US urges NATO allies to use defence funds to replace Huawei gear

WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump’s administration urged NATO allies to channel defence spending towards efforts to replace components from China’s Huawei in their networks and critical infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter.

The US government has long considered Huawei and other Chinese vendors a national security risk and excluded them from American networks. Trump officials are calling on NATO allies to follow suit.

The US State Department’s China coordinator, Joshua Young, told officials in Brussels in May that they should use defence-related funding as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s spending benchmark to rip out Huawei gear and replace it with other vendors’ products, the people said on condition of anonymity as the talks took place behind closed doors.

Young didn’t refer to specific allies, but the remarks were in reference to Germany, one of the people said. The comments by a lower-ranking diplomat didn’t elicit an immediate response from allies, who have noted often contradictory moves from officials in the US administration, according to another person familiar with the meeting. The State Department declined to comment.

Almost all NATO allies agreed in 2025 to raise spending on core defence needs to 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product, with another 1.5 per cent allotted to defence-related spending, to meet a Trump demand that allies take a larger share of the alliance’s expenditure by investing 5 per cent of economic output in their militaries.

Germany and Spain are leading opposition to plans by the European Commission to ban Chinese suppliers from telecommunications networks as part of a plan to push for stronger oversight through a revision of the bloc’s Cybersecurity Act, Bloomberg News reported in May.

Officials in Berlin and Madrid want to maintain state-level control and have expressed concerns that banning products from Huawei and other Chinese suppliers at the EU level risks retaliation from Beijing, people familiar with the negotiations said. The commission has labelled Huawei and ZTE “high-risk suppliers” for telecom networks.

The issue of tearing out Huawei equipment from critical networks has surfaced repeatedly in Germany in recent years. The government in Berlin has considered using public funds to pay Deutsche Telekom AG and other telecom operators to replace the Chinese equipment, Bloomberg reported in October.

NATO funding will be a focus again at the alliance’s leaders summit in Turkey in July after Trump in 2025 secured a commitment from all allies except for Spain for the higher spending by 2035. The 1.5 per cent in defence-related spending can be used for defending networks, including replacing vendors, according to a NATO official, who declined to comment or confirm the exchange with Young in Brussels.

The US has been vocal in criticising allies for designating spending towards the 1.5 per cent goal that isn’t related to defence. In 2025, the US ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker condemned a “very expanded view” of the spending among allies. Italy, for example, had considered whether to count the construction of the world’s longest suspension bridge as military spending before backing off. Bloomberg