UK National Security Council signed it off. Huawei evinced satisfaction that London had reached an “evidence-based decision” that “will result in a more advanced, more secure and more cost-effective telecoms infrastructure that is fit for the future.”[21]

  In private, the reaction in the United States was apocalyptic. Matt Pottinger, newly installed as the deputy national security advisor, had led a delegation two weeks earlier to try to persuade the British government to change its mind. In public remarks earlier that month, he would comment: “Can you imagine [Ronald] Reagan and [Margaret] Thatcher having a conversation in the 1980s saying, ‘Let’s have the KGB build our telecommunications systems, because they’re giving us a great discount’?” Trump had weighed in directly and angrily with Boris Johnson.[22] Pompeo had scheduled a visit the week following the decision. There were furious discussions among US officials about what steps to take to show that the UK would not get away with calling the US bluff. Public warnings from US senators over reviewing intelligence-sharing arrangements with the UK, as well as the perennial question of the FTA, were only a couple of the most obvious options. The Trump administration official who had been in charge of the National Defense Strategy openly speculated that “sucker-punching” the US on an “absolutely key issue” at a “critical juncture” should result in the use of US F-35s being placed on the table, and even Trident cooperation, the British nuclear deterrent that depends on the United States in a host of different areas.[23]

  But most officials in the Trump administration wanted to hold their fire. One US official described the post-Brexit UK as a “wounded animal” in a fragile economic and political position. No-one wanted China to pull off the additional success of a rift between the United States and its closest defense and intelligence partner. That wasn’t the only reason to hold fire though. US officials were considering steps that would nearly cripple Huawei’s capacity to provide 5G networks altogether, by denying it access to the essential US technologies on which it still relied. And the one thing that was always true with 5G politics was that no decision was ever quite final. Having drawn a blank with intelligence counterparts and Boris Johnson himself, there was still hope that the decision could be reversed if another politically influential grouping was willing to step up again: the very Conservative Brexiteers that had led the country to such a fragile situation in the first place.

  A few months after Johnson took over the reins as prime minister, the Conservative Party had been re-elected with an increased majority, a sharp contrast to the disastrous decision to call early elections by his predecessor, which left the government’s majority on a knife edge. Given the stakes and the divisions—far from neatly partisan—over Brexit, this resulted in a year of parliamentary rebellions that saw some of the largest defeats for a governing party in the country’s history. This should have come to an end after December following the resounding Conservative victory. But the habit of rebellion had become entrenched. And the original rebels were the party’s euroskeptic right. These included the former Brexit negotiator, David Davies, the former leader of the party, Iain Duncan Smith, and a cluster of less senior backbench MPs. Many of them had their own channels to the Republican administration and to their counterparts in Congress, who were also asking increasingly vociferously why the Brits had gone wobbly.

  Many of the Brexiteers, as well as right-wing senators such as Tom Cotton, started to link the issue to Brexit itself. Why, they asked, should we shuck off our dependence on Brussels only to end up beholden to the Chinese? Indeed, some of them suggested that it was the same globalist “Remainer” establishment that was conning the country into the decision to give Huawei the green light. But if it had only been the serial rebels and Tory right that were up in arms, the government might still have expected to prevail given the size of its majority. In fact, the concerns went deeper.

  Early that year, after the latest Huawei decision had broken, I received a message from an old school buddy who wanted to reconnect me with his friend, a Conservative MP, whom I’d met at university more than twenty years earlier. Neil O’Brien was an MP of a different caliber than many of the other rebels. After running the UK’s most influential euroskeptic and center-right think-tanks, he had gone into government as former Chancellor George Osborne’s advisor during the peak of the “Golden Era,” ended up in Downing Street and landed a safe seat soon afterwards. The Financial Times described him as “one of the central figures” in the new generation of modernizing Conservative MPs who had entered parliament in recent years. He wanted to chat about a new initiative he and his colleague were putting together, modeled on the European Research Group, a network in the Conservative Party that had acted as the locus of the hardline Brexit parliamentary rebellions. This one would have a different focus: China.

  His colleague was Tom Tugendhat, Röttgen’s counterpart as chair of the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee, a former army intelligence officer who speaks fluent Arabic and had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of them were examples of the liberal, internationalist, moderate, rising talents in the party rather than the “mad, swivel-eyed loons” who were riding the Brexit populist wave. Like members of the Bundestag, however, they could see the radical changes in both the salience of the China question and the politics around it. While O’Brien would occupy a less visible role on China, Tugendhat would become the sharpest and most visible voice on the 5G question in the months that followed.

