Huawei denies that that law — China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law — mandates that it assist the country’s intelligence services. “Huawei has obtained various legal opinions on the subject, all of which agree that it is not subject to any legal provisions that could bring it into conflict with German laws,” Berger, the Huawei spokesperson, said in an email.

Lacking the proof U.S. officials insisted wouldn’t come until it was too late, the Germans were reluctant to come down hard on Huawei. U.S. officials believed Berlin’s enormous economic dependency on China was a key obstacle.

By 2020, German automakers Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW were selling more cars in China than anywhere else in the world. That made Berlin especially sensitive to fears of Chinese retaliation.

“German policy towards China has always been primarily industrial policy,” said Röttgen, the conservative lawmaker. During the Trump years, “Germany did not want to antagonize China and thus provoke disadvantages for the German automotive industry, which China openly threatened.”

Gordon agrees.

“Part of their unstated concern, we always believed, was the economic damage that would be imposed [by China] as a retribution for walking away from Huawei,” she said.

For Turpin, the former NSC official, Germany’s apprehensions of Chinese bullying were proof of the very point the U.S. was trying to make. Whether it was blunt economic pressure or technically sophisticated cyberattacks, relying heavily on Huawei meant making yourself vulnerable to Chinese coercion.

“For [the Germans] to continue to tell us, well, we need a smoking gun, we haven’t seen intelligence, suggests that they’re being just completely obtuse,” he said.

Turpin and other Trump administration officials believe it was difficult to convey that message, in part, due to the Germans’ bitter dislike for Trump and his high-pressure style of diplomacy.

Since he entered office, Trump had berated Germany and other NATO allies as “free riders” because they failed to fulfill the alliance target of spending 2 percent of GDP on national defense. He also frequently threatened to levy a 20 percent tariff on European car imports — a potentially crippling blow to Germany’s auto industry, and a threat that looked an awful lot like the one U.S. officials were suggesting could come from China.

“Merkel is looking at this through the lens of, first of all, I’m not going to side with Donald Trump. And second of all, I am not going to jeopardize our economic relationship with Beijing,” he said.

It was that type of behavior from the U.S. president that turned Germans into some of the world’s foremost Trump critics by the end of 2019. A survey published that December by British research firm YouGov found that roughly two-fifths of Germans believed Trump was the world’s most dangerous world leader, even ranking above North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Still, the Trump administration wasn’t shy about browbeating the Germans on Huawei.

In March 2019, Trump’s then-ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, wrote a letter to the German Minister of Economic Affairs threatening to curb intelligence sharing with Berlin unless it excluded Huawei from the pending rollout of its 5G networks.

In it, Grenell warned that the 2017 law meant Beijing could force Huawei and ZTE to share confidential information that passed through their German networks, potentially compromising sensitive defense and intelligence data belonging to NATO.

The letter, which leaked to reporters, was followed by repeated public warnings from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, when the two were in Germany.

Those early efforts failed because “we were going around the world, banging on the table like the ugly American, and saying, ‘Don’t buy Huawei,’” said Keith Krach, who began as Trump’s under secretary of state for economic affairs in June 2019.

Like Turpin, Krach believes the bluntness of the Trump team’s early appeals backfired. After he came into his role, he tried to develop a positive vision of how German industry could benefit by reducing its reliance on Huawei, he said.

But Steinman, Trump’s senior director for cyber policy on his national security council, pushed back against the idea that the administration’s vocal approach was foolhardy.

“When one of your major trading partners, when one of your major military allies, is doing things that are contrary to their national interest — and as an ally, things that are contrary to yours, too — you say something,” he said. “I wouldn’t call that brash, I would call that honest.”

Whatever the reason, Turpin said he realized how difficult it would be to move the Germans off Huawei during a trip to Berlin in May 2019.

After a day of meetings with his German counterparts, Turpin’s hosts brought him to a rooftop bar overlooking the city’s Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church. The church, which had been leveled during a World War II bombing raid, later became a symbol of Germany’s commitment to avoiding the sins of its Nazi past.

But the view that day featured a perverse twist: The church’s new tower had been covered in an enormous, 360-degree advertisement for Huawei.

“The idea that a solemn monument that is supposed to look at the full crimes and challenges of the Second World War had turned into an advertisement for Huawei, it was like, ‘Guys, this is what we mean,’” Turpin said.

A digital Nord Stream II?

The ground beneath Huawei began to shift in Germany in February 2022, virtually the same day Russian tanks rolled across the border of Ukraine.

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