[The_Colonel]

> I'm not seeing what the contradiction is. The US made a bet that Huawei couldn't survive without foreign help

That looks like a strawman, especially the "foreign" part.

Sanctions often boil down to the goal of incurring costs. Huawei went from a money making to a money losing machine. China may very well cover the bill in this case, but that money will be missed elsewhere.

[elfbargpt]

Based on my understanding, the goal of kneecapping Huawei goes far beyond hurting the company’s P/L or market share. This is a geopolitics issue—-centered around slowing the advance of China’s technology sector related to chips / compute / etc. The capabilities of the nation as a whole is what both parties are primarily concerned with.

The US wanted China dependent on the west for high end smart phones and chips. The way it’s turned out, China would have been more dependent if the US just left Huawei alone to begin with

[The_Colonel]

> Based on my understanding, the goal of kneecapping Huawei goes far beyond hurting the company’s P/L or market share.

Hurting Huawei financially also hurts China's economy, since the government faces a difficult choice of letting it fall or footing the bill (incurring opportunity cost).

> The US wanted China dependent on the west for high end smart phones and chips.

That again seems like a strawman. What US appears to be doing is it tries to stifle China's development geopolitically, economically, militarily. That's the high-level goal. Reducing access to high-end chips is just a mean to do it, not the goal itself.