The US wants NATO allies to spend their new defence budgets ripping out Huawei

The US has found a new use for Europe’s swelling defence budgets: tearing out Huawei. Whether its allies are listening is another matter.

The State Department’s China coordinator, Joshua Young, told officials in Brussels last month that NATO members should use defence-related funding, the spending that counts towards the alliance’s targets, to rip out Huawei equipment and replace it with other vendors’ gear, Bloomberg reported.

Young did not name countries, but one person said the remarks were aimed at Germany.

The reception was cool.

The comments came from a relatively junior diplomat, and allies, who have grown used to contradictory signals from the Trump administration, did not respond on the spot, according to people familiar with the closed-door meeting. The State Department declined to comment.

The idea leans on NATO’s new finances.

Almost all members agreed last year to lift defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP, 3.5 per cent for core military needs and another 1.5 per cent for defence-related areas, to meet a demand from President Trump. A NATO official said that second slice can indeed be used to defend networks, including replacing vendors, which is the opening Washington is trying to exploit.

Europe is not aligned. The European Commission has labelled Huawei and ZTE “high-risk suppliers” and wants tighter oversight through a revision of its Cybersecurity Act, but Germany and Spain are leading the resistance to an EU-level ban, preferring national control and wary of retaliation from Beijing.

Germany has already wrestled with the cost, having weighed paying Deutsche Telekom and other operators with public money to swap out the Chinese kit.

The scale explains the reluctance. Chinese vendors supply an estimated third to 40 per cent of Europe’s 5G infrastructure, and a full removal would be the largest forced replacement of telecoms equipment in European history. By recasting that bill as defence spending, the US is offering allies both a way to fund it and a reason to.

There is friction over what counts, too. American officials have criticised allies for stretching the 1.5 per cent category to cover things only loosely related to defence; Italy at one point floated counting a giant Sicily bridge before backing off.

Network security is an easier sell, and the question will be back on the table when NATO leaders meet in Turkey next month.

For now, it is a suggestion, not a policy, floated by a mid-level official and met with silence.

But it reframes a politically toxic expense, ripping out Chinese tech, as something closer to a NATO obligation. If that framing sticks, the countries with the most Huawei to remove may find the bill easier to justify, even as Brussels keeps arguing over the principle.