Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street to travel to Buckingham Palace, London, to meet with Queen Elizabeth II on Friday, Dec. 13, 2019. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has won a solid majority of seats in Britain’s Parliament — a decisive outcome to a Brexit-dominated election that should allow Johnson to fulfil his plan to take the U.K. out of the European Union next month. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

We are only days away from Brexit becoming final and Boris Johson improbably delivering on a promise most scoffed at just months ago.

But in the midst of that, a major blunder has just occurred inviolving China and the United States. Namely, the United Kingdom has decided to put the short term interests of its surveillance state above pleas from the United States to exclude Huawei from participating in the building of it’s 5G network.

Huawei is of course a Chinese communist influenced company that has a history of using its reach to steal information.

The New York Times has the report.

LONDON — Britain said on Tuesday that it would not ban equipment made by the Chinese technology giant Huawei from being used in its new high-speed 5G wireless network, the starkest sign yet that an American campaign against the telecommunications company is faltering.

Despite more than a year of intense lobbying by the Trump administration, which has accused Huawei of having ties to China’s Communist Party that pose a national security threat, the British government announced it would allow the company to provide equipment in some portions of a next-generation network to be built in the coming years.

The British decision was crucial in a broader fight for tech supremacy between the United States and China. Britain, a key American ally, is the most important country so far to reject White House warnings that Huawei is an instrument of Beijing. Britain’s membership in the “five eyes” intelligence-sharing group of countries, which also includes Canada, Australia and New Zealand, gave the outcome an added significance.

Time and again, when European countries are given the chance to stifle Chinese and Russian influence, they choose to instead welcome it for selfish, short term financial gains. We’ve seen this play out with Germany’s pipeline deals with the Kremlin, in which they’ve chosen to help enrich the very country the United States is then charged with protecting them from. It’s asinine and it shows just how little these countries actually care about being good allies. France has also been guilty of these games, among others.

The U.S. spends billions upon billions of dollars to bolster the defense of the Europeans and they continually spit in our faces when push comes to shove. Perhaps it’s because they realize we’ll come save them regardless?

Worse, the U.K. is currently counting on the U.S. to bolster their trade markets now that the EU is playing hardball due to Brexit. So at the same time they want us to increase our imports and exports to their country, they are unwilling to make the simple concession of using U.S. 5G technology instead of running to the communists. Because of the U.K.’s intelligence gathering relationships, this puts other countries in danger as well.

By allowing Huawei into their 5G network, @BorisJohnson has chosen the surveillance state over the special relationship.

Tragic to see our closest ally, a nation Ronald Reagan once called “incandescent with courage,” turn away from our alliance and the cause of freedom.

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) January 28, 2020

Is it really too much to ask for these European countries to offer a little reciprocation to the great amount of resources we expend on their behalf? Apparently it is, and they’ll keep taking advantage of our “special relationship” until someone gets up the courage to make them actually choose a side.