BRUSSELS — The United States ambassador to NATO said Wednesday that he is raising Chinese technology risks “often” at the North Atlantic Council and that some alliance members are still resisting the message — a blunt public acknowledgment that Washington’s campaign to purge Huawei from allied infrastructure is not moving fast enough for the Pentagon.
“Some of them still are a little too close and a little too willing to use Chinese technology,” Ambassador Matthew Whitaker told Fox Business on Wednesday, when pressed on Huawei gear in allied networks. He described such equipment as unreliable and potentially exploitable for intelligence collection, adding that the Pentagon’s concerns about Chinese technology “need to be heard” by allies.
The remarks arrive two days after Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration had called on NATO member states to use defense funds — allocated under the alliance’s spending benchmark — to dismantle Huawei equipment and replace it. The administration has long excluded Chinese telecommunications companies from its own networks, and Washington has been pushing European capitals to do the same for years. The fact that its own ambassador now says the message is not fully landing at the alliance’s governing body signals a deeper friction than official communiqués reflect.
The resistance is not abstract. Germany, the most consequential case inside NATO, committed in July 2024 to removing Huawei and ZTE components from the core of its 5G networks by the end of 2026, and from radio access and transport management systems by 2029. That agreement — reached between the Interior Ministry and Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica Deutschland — came after years of resistance from German operators, who had built roughly half their radio access infrastructure on Huawei equipment. Deutsche Telekom itself had previously called the 2026 core deadline “unrealistic.” Whether Germany meets it is a live question with six months to run.
The question Whitaker’s comments sharpen is not simply technical. It is about what kind of obligation comes with NATO membership in an era when the United States has elevated technology competition with China to a strategic priority. Washington’s position, increasingly stated without diplomatic softening, is that using Huawei equipment in critical infrastructure is not a sovereign commercial decision — it is a collective security risk. Allies who have not moved fast enough are, in the ambassador’s framing, too close to an adversary.
Huawei has consistently denied that its technology poses espionage risks, arguing it is employee-owned and that compromising customer networks would be commercially self-defeating. That position has not moved Washington. The United States began blocking Huawei from its own telecommunications infrastructure during Trump’s first term and tightened restrictions under the Biden administration, revoking export licenses and imposing chip restrictions. The company is also on the Pentagon’s list of entities designated as Chinese military companies — a designation Beijing has called discriminatory.
That broader designation campaign intensified this week. The Pentagon expanded its list of Chinese military companies on Monday to include Alibaba, BYD and Baidu, drawing a sharp response from Beijing, which threatened countermeasures and called the move an abuse of the concept of national security. The Huawei campaign and the military-companies list are separate legal instruments, but they are expressions of the same strategic logic: that Chinese technology embedded in Western infrastructure and supply chains creates leverage that Beijing could exercise in a conflict.
Whether that logic convinces every NATO member is a different matter. Whitaker’s admission that he raises the issue “often” at the North Atlantic Council — and that some allies remain unconvinced — suggests the conversation is more contested inside NATO’s governing chamber than the public posture of alliance unity implies. Which countries he was referring to, and whether the Monday Bloomberg report on defense-fund redirection prompted any movement among them, Whitaker did not say.
The defense-fund argument carries its own complications. NATO members only recently began meeting the alliance’s 2 percent of GDP spending target after years of pressure from Washington, and some capitals have been counting cybersecurity investments toward that benchmark. Directing those same funds toward Huawei removal would mean absorbing potentially significant costs — analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence estimated Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica as most exposed in Germany, with Chinese kit comprising roughly half of 5G radio access equipment — without new money to compensate. Operators in countries with less political pressure than Germany have even less incentive to move quickly.
Meanwhile, the parallel campaign against Chinese technology in US domestic networks is tightening further. The Federal Communications Commission moved this week to cut Chinese carriers from US network interconnection arrangements, a step that reflects how comprehensively Washington now treats Chinese telecommunications access as a security matter rather than a regulatory one.
Whitaker has used his NATO position to press the China file broadly. In February, he told a Munich Security Conference audience that China was “completely enabling” Russia’s operation in Ukraine by providing dual-use technologies and purchasing Russian energy, and that Beijing could end the war “tomorrow” with a single call to Moscow. The Huawei argument is a narrower but more actionable version of the same concern: that Chinese technology embedded in NATO member infrastructure creates a vulnerability that could be activated in precisely the kind of contingency the alliance exists to deter.
What the alliance will actually do — and by when — remains unclear. The Trump administration’s push to have allies fund Huawei removal through defense budgets landed without a formal NATO commitment or timeline. Whitaker’s comments Wednesday suggest the U.S. will keep pressing. Whether that pressure eventually produces a binding alliance standard on Chinese technology, or simply a running argument at the North Atlantic Council, is the question Washington has not yet answered.
