The U.S. government’s years-long campaign to remove and preclude Huawei’s equipment from mobile networks is now formally unrequited in Europe’s largest economy. Germany today declined to ban any vendors from participating in the design and buildout of 5G mobile networks.

Earlier this year U.S. government officials took an especially heavy-handed approach to Huawei with respect to its inclusion in networks operating in countries that are allied with the United States. Germany was singled out and informed that the U.S. government would limit intelligence sharing with the country if Huawei is allowed to be part of Germany’s 5G infrastructure.

Germany responded in a predictably robust fashion to the perceived threat as it bristled over U.S. efforts to impose its will on 5G security standards in sovereign nations. Indeed, German operators Vodafone Germany and Deutsche Telekom both recently launched 5G networks in that country using Huawei equipment even before the new guidelines were formalized by German regulators.

“We are not taking a pre-emptive decision to ban any actor, or any company,” German government spokesperson Steffan Seibert told a news conference in Berlin today, according to Reuters. German operators, of which all are currently Huawei’s customers, have rallied around the beleaguered vendor and cautioned against banning its equipment, claiming it would cause delays and increased costs to deploy 5G networks.

The U.S. government views Chinese telecom vendors, particularly Huawei and ZTE, as a national security threat and has been waging a multi-front campaign to weaken the vendors’ ability to compete for 5G contracts in the United States and other Western countries. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that prohibits Huawei from purchasing American-made products and further actions by the Commerce Department prompted multiple companies to halt business with the vendor.

Huawei is also embroiled in a legal battle with the U.S. government, which is challenging the constitutionality of a ban against using its equipment in government networks. Huawei’s founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei recently floated the idea of licensing the company’s 5G technology, including patents to a company based in the West, but there’s been little interest in that effort since it was proposed.

The German government’s generally unrestrictive security guidelines were not a surprise, but it underlines the difficulties U.S. government officials have encountered in their quest to broaden a ban on Huawei in other countries. The cross-country espionage collaboration angle appears to have fallen on deaf ears.

The new rules imposed by Germany also come just days after the European Union (EU) issued a report that concluded 5G networks face an increased risk of cyber attacks due to the greater use of software to control functions and edge networking components to serve more use cases.

“With 5G networks increasingly based on software, risks to major security flaws, such as those deriving from poor software development processes within suppliers are gaining in importance,” the report states. “They could also make it easier for threat actors to maliciously insert backdoors into products and make them harder to detect.”

The report’s authors did not single out China as a specific threat, but rather identified the 5G market’s largest vendors and possible geo-political issues tied to the headquarters of those suppliers. “Some of these suppliers are headquartered in the EU (Ericsson and Nokia) while the others are headquartered outside of the EU. Their corporate governance presents notable differences, for example in terms of level of transparency and type of corporate ownership structure," the report notes.

The U.S. government’s failure to limit Huawei’s growth in Europe also gained prominence today with the opening of the vendor’s first European 5G Joint Innovation Center. The company partnered with Sunrise, Switzerland’s second-largest operator, to develop 5G application scenarios and expand the 5G ecosystem in Switzerland.

“What we have presented today will showcase the huge potential of 5G applications for both the private and business sectors,” Sunrise CEO Olaf Swantee said in a prepared statement.

“This center is very important for Huawei and for the industry,” Huawei Switzerland CEO Haitao Wang said in a prepared statement. “The aim is to stimulate the 5G ecosystem in Switzerland by showcasing real 5G use cases for business customers and consumers and supporting third party companies to develop and test their 5G-based applications. With this center we can drive innovation on 5G, one of the core technologies for the next decade.”