“What’s natural for Taiwan is we produce 95 percent” and “we feel great about it,” Lutnick said, conceding that “you can imagine when someone has 95 percent, convincing them that they should only have 50 percent. That’s a lot” to lose.
But “Donald Trump would say it’s not healthy for you or healthy for us because we protect you, and for us to protect you,” then “you need to help us achieve… reasonable self-sufficiency,” Lutnick argued.
To close the deal with Taiwan, Lutnick suggested that the US would offer “some kind of security guarantee” so that “they can expect” that moving their supply chain into the US won’t eliminate Taiwan’s so-called “silicon shield,” where countries like the US are willing to protect Taiwan because “we need their silicon, their chips, so badly.”
If you move that production to the US there’s no need for the US to “protect” Taiwan anymore as they have what they want within their borders.
Well, not quite. The US would still have a very good reason to concentrate attention in Taiwan. The issue for them is that it wouldn’t be in any of their interest. It would be purely to serve as a staging ground for anti-China excursions and operations. A logistics hub and military base.
As I’m sure you know but it’s worth stating explicitly: moving so much chip production from Taiwan to the US would also make the US much more inclined to actually make use of Taiwan militarily rather than just use it to posture Cold War style, because they have much less to fear from Taiwan being attacked and even overtaken by China.
Ahh yes that’s a fair assessment. In fact, ethnic han Chinese that are US-aligned are probably extremely valuable for the purposes of operations to disrupt China.
The US doesn’t have the infrastructure or the control over industry to have significant semiconductor movement from Taiwan (PRC territory). As has happened with all other semiconductor pipedreams in western liberal nations, it will crash with the reality of immediate profits and stock value growth vs huge capital investment in a heavily capital intensive sector. It simply cannot happen, and if it’s attempted, it will be the crash of global semiconductor industry
Oh I’m not saying it can do it. Just saying that if it could do it, it would not be good for Taiwan.
The equipment isn’t even the main issue. The biggest issue is they do not have the educated and skilled workers for it. You can’t just make 50% of the people in this industry move country, will never happen.
Building the skillsets that have developed in Taiwan over decades of the industry’s growth in a completely different country is not a simple task.
“Denuclearize and we won’t have any reason to threaten you!”