⁍ Washington renewed pressure on Europe to ban the company from fifth-generation (5G) networks.

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⁍ Keith Krach, the undersecretary of state for economic affairs, stepped up warnings as Germany and Italy consider their next-generation mobile networks.

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⁍ Krach said that Finland’s Nokia NOKIA.HE and Sweden’s Ericsson ERICb.ST were the only companies that European governments should choose.

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– The US wants China’s second-largest telecom equipment maker, Huawei, banned from building Europe’s next-generation 5G mobile networks—because it’s part of the Chinese Communist Party’s “surveillance state” and complicit in human rights abuses. “Untrusted, high-risk vendors like Huawei and ZTE provide the CCP’s authoritarian government the capacity to disrupt or weaponise critical applications in infrastructure or provide technological advances to China’s military forces,” US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Keith Krach told a German think tank on Tuesday, per Reuters. He said Nokia and Ericsson were the only companies in Europe that should be allowed to build 5G networks, though he didn’t provide any evidence to back up his assertion that Huawei’s equipment could be used for spying, the Guardian reports. Germany and Italy are considering banning Huawei, which is already banned in the US, from building 5G networks, and Krach’s comments come as China and the US are in a trade dispute that threatens to escalate into a trade war between the world’s two biggest economies. (President Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods.)