This in addition to all the "security" advisories to other countries seems like a move to curb their economic growth more than anything.
China especially has been playing the ultra-long game by slowly getting more and more countries under their dependence, buying up assets left and right and where that didn't help resorting to industrial espionage.
The problem that the telco operators have is that there is (thanks to Chinese dumping, did I mention they are playing a long game) next to no viable competition in either the US or the expanded NATO space - Europe has Ericsson and Nokia which are expensive and the US has Cisco which is expensive and crops up with at least one real backdoor a month.
From my experience in the industry, most of the protections being offered are hand-wavy things, like a software patch from Huawei being scanned by a desktop virus scanner for viruses or remote access gateways that record the screens of external employees accessing equipment where the demo I got for the solution the security prime couldn't figure out how to actually view the screen recordings. Huawei employees weren't allowed to give us any USB devices either. (I didn't work with Huawei routinely, although I know many who do. I tended to work with Cisco, Nokia, and several smaller vendors).
The only model I could see sort of working is forcing them to hand over the sources to an industry group or government entity, that is then responsible for auditing, building, and signing the software. But there are so many moving components slipping something past that is still plausible, and many barriers towards that sort of model.
You can argue the West doesn't behave as well as it should on the world stage, but Western ideology seems to be the best hope we have for an eventual egalitarian future, although the human cost will still be high. The further we get from authoritarianism, be it left or right, the better, in my opinion.
When it comes to China and Russia, what they are doing is a plan of the sort that can only be done in an authoritarian, controlled state.