  The Brexiteers and the modernizers were not natural bedfellows, and some of the resentments would play out in the competition over which MPs should be seen as the leading parliamentary voices on the China question. But on the substance, there was little disagreement. One Conservative peer drew up an extensive delineation of the groups in the Conservative Party that were coalescing on the China issue: pro-Brexit Atlanticists who identified with the US position and didn’t want a Huawei deal to jeopardize a free-trade agreement, senior former ministers who thought that China has failed to abide by its agreements, younger liberal internationalists, civil libertarians, religious freedom and human rights advocates, opponents of Chinese trade practices, globalization critics and many MPs who overlapped between multiple categories.[24]

  Meanwhile, much like the SPD, the Labour Party was staking out a position on China that was even tougher on human rights and values issues than the Conservatives. And so as in Germany, the decision on Huawei would sit in limbo. The government knew it risked defeat if it brought a bill to parliament. It had already received warning shots with amendments on other unrelated bills. The combined forces of the Labour Party, the Brexiteers and the moderate Tory rebels were sufficiently potent to run the votes close even when they weren’t trying very hard. So Johnson waited and hoped that something might change that would make it easier to pursue the preferred course of action. Of course, something did come along in the months that followed, which would have precisely the opposite effect: a potent virus from Wuhan that would tilt the political balance even more sharply.

  * * *

  —

  The UK was one of the major economies hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. By May of 2020, it had become the worst-affected country in Europe, surpassing Italy. While much of this reflected flaws in the government’s response, it induced considerable concern about the level of dependence the UK had demonstrated on China for vital medical supplies and other strategic imports. It resulted in a set of civil service efforts called “Project Defend” that were intended to identify Britain’s main economic vulnerabilities to potentially hostile foreign governments. It would put an even bigger question-mark over Huawei as a result. Then at the end of June 2020, China passed its long-rumored National Security Law for Hong Kong, the provisions of which had been kept secret until China’s rubber stamp assembly approved the legislation. Protests had already been roiling the city for the last year over a new extradition law, but the National Security Law went even further, representing the de facto end of the “one country, two systems” model that had been the treaty-founded basis for the handover of Hong Kong in the first place.

  The UK bore special responsibility for the fate of the citizens it gave to Chinese rule under the guarantee that Beijing would maintain the principle. This sense of responsibility was even more acute—even tinged with guilt—among Conservative MPs. It was during their party’s time in government that the agreement with Beijing on Hong Kong’s future was negotiated, signed and agreed. The deep immersion of so many British companies and families in Hong Kong made it seem far closer than for most other countries. As one official put it: “It just feels different—being frank, the situation in Xinjiang was bad already and has got much worse. But Hong Kong is the first case that looks like a real rollback of freedom in an international city that is so familiar to us.”

  If the political climate was already looking icily bleak for Huawei, the United States helped to deal the killer blow, a face-saving one for the Brits as it happened. On 15 May, the US Department of Commerce amended a little-known tool, the “Foreign-Produced Direct Product Rule.” The effects were seismic. It prevented

  the transfer to Huawei entities of any items produced or developed by Huawei and which are “direct products” of controlled US technology or software, and transfer to Huawei entities of any items that are both produced by manufacturing equipment that is the “direct product” of controlled US technology or software.[25]

  It effectively meant that any use of US technologies by Huawei would require licensing, imperiling the capacity of the firm to roll out its 5G networks. Above all, this meant semiconductors. Despite claiming to have stockpiled chips, there was simply no way to guarantee it would be able to deliver and sustain its equipment over time. It gave NCSC the grounds to write a whole new opinion, described with British understatement as “[modifying] the scope of its security mitigation strategy for Huawei.” It has “significantly changed the risk to the UK, causing the NCSC to review our previous advice on Huawei from January 2020,” the report stated: “It will be extremely challenging to gain confidence in Huawei’s post-sanction equipment, and it may be impossible.” Moreover, the measures pursued demonstrated

  a further hardening of the US position towards Huawei, setting an even clearer intent. Should this US action be ineffective, in particular if Huawei were to find a workaround, it is likely that the US government would continue to modify its approach until it had successfully had its desired effect on the company.[26]

  As one US official at the time said with a shrug of the shoulders: “We had warned them that a company subjected to US sanctions already may not be a reliable supplier.”

  The legislation would have to be changed again. The last iteration had not yet been brought to the vote that they may have lost even before the US decision. The government ordered the complete removal of the company’s kit from the entire 5G network by 2027. The UK’s culture secretary, who—in a departmental quirk—had authority over the telecoms sector, came to the House of Commons where he had been repeatedly mauled by MPs from his own party to make a less tortured announcement: “This has not been an easy decision, but it is the right one for the UK’s telecoms networks, for our national security and our economy both now and indeed in the long run.”[27] He would go on to lay out a “clear path for the complete removal of high risk vendors from our 5G networks…This will be done through new and unprecedented powers to identify and ban telecoms equipment which poses a threat to our national security.”[28] There was still some wiggle room—the vain hope that things might change in the United States in November—but for Huawei in the UK, the journey that had kickstarted their rise in the advanced economies of the world was effectively over.

