Opinion: Spy me a river

- America has turned risk aversion into a digital industrial strategy. - The U.S. government is banning technologies it no longer manufactures while degrading the infrastructure it already owns. - The real crisis isn't active Chinese spying; it's America's failure to think like a digital industrial power—or act like a grown-up. Two years ago, I wrote that Washington's $20 billion plan to rip out and replace Chinese-made port cranes was a farce. Given what has transpired since then, I was being far too kind. What we are witnessing now is a self-inflicted infrastructure failure of astonishing incompetence, driven by an analog political establishment visibly out of its depth in a digital industrial economy. Worse still, America's port fiasco is no longer confined to ports. It has become the template for how Washington increasingly approaches critical infrastructure: define the villain first, define the objective later, substitute rhetoric for evidence, spend billions, then quietly move the goalposts when the original claims fail to materialize. The port story began in 2024 when congressional investigators revealed that some cranes built by Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (ZPMC)—which manufactures nearly 80% of the ship-to-shore cranes used at U.S. ports—contained cellular communications modules. Predictably, Washington erupted into a bipartisan chorus of "China is spying on us." Except there was never any evidence this was actually happening. Quite the opposite. The U.S. Coast Guard investigated and found zero evidence that the Chinese cranes—or their shocking, completely unhidden communications hardware—had ever been used for espionage or malicious activity. "Coast Guard cyber protection teams have not observed any active malicious cyber activity (MCA) on these crane systems," it concluded. The American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) agreed: "There is no evidence of the cranes being used to harm or track port operations." Nor was there anything remotely suspicious about finding communications hardware inside modern industrial equipment. Remote diagnostics, software updates and predictive maintenance all depend on exactly these kinds of digital connections. In the 21st century, connectivity is not an optional extra; it is table stakes. It would have been far more surprising if ZPMC hadn't supplied digital communications capability as standard. Only in countries that have effectively abandoned advanced industrial leadership—America, Mali, Niger, North Korea, Venezuela, the U.K., Yemen…. places like that—could officials react as though discovering communications hardware inside a container crane were akin to uncovering Soviet listening devices inside an embassy wall. What exactly did they imagine modern cranes operate with? String and tin cans? Semaphore? Signal flags? And here we go again The "China is spying on us" narrative also sounds strangely familiar because it follows precisely the same playbook successive administrations used against Huawei. Accuse a Chinese infrastructure company of embedding espionage capabilities. Produce zero public evidence that the equipment has actually been used for espionage against the United States. Then use the unproven allegation to justify removing the vendor and replacing it with American technology. There is only one problem: America no longer manufactures the replacement. The United States no longer has an incumbent supplier building end-to-end 5G radio access networks. It builds precisely zero ship-to-shore container cranes. Washington has effectively declared economic war in two industries in which it no longer competes. The promised manufacturing renaissance has proved equally illusory. The first replacement cranes ordered by U.S. ports are not being built in America. They are being built in Japan because the United States no longer possesses the heavy industrial capacity to manufacture them itself. The Huawei comparison becomes even more awkward when you look at the legal reality. For years, Washington insisted Huawei had embedded hidden spyware inside its telecommunications equipment to spy on Americans. Yet when the Department of Justice finally unveiled its high-profile criminal case, it didn't bring a single espionage charge. Instead, prosecutors brought charges of bank fraud, intellectual property theft and sanctions evasion. The disconnect is damning. Washington weaponized the terrifying specter of "espionage" to scare the public, bring the media onside and justify a massive infrastructure ban. Yet when forced to prove those allegations in a court of law, it relied instead on financial crimes and sanctions violations. That may yet backfire. Having pressured allies to spend billions ripping Huawei equipment out of their networks, Washington may now find those same governments—and their telecom carriers—asking an uncomfortable question: if you couldn't charge them with espionage, why exactly did we replace perfectly functional infrastructure, and why would we continue to do so? The port crane program has fared no better. None of the Chinese-built cranes has been replaced. The first replacements are not expected until 2027. In the meantime, U.S. ports have been instructed to remove communications hardware, sever remote connections and "air-gap" operational systems. In effect, America is deliberately reducing the capability and operational efficiency of its own critical infrastructure in order to defend against a threat that its own Coast Guard found no evidence to support. This is not an isolated fiasco. The $42.5 billion BEAD broadband program has likewise become bogged down in bureaucracy, compliance reviews and political horse-trading while delivering remarkably little broadband infrastructure. Whether the issue is ports, broadband or telecommunications, the pattern is the same: announce a grand strategy, bungle it. None of these failures is really about cranes, Huawei or broadband. They stem from the same underlying misconception: that digital infrastructure consists of isolated sectors rather than a single interdependent industrial system. Washington continues to regulate yesterday's industries while its competitors are building tomorrow's infrastructure. A failure for the ages The deeper problem is architectural. Washington still governs telecommunications, energy, ports, cloud computing and AI as though they were separate industries. They are not. They have converged into a single digital infrastructure stack in which power, fiber, cloud, AI, logistics and communications increasingly operate as a single integrated economic system. That is the central premise of my Unified Infrastructure Stack framework. Competitive advantage no longer belongs to the nation with the best individual technologies. It belongs to the nation that integrates them most effectively. China increasingly understands this. Much of Europe is beginning to understand it. Washington still does not (see figure). Forward-looking governments around the world are increasingly competing to dominate the top layer of the model: Operational Sovereignty, or OpSov. This is the layer that determines who ultimately controls critical infrastructure—and therefore economic power. The model isn't a scoreboard, but if it were, America would barely be on it. It is still floundering at the bottom of the stack in governance, while simultaneously boasting about its leadership in artificial intelligence, which is itself problematic for other reasons. That disconnect is precisely the problem. Dominance in one layer cannot compensate for strategic failure across the rest of the infrastructure stack. America's greatest strategic vulnerability is not that it depends on Chinese cranes or Chinese telecommunications equipment. It is that, after decades of industrial decline, it no longer manufactures many of the technologies it now wants to ban. This is not a national security failure. It is a failure of industrial strategy, competitiveness and architecture. It is one of the most remarkable failures of policymaking in modern American history. Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud, and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale. Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.