Brexit and Huawei Show Boris Johnson's Limits
The prime minister's desire to have it both ways on Huawei shows the impossibility of Britain exercising true sovereignty on the world stage.
Friends and allies.
Photographer: BEN STANSALL/AFPBrexit had one universally appealing premise: It would leave the U.K. free to chart its own course in the world, determine its own laws and adjudicate its own disputes. Britain would be sovereign again. Now Prime Minister Boris Johnson is being accused by his closest ally of selling that newborn sovereignty cheaply to the Chinese, by allowing Huawei Technologies Co. a role in building Britain’s crucial fifth-generation mobile network.
That was the stinging criticism made by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who’s due to visit London this week. While Johnson was in an awkward spot, the Americans had a point. A number of prominent members of Johnson’s Conservative Party — ex-Foreign Secretary William Hague, the journalist Charles Moore, Theresa May’s former adviser Nick Timothy, the lawmaker Tom Tugendhat, to name a few — also urged him to ban Huawei because of the threat it posed to the security of Britain’s information networks.