  The process in Germany took nearly a further year to reach a still-preliminary conclusion. The result was more ambiguous than the UK’s plan for the removal of Huawei kit. All elements of the implementation were kicked to the next government to resolve, and in the meantime the telecoms firms could not only get away with keeping the existing Huawei equipment but also continue quietly to roll out Chinese kit in the new 5G infrastructure. While the interior ministry now had the ability to restrict “untrustworthy” suppliers, the battle was not over. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” one CDU parliamentarian contended in the debate.[29] If it lacked the stark finality of the declarations in London, it was at least clear that the political tide for Huawei had turned, and not just in Europe.

  New Delhi, April 2018

  I was sitting in the lobby of the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi waiting for a meeting with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, not knowing for sure whether he would arrive. He was too discreet to say so, but it appeared that Jaishankar had been pulled in urgently to see India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. The meeting had overrun, and evidently he could not send me emails about the delay. I was eager to speak, though, however briefly. He was in what proved to be a short window between leaving his position as foreign secretary and going back into government again as foreign minister, and I knew it was an opportunity for him to be maximally candid. The last time we had more than a brief exchange was back in Beijing, over gin and tonics in the embassy, while he was serving as ambassador there.

  He was graciously apologetic when he arrived, but time was now very short indeed. In the minutes we had, he laid out a strikingly intense vision of how the rivalry with China would play out for India in the region. A deal had just been reached after their confrontation at the contested border, but his comments formed a sharp counterpoint to the ostensible stabilization of ties that the end of the recent crisis in the Himalayas was supposed to portend. Mike Pillsbury, who had recently achieved heightened prominence as Trump’s favorite China analyst, joined us and poked fun at my assiduous notetaking. When we headed to the airport together the next day, Pillsbury would spend much of the drive complaining about India’s unwillingness to sign a series of foundational agreements that would allow for closer communications, sharing of geospatial intelligence, and logistical cooperation with the US military.

  India’s tradition of non-alignment runs deep, and as foreign minister, Jaishankar went on to valorize a sophisticated version of it. In his years at the Ministry of External Affairs, few figures did more to tighten ties with the United States, whether as ambassador in Washington or his role in navigating the breakthrough India-US civil nuclear deal. But there was always a clear appreciation of where the lines needed to be drawn. Now, with the Trump administration straining traditional alliances to breaking point and tearing up trade agreements at will, India’s nimbleness and greater self-reliance looked like the better path. Unlike anxious allies terrified at the withdrawal of US security commitments, India was confident in its autonomy. Since Indian power was itself an asset to the United States in the Indo-Pacific, there was no need to compromise much when it came to its economic and military ties with the states that were on Washington’s bad side, Iran and Russia. It would win its exemptions from the US government for energy deals with the former and arms purchases from the latter. Nor did India need to sign the binding FTAs that smaller economies rely on. The “Make in India” agenda, the plan to build up its indigenous industries, worked better without them, so the argument went. Democracy too was an asset for India but nothing that should limit Indian foreign policy excessively, any more than it ultimately limited those of any other great power when relations with authoritarians serve a strategic purpose.

  Meanwhile, for all that India was dealing with a military build-up from China on its border, and fierce competition in its traditional South Asian sphere of influence, it seemed that the two sides could still deal with each other judiciously when they needed to. Long-established bilateral mechanisms helped navigate flare-ups in the Himalayas without recourse to violence. There was a modus vivendi that held, however strained it seemed at times. Then in 2020, everything unraveled.

  After years of worsening tensions, events during the pandemic took a stark turn. The border mechanisms that India had counted on for so long, and the restraint that had still characterized China’s approach, was seemingly over. Following a huge Chinese mobilization at the border, a clash in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley saw the first casualties there since 1975. Twenty Indian soldiers died in a high-altitude altercation that involved stones, clubs and sticks rather than guns, and an indeterminate number of Chinese soldiers too. The old norms no longer held. Beijing seemed intent on taking and fortifying positions on India’s side of the line of actual control, which had demarcated the two sides’ informal territorial writ for decades. One month later, Chinese officials and media also made claims to a large tract of territory in Bhutan, an area that had not featured in previous border negotiations.

  Much as European politicians were baffled by China’s behavior during the pandemic, the response in India was one of shock. As a former senior Indian official, who had been closely involved in handling the bilateral relationship, commented at the time: