Having your shipments intercepted en-route by spies is very different than directly cooperating with those spies. None of those interceptions required cooperation by Cisco.
Cisco complained to the government about the interceptions: https://www.recode.net/2014/5/18/11627004/in-letter-to-obama...
Apple has also famously resisted government demands to develop a backdoor for its hardware. IIRC, all indications were that the government's demands would have been rejected by the court system had the case progressed far enough to provide a definitive answer.
Huawei says, in public, that it's important to their reputation to be known to ship un-backdoored devices. Cisco says the exact same thing.
What really happened: Intelligence Community: "So, we'll demand you backdoor devices, we'll intercept a few and modify them, and then you'll public complain and resist, and then after the media frenzy has died down..."
/tinfoilhat
If it came to a war, the US and China are both going to shut down whatever communications channels their “enemies” are using. This is just one of the reasons that US DoD is so interested in SpaceX’s StarLink.