National Security Trade

Huawei Gets Another 90 Day Reprieve From Trump

Written by SK Ashby

It's been more than half a year since the Trump regime first added Chinese-owned telecommunications giant Huawei to the Commerce Department's so-called blacklist which prohibits American companies from doing business with foreign entities, but the Trump regime still hasn't entirely enforced their blacklisting.

The Trump regime has said that Americans firms cannot sell goods and equipment to Huawei because the foreign company poses a threat to national security, but if that's true -- or more specifically if that's the real reason for their blacklisting -- why does the regime allow Hauwei to continue operating in the United States?

The Commerce Department has just granted American firms another 90-day extension which continues the last 90-day extension allowing them to do business with Huawei.

After adding Huawei to an economic blacklist in May citing national security concerns, the U.S. Commerce Department has allowed it to purchase some American-made goods in a series of 90-day license extensions that it says aim to minimize disruption for its customers, many of which operate networks in rural America.

Reuters on Sunday reported the planned 90-day extension after the Trump administration initially planned a short-term two-week reprieve, but ran into bureaucratic issues and opted instead to issue another 90-day extension.

The answer to all of these questions is that Huawei was not blacklisted because the company poses a grave threat to national security.

The foreign company may be a threat in some vague way, but the Trump regime blacklisted the company for political reasons. He needed another bargaining chip in his trade war with China.

Trump and Secretary Wilbur Ross added Huawei to the Commerce Department's blacklist for political reasons and then worked backwards from that decision to find a reason to justify the ban. They're still working backwards today and that's why the firm has been granted another 90-day extension; because Commerce is still trying to catch up to what was initially announced in May. They're still trying to write regulations that will somehow neuter Huawei but also not kill tens of thousands of American jobs and put American companies out of business.

Enforcing sanctions on Huawei at this critical time also wouldn't benefit trade talks with China of which these sanctions are clearly part of and that brings us to another angle to this story that we should consider: that Huawei really is a grave threat to national security and Trump is compromising national security in the name of securing his "greatest and biggest deal ever" with China.