While the Trump regime has already added Chinese-owned telecommunications company Huawei to the Commerce Department's export-control "blacklist" that prohibits American firms from selling their equipment or software to the foreign company, the Trump regime appears poised to implement new sanctions that will even limit the ability of foreign companies to sell their goods to Huawei.
All of these measures have been taken in the name of "national security," but Trump just intervened to block export controls that could have been placed on aircraft engines produced by General Electric and sold to China.
Speaking to reporters yesterday afternoon, Trump said the export controls on engines were based on a "fake term of national security."
His views on the issue contrasted with the sharp restrictions his administration has placed on U.S. companies trading with Huawei Technologies, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker, also for national security reasons.
“We’re not going to be sacrificing our companies ... by using a fake term of national security. It’s got to be real national security. And I think people were getting carried away with it,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews before departing for a trip to California.
“I want our companies to be allowed to do business. I mean, things are put on my desk that have nothing to do with national security, including with chipmakers and various others. So we’re going to give it up, and what will happen? They’ll make those chips in a different country or they’ll make them in China or someplace else,” he said.
You know, Trump is not necessarily wrong in this case, but none of this makes sense.
I suppose this could be an indication that the Trump regime's upcoming meeting to decide what their policy toward Huawei really is won't turn out the way we expect, but who knows? The regime spent most of the last year crying wolf about "national security."
Our closest, intelligence-sharing allies in the world including Britain took a close look at the Trump regime's insistence that Huawei should be completely banned from next generation networks because the company is a threat to national security and they concluded it wasn't. It's a "fake term of national security," if you will.
Beyond export controls, Trump entire trade war with China and other nations has been based on a poorly-defined if defined at all position that imports of everything from aluminum to baby cribs are a threat to our national security.
If that's not a "fake term of national security," how could anything else be more fake? The regime's positions are so incoherent I honestly struggled to even string all of these thoughts together in response.
None of it makes sense and the term "national security" is now almost meaningless.