In an executive order, Trump wrote: “foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technology and services… in order to commit malicious cyber-enabled actions, including economic and industrial espionage against the United States and its people.” 

Promises made by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the biennial Belt and Road Forum about opening the Belt and Road Initiative to multilateral and third-party investment could bode well for Gulf-China relations and the Middle East more broadly by creating new opportunities for energy and economic cooperation.

US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has urged the United Kingdom not to give Chinese telecom giant Huawei a role in building its 5G telecommunications network warning that China wants to “divide Western alliances through bits and bytes, not bullets and bombs.”

In a speech in London on May 8, Pompeo also said US intelligence sharing relationships with its friends and allies are at stake. He stressed that “insufficient security will impede the United States’ ability to share certain information with trusted networks.”

A strong economy and the support of his base have created the conditions necessary for US President Donald J. Trump to ratchet up pressure on China in trade talks, according to the Atlantic Council’s Bart Oosterveld.

The stock market’s “muted overall reaction to the threat of tariff escalation” and the fact “that the United States is performing exceptionally well on jobs and growth” have provided the administration “the economic leeway to take drastic measures against China,” said Oosterveld, who is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Global Business and Economics Program and C. Boyden Gray Fellow on Global Finance and Growth.

Robert A. Manning, a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, explains: “It will be difficult to avoid licensing any Huawei or Chinese 5G technology as Chinese firms hold 37 percent of all 5G patents.”

Huawei, for instance, said Manning, “has over 1,000 patents, so many nations and carriers may have little choice but to license some Chinese 5G technology.”

Heads of state and top government ministers will be listening to the Chinese sales pitch with much more skepticism than in previous years at the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, a three-day conference that got underway in Beijing on April 25.

Established in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seeks to improve international trade connections, infrastructure, and development throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa, with specific focus on connecting China to these international markets. According to the Chinese government, the program has already resulted in an investment of $80 billion in partner countries and Beijing has signed agreements with 122 nations and twenty-one international organizations.