The battlefield isn't (only) economic. Whoever deploys more networking gear has visibility into more networks around the world via "accidental" backdoors. Same

The battlefield isn't (only) economic. Whoever deploys more networking gear has visibility into more networks around the world via "accidental" backdoors. Same goes for IoT devices. They're all just sleeper agents awaiting orders. Be it on price or features, the more commercial appeal the device has, the broader its deployment around the world. There's at least one foreign-produced, internet-connected listening device in every boardroom (and bedroom). We can insist on pushing Cisco gear so the former exploits are available only to ourselves, but we don't have anything that competes with the latter since we don't actually make anything in this country-- no smart TVs, drones and IoT vibrators that we sell to Chinese consumers. iPhones are about it, and we outsource their production to...China. We make "intellectual property," which is easily stolen and replicated. They're NIH-adherents so we can't push software on them either-- not only do they subvert ours (Equifax, Grindr almost), they onboard us to theirs (TikTok). The language of their biggest competitor/adversary is taught in schools. The US curriculum is limited to introductory French or Spanish. Never in my life have I needed to communicate anything in either language that couldn't be conveyed in English. Mandarin or Russian would have been more useful. They beat us at the spycraft game big-time, but we can't address that in public. So instead we're sowing confusion through vague trade sanctions to disrupt their deployment strategy. Since we never had a coherent plan to begin with, it won't achieve anything. The ultimate disruptor usually ends up being war.