Billionaire George Soros gave some rare praise for Donald Trump’s policies in an article in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, but said he was concerned the president would undermine his strategy.
Soros described the Trump policy on China as “coherent and genuinely bipartisan” as well as “the greatest — and perhaps only — foreign policy accomplishment of the Trump administration.”
Specifically, Soros said that the Trump administration was right to include Huawei in the Commerce Department’s “entity list” as a threat to national security, preventing US companies from engaging in business with the company.
At the opening of the article, Soros described China as “a dangerous rival in artificial intelligence and machine learning,” but said its ability to compete in the fifth-generation market is seriously hampered by Huawei’s dependence on US companies.
“As long as Huawei remains on the entity list, it will lack crucial technology and be seriously weakened,” Soros wrote.
But Soros said he was worried that Trump might remove Huawei from the list of entities as a concession to China during trade talks. Soros said he believed Trump would want to arrange such talks in the run-up to the 2020 elections. While amendments were made in the House and Senate to prevent Trump from removing Huawei from the list without congressional approval, Trump sought to prevent such a restriction, Soros wrote.
“If Republicans allow Mr. Trump to bail out the Communist Party-run telecom giant, they will be abdicating their most basic democratic responsibilities,”, said George Soros. The 89-year-old billionaire’s foundations have, over the time, helped countries transit to democracies.
The US has long had concerns about Huawei, claiming the company has an intimate relationship with the Chinese government, which could use its technology to gain the advantage of espionage. The Ministry of Justice filed criminal charges against the company in two separate cases earlier this year, claiming Huawei committed fraud and theft of trade secrets. Huawei recently accused the US government of using “unscrupulous” tactics to interfere in its business.
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