DECOUPLING, BIGLY: Trump Just Took the Nuclear Option on Huawei.

I linked to a similar report yesterday, but this one is more detailed:

On Monday the Commerce Department expanded its foreign-produced direct product rule to include situations “where U.S. software or technology is the basis for a foreign-produced item” that will be used by Huawei, or where the company is party to such a transaction, such as being an intermediary supplier.

There are dozens of steps in developing, manufacturing and installing chips in a device, with U.S. technology an integral part throughout. Synopsys Inc. and Cadence Design Systems Inc. make software used to design semiconductors; Lam Research Corp. and Applied Materials Inc. are major suppliers of manufacturing equipment — all four companies are based in Silicon Valley.

There are many more American technology providers crucial to the process. Remove just one, and any chip company will struggle to keep up. Removing them all would be akin to cutting off the oxygen. And if the new rule is to be strictly interpreted, then even the use of generalist technologies like PCs running on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows and Intel Corp. processors could be prohibited.

Huawei isn’t merely a Communist front corporation — it was built on the bones of Nortel, picked clean by Huawei in what amounted to state-sanctioned intellectual theft and espionage.