Re: it's better to stick to reality
The narrow question – as I said – is how much value does the US get from the UK being in the five eyes – how bad/inconvenient for the US would it be to tolerate the UK still being an eye if the UK went ahead and used Chinese gear in its peripheral networks. Ideally presumably the US would like everyone in the world and particularly everyone in the five eyes always to use gear made by on-side nations indefinitely, no matter how crap and/or expensive it is compared to the alternatives – and of course I assume the UK is considering the risks the US will throw its toys out of the pram even if that might not be the most rational thing for it to do in the short term. I have no privileged knowledge about any of this but it is clear that part of what is happening at the moment (if the comments section here is anything to go by!) is a lot of posturing and bluff calling on both sides. Surely anyone trying to take a reality based approach to understanding the world needs to understand that lots of strutting and bloviating is an important part of human decision making, particularly in the field of international relations.
Regarding Brexit – as you observed, it was a narrow outcome of a democratic process and I would assume that someone with your reality based approach understands that the point of democracy is not to make good decisions – the point of democracy is to make it possible for us to change course when it becomes clear we've made a bad decision. The election of DJT in the US was also the narrow outcome of a democratic process and it has been melodramatically argued by many (though personally I think it is a lazy argument) that DJT's America First doctrine (a clearly stated part of his campaign platform) has seriously undermined various written and un-written international trust relationships many of which date back to the end of the second world war.
The deep historical undertow here in my view is the likely slow but steady decline of US hegemony and how the US and the rest of the world is going to adapt to that. Over here we do at least have some fairly recent experience with coming to terms with declining hegemony! As I said, I have no privileged knowledge about any of this, but perhaps one way to look at it could be as a nudge in the direction of knowing when it does and does not make sense to try to use your (perhaps dwindling) power simply to try to brute force your will rather than compromising and thus perhaps gaining the skills sooner rather than later that you will eventually need to adapt to a world in which your power is more limited?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
