Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Then the interesting question is whether or not all of the other governments than the United States government have not been fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities by allowing systems which have been penetrated — we know quite thoroughly — by the NSA to the point that the NSA for a period basically recorded all of the phone calls going back and forth within a particular country — I believe it was Bermuda — in order, more or less, to show that this could be done. Sure, so Merkel won’t make an important call on her iPhone anymore, but I would say that’s the correct German response. And the correct American response is to be equally or even more skeptical of Huawei, which is not a democracy. It’s an autocracy. It’s from a country that’s put over a million people in camps. Why should we even consider letting them be the backbone of the free world’s communications network? There are two questions here. First, there’s the US question, the domestic question, which I think is being sorted out. The US has decided that Huawei is not going to be allowed to supply goods to its telecommunications providers. In fact, Huawei has never played any significant role in US telecommunications providers, more or less telcos. I remember being told by a lawyer what they did was, they used to effectively take bids from Huawei in order to scare Ericsson and Nokia and other companies into offering them better terms, but with the presumption that they were never going to use Huawei because this would get them into too much trouble in security. So the question for the US is straightforward. The question for other countries is much less straightforward. Do they see China as being a fundamental threat? Or do they just view this as being another nuisance along with the fact that the NSA is listening into their phone calls? And it’s interesting to see that some countries, including close allies such as the United Kingdom, have been much, much less forthright on the US side than one might expect. Roughly speaking, one could say that there is a . . . if one wants to look at the ways in which countries have responded, I think a lot of it has to do with their geopolitical or geo-strategic exposure to China. So places like Australia and Japan have been far, far more willing to listen to the US on these kinds of things than places like the United Kingdom, which see that there is a plausible threat from Huawei but think that, at the end of the day, the balance between that and having cheap telecommunications infrastructure is such that they’re willing to allow Huawei to provide at least some parts of the machineries that they are looking to have subcontracted out.…

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