I don’t think the goal was ever to bankrupt Huawei so some US form could swoop in. It was and is about national security. Do you think China wouldn’t bug equipment sent to the US? That seems like a bad bet.
If that were the case, the US government would not ban US companies from selling to equipment and software to Huawei.
After all, if all the US were worried about were back doored Huawei equipment (of which there's no evidence), why would it care if Huawei phones in China use Google services?
Also, if the goal wasn't to bankrupt Huawei, what was it?
Force them to become market leaders across a broader part of the technology sector? That's been the effect of the export ban. How was it supposed to reduce the amount of wiretapping, etc. they can do?
I'd also like to know how nabbing the Huawei CFO (who also happens to be the daughter of the founder) in Vancouver fits in with just preventing bugged equipment (again, for which there's no evidence) from being installed in US networks.
The US has gone after Huawei in such an all-encompassing manner that it's impossible to maintain the fiction that this is just about preventing Huawei from spying on the US (something that Huawei has never done anyways, as far as anyone knows).
It's about control - Huawei was taking over too much tech for the deep state's taste.
Deep state is bugging American devices so they have a very good reason to believe the other side is doing the same - evidence or not.
Unfortunately in this case, I think the deep state is really that dumb. They did not foresee the consequences. They expected Huawei to fade away with a whimper - and if you read the article, it was a pretty close call, so the expectation wasn't entirely unfounded.
Motive was curbing Chinese state actor influence and also industry, ie preventing Huawei from crushing Google or Apple. it's not very smart but it's kind of how they think about it.
On both sides, tech companies and state intelligence services are walking hand in glove. It's not about devices being bugged per se, it's about siphoning more and more data into their own data centers, controlling more and more of the info highways, and so on. Potential backdoors only play a very minor role IMO - anything can be backdoored these days, and state actors anywhere have the resources to get into anything.
It's more about the front doors, ie our chinese security camera talking to chinese servers... large scale data collection that's not hidden.
