Global geopolitics

Tariffs, Sanctions, Hot or Proxy Wars Will Fail

For over a decade, the United States has pursued a strategy of economic containment against China. Sanctions, tariffs, tech bans, propaganda, and even proxy maneuvers have been deployed in an attempt to stop China’s rise. But the case of Huawei, once the bullseye of that strategy, has shown the world exactly why that containment policy is doomed to fail.

The resilience and resourcefulness of the Chinese people is impeccable. To those brainwashed to hate the Chinese, before you get worked up, this is just an article. Let me also point that the US has been involved in over 70 regime change wars in the Global South since world war 2, and China zero. I actually fell in love with Huawei phones, and I am actually typing from one. Since being banned from the western world, functionality has been a nightmare but lately the work arounds on google and google services framework have been great albeit some limitations.

Huawei wasn’t just a company. It was the symbol of China’s tech ambition. That’s precisely why Washington targeted it. During the first Trump administration, the U.S. launched semiconductor sanctions and placed Huawei on the entity list, cutting off access to American software, hardware, and chipmaking technology. Under Biden, the pressure escalated.

The logic behind the sanctions was arrogant but clear: without Qualcomm chips, without Android, without Oracle software, Huawei would collapse. And if Huawei collapsed, China’s entire technology sector, deeply interconnected with Huawei, would also go down. U.S. media, completely complicit in this narrative, echoed it without question. CNN called it “the final nail in Huawei’s coffin.” Bloomberg labeled it “the nuclear option.” CNBC predicted Huawei wouldn’t survive past 2022.

But all of that was wrong. Not just wrong, completely, embarrassingly, catastrophically wrong.

As Kevin Walmsley in the attached video, a former U.S. military intelligence officer turned logistics expert in China, explained in his frontline report, Huawei didn’t collapse. Instead, it adapted and rose stronger. It built its own semiconductors, the Kirin chips, and started replacing Qualcomm entirely. It launched Harmony OS to replace Google’s Android. It scaled up its telecom infrastructure business, deploying over $50 billion worth of 5G towers around the world. And then it leapfrogged the U.S. and its allies by becoming the first to roll out 5.5G, a technology the West still can’t match.

In 2024, Huawei’s revenue not only recovered, it surged. Telecom, consumer smartphones, cloud systems, all saw double-digit growth. While U.S. politicians were celebrating imaginary victories in Washington, Huawei was selling $42 billion worth of devices globally, dominating market share, and phasing out all reliance on U.S. suppliers.

But the Huawei story is not just about one company. It triggered a nationwide movement, what the Chinese government officially referred to as Delete America. This wasn’t just about software. It was about full-spectrum technological independence. Chipmaking. AI. OS platforms. Supercomputers. Even agriculture and military systems. Every sector began cutting foreign dependencies, building Chinese supply chains from the ground up. What the U.S. thought was a strategic kill switch ended up being a wake-up call, and China answered.

Meanwhile, the U.S. discovered an uncomfortable truth: it is now the one that depends on China. When the Biden administration tried to slap a 145% across-the-board tariff on Chinese electronics, they were forced to reverse it within days. Why? Because American industries, from consumer tech to aerospace, cannot operate without Chinese components. Hard drives. Displays. Motherboards. Semiconductors. It turns out the global supply chain isn’t controlled by Silicon Valley anymore, it runs through Shenzhen, Suzhou, and Chengdu.

And what about the so-called decoupling? It’s a myth. While the percentage of U.S. imports from China may have shrunk superficially, the reality is that production shifted through intermediary countries. The core technologies, components, and innovation? Still made in China. Still irreplaceable.

Now, the U.S. faces an uncomfortable paradox. The more it tries to isolate China, the more self-reliant and advanced China becomes. The more it cuts off trade, the more it hurts its own industries. The weaponisation of tariffs and sanctions has backfired.

This is a moment of truth, not just for Washington, but for the rest of the world.

For Europe: it’s time to think independently. Blindly aligning with the U.S. containment anddecouplinga agenda means sacrificing your own industries for American strategic goals. Why should European companies suffer just to delay a rival that has already caught up?

For Africa: the lesson is powerful. China was once dismissed, sanctioned, mocked, and now it’s leading in fields the West can’t compete in. Africa can observe and learn from China’s rapid journey from technological dependency to innovation leadership. Through focused investment in education, infrastructure, and domestic capacity, it is possible to break the cycle of dependency, just as China did in the face of extreme pressure. Huawei proved that technological independence isn’t a dream. It’s a roadmap. Africa can build its own systems, its own infrastructure, its own digital future, without waiting for permission from Washington or Brussels.

And for the world at large: the myth that sanctions can stop China is over. Huawei survived the most intense economic pressure campaign in modern history. Not only did it survive, it won. It exposed the weakness of America’s industrial base and proved that resilience, innovation, and long-term planning beat media narratives and short-term coercion.

China is no longer the world’s factory, it is becoming the world’s lab, data center, and command hub. That’s the reality Washington must now face.

So let the U.S. try tariffs. Let it fund fake news campaigns. Let it push proxies. It won’t work.

Huawei already proved that this strategy is a failure.

@GGTvStreams