For certain applications, that is not unreasonable. I am sure there are more than a few countries that would be interested in fabbing trustable hardware for their own internal use.
Do you trust all the people that work on your factory, and all the people that touch the design? By the way, do you trust the manager of the factory? And his manager (and so on)?
These are issues that countries need to grapple with regardless. If they don't have these personnel issues reasonably figured out, then backdoors in their hardware are really sort of a moot issue.
These are much easier problems to mitigate in practice than "We just bought this hardware from the US, who is not particularly keen on us, and we have absolutely not fucking idea what is in it."
For certain applications, that is not unreasonable. I am sure there are more than a few countries that would be interested in fabbing trustable hardware for their own internal use.