Back in the fall of 2007, I went on the U.S. House floor and locked horns with Communist China’s Huawei technology company and its American supporters in the private and public sectors. My conviction then was that the company constituted a threat to the security of the United States. I argued that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States should block Huawei’s purchase of a significant minority stake in the 3Com Corporation. As I noted in a November 2007 Human Events article:
The psychological disorder termed “cognitive dissonance” occurs when individuals refuse to acknowledge facts that contradict their existing views. In the realm of national security, the equivalent of cognitive dissonance is properly termed “communist dissonance.” This occurs when the global sophisticates inhabiting America’s business and political elites refuse to recognize facts contradicting their belief communist China is our friend.
Ultimately, that deal did not go through. Still, at that time, America’s appeasers of Communist China were legion for all the wrong reasons—avarice, arrogance, and power. Opposition to such appeasement was branded naïve, at best, or antiquated Cold War jingoism, at worst.
Yet, through it all, the clarion moral vision of people who understood Communism is an oppressive, insidious system, such as Gordon Chang, the late Harry Wu, and other intrepid souls has persisted and, God willing, prevailed at least in the present instance of Huawei.
Now more than a decade later, there comes this tweet from Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:
The Eli Lake article is headlined, “Why Huawei Should Worry America: Be more concerned about the company’s possible involvement in espionage than its alleged violations of sanctions against Iran.”