Exclusive: Pompeo warns Turkey that Huawei threatens US military presence
By Joel Gehrke
September 23, 2020 - 6:30 AM

Turkey’s growing reliance on Huawei and other Chinese companies could complicate U.S. military cooperation with the major NATO ally, according to Mike Pompeo.

“They make it more difficult,” the Secretary of State told the Washington Examiner. “The fact that you have a significant amount of data in Turkey now, in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, means that we have to be ever more careful.”

Huawei and ZTE have emerged as telecommunications heavyweights in Turkey in recent years, even as Pompeo has warned other NATO allies that such partnerships could force American troops to withdraw rather than risk exposure to companies linked to Beijing’s spy agencies.

Their expansion in Turkey has added a cybersecurity irritant to military ties strained already by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s foreign policy disputes with Washington.

“We have to make sure that our networks are secure — that is, our defense networks, our security networks,” Pompeo said. “It’s not only military and security networks that will be impacted by increasing activity inside of Turkey or any other country from Chinese networks. We're gonna make sure and protect American data.”

President Trump's administration already has expelled Turkey from the F-35 stealth fighter jet program, citing Erdogan's insistence on purchasing advanced Russian anti-aircraft missile systems. Pompeo's warning about the telecommunications companies comes just weeks after Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations subcommittee for Europe, revealed that U.S. strategists are preparing for a potential removal of American forces from Turkey’s Incirlik Air Force base. “The path that Erdogan is on is not good,” Johnson said. “Our presence, quite honestly, in Turkey, is certainly threatened.”

China’s telecommunications companies represent just one aspect of Turkey’s increasing economic entanglements with Beijing, which seeks to run the communist power’s vaunted Belt and Road Initiative through Ankara.

“China has invested $3 billion in Turkey between 2016 and 2019 and intends to double that by the end of next year,” Stanford University’s Ayca Alemdaroglu and the University of Chicago's Sultan Tepe observed in a recent Foreign Policy magazine analysis. “And the cash keeps coming: This year, China’s Export and Credit Insurance Corp. committed up to $5 billion for Turkey’s Wealth Fund, to be used for BRI projects. The fund’s limited transparency and accountability raise further concerns about where the money is going and Turkey’s ability to repay.”

Pompeo, who has described the Belt and Road Initiative as “a treasury-run empire-build” that allows the Chinese Communist Party to use “predatory” lending as a way to gain political influence at strategic junctures, expressed similar misgivings about Turkey’s deals.

“There's a real cost, not an upfront cost, but a real cost to accepting these resources from the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo said. “And the people in those countries will be worse off as a result … That applies not only to Southeast Asia and to Turkey, but it's true here in the United States as well.”

Pompeo, who acknowledged the need to "get the American house in order” as well, emphasized that China is trying “to create hegemony through using these state-owned enterprises” to gain assets in foreign countries.

“[Their] first rule is come steal stuff; second is bring it back to the Chinese Communist Party, and then turn it back, unleash it on the world with a state-sponsored enterprise,” he said. “That is a very risky security model and one that President Trump takes very seriously.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...itary-presence