Fighting a war over an industry reliant on large, immobile, extremely vulnerable factories/laboratories is really, really, really, really, really, really, really stupid.
If China invaded Taiwan to controls fabs, the USA would just destroy them with air power. And that's assuming Taiwan didn't sabotage them first.
To be fair, fighting WW1 was predictably stupid. Sometimes countries do dumb things. This gets worse with autocrats, because their whims and delusions can have an outsized effect on national choices.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Taiwanese government hasn’t subtly signaled to China that the fans would be destroyed within 10minutes of an invasion. It would be stupid for them not too. Then again China is liable (but not guaranteed) to invade Taiwan less because of the fabs, and more because they consider Taiwan a rogue province that they want back.
WW1 was the first turn-of-the-century war fought with automatic rifles. There were battles foreshadowing the impact of automatic guns (Russo-Japanese War) but the real impact (trench warfare and the later development of war tanks) were seen developing on the fly.
Just go and search for early pictures of ww1, France was still using 19th century flamboyant uniforms that proved totally ineffective and later gave way to brown, camouflaged cloth.
Everyone thought WW1 would be quick and dissipate in a matter of months. Nobody was prepared for year long conflicts.
We can think that the war was predictably stupid because in hindsight we can see all the stupidity, but that is our historical privilege. Nobody was prepared for that in 1914. Just like we might very well be totally unprepared for the probable next worldwide conflict.
> Everyone thought WW1 would be quick and dissipate in a matter of months. Nobody was prepared for year long conflicts.
Everyone, except those who were in the military officer corps and thus knew that modern war was going to be a long, drawn-out, bloody affair. In other words, the experts knew it was going to be long, but the politicians and the media ignored the experts' opinions because what do they know?
I agree that that is a problem with the system back then (and even now considering how much military power is under the POTUS). Regardless, those are the ones that are in charge so I think it is fair to say we, as in the society was not prepared for those conflicts.
And this repeated itself in the second world war. The late battles near japanese homeland were the first to reach the United States population without the heroic and patriotic filtering, all thanks to the work of Tom Lea.
The civil war also had some cannons blasting... but the weapons were VERY different. A well trained soldier was shooting 2-3 bullets per minute in the civil war. WW2 machine guns were 25 rounds per second. There is no comparison of the destruction capabilities...
Sure, but at a limited scale. And the Germans knew that a trench duel was unwinnable going into ww1, hence the Schlieffen-plan. The intention was to take out France in aug 1914 and then swing around before Russia was even fully mobilized.
The major turning points were still more like battles from the Napoleonic Wars than WWI.
It's also much easier with hindsight to view them as precursors to the trench warfare of WWI. But I believe contemporaries viewed it more like classic siege warfare.
WWI occurred in a brief window where defensive technology/strategy was much more effective* than offensive technology/strategy.
*defense almost ways is easier, but it was much more than normal in that period.
In the de-constructive palingenetic perspective some see in its human promoters:
> And had not «mere anarchy», as W.B. Yeats put it in 1916, been «loosed upon the world»? To many, the war had seemed the greatest calamity since the fall of Rome. Germany, from fear and ambition, and Austria, from resignation and despair, had willed the war in a way the other belligerents had not. It marked the culmination of the wave of pessimism in German philosophy which was its salient characteristic in the pre-war period. Germanic pessimism, which contrasted sharply with the optimism based upon political change and reform to be found in the United States, Britain, France and even Russia in the decade before 1914, was not the property of the intelligentsia but was to be found at every level of German society, particularly at the top. In the weeks before the outbreak of Armageddon, Bethmann Hollweg's secretary and confident Kurt Riezler made notes of the gloomy relish with which his master steered Germany and Europe into the abyss. July 7 1914: «The Chancellor expects that a war, whatever its outcome, will result in the uprooting of everything that exists. The existing world very antiquated, without ideas». July 27: «Doom greater than human power hanging over Europe and our own people». Bethmann Hollweg had been born in the same year as Freud, and it was as though he personified the "death instinct" the latter coined as the fearful decade ended. Like most educated Germans, he had read Max Nordau's Degeneration, published in 1895, and was familiar with the degenerative theories of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. War or no war, man was in inevitable decline; civilization was heading for destruction. Such ideas were commonplace in central Europe, preparing the way for the gasp of approbation which greeted Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, fortuitously timed for publication in 1918 when the predicted suicide had been accomplished.
Coming from the guy that built a pan-European system of alliances with the sole purpose of preventing opposing blocks to form, yeah. A pity the big powers, Germany being one of the first ones, tore Bismarck's system of alliances down.
Not sure the tragedy that happened in the Balkans qualifies as foolish. The local Slavic population was sick of the Austro-Hungary's rule and wanted to kick out the empire they never invited.
WW1 made perverse sense when viewed in the mindset that existed in Europe from the early gunpowder age to the end of the Napoleonic wars. They just didn't account for the rise of nationalism, total war, and industrialization.
China understands that wars of expansion rarely have worked since WWII. They know a single US submarine could cripple world semiconductor manufacturing for months.
But I agree, they might try it for non-economic reasons like reunification. Or maybe cause they think--rightly or wrongly--that the USA would cower and wouldn't support Taiwan at all. Wars can be caused by miscalculation too.
>>that the USA would cower and wouldn't support Taiwan at all.
At most that would only last 1 election cycle, so they would have to unify and hold it fast, very fast. Any Administration that would allow China to take over Taiwan would surrender (rightfully) all their political power and be ousted by a landslid the next election
I think you'd be surprised how quickly we'd get over that. Regardless, if we abandoned Taiwan and it fell, there is pretty much no chance we'd invade several years later.
> China understands that wars of expansion rarely have worked since WWII.
coughs in Crimea, Hongkong and arguably Israel, Syria and Turkey
Wars of expansion can and do still work, all it needs is for the rest of the world to stand aside just as they did in 1933-45 - and the signs don't look good, given that the reaction for Russian and Chinese annexation projects was nothing more than a couple ineffective sanctions.
Crimea is the best success, but its because it really more of an annexation of a population that is ethnically same as the annexing nation.
I don't want to give what Russia did legitimacy, but its closer to self-determination than most liberal internationalist (the IR theory, I don't mean US liberals) will give it credit for. Crimea was only part of Ukraine due to the dictates of the Soviet Union and had only been part of it since 1954. Then again, maybe I'm overestimating how strong Taiwanese nationalism is.
In places like Syria, you see what happens when different ethnicities fight over territory. It's a bloody mess and everyone is worse for it.
Israel is in a different position since they really just want the land and not really the economy and people on the land. They are ethnically cleansing and then populating the area with settlers.
I was going to say that is unique in this age, but its really not all that different from what China did in Tibet or is doing in Xinjiang.
What really diminished since WWII is real ethnical cleansing. And I mean by the definition of "forced removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups from a given area". What China did was move in their people, and what Israel did is curve out the areas with low existing population and called them their own.
This, together with the democratic nature of the western world has led to a place where annexation of an area becomes infeasible for a place with a large opposing population (which is why Israel is not officially annexing the west bank).
>>"Fighting a war over an industry reliant on large, immobile, extremely vulnerable factories/laboratories is really, really, really, really, really, really, really stupid."
Sounds like you just described the Oil/Gas industry, in which about a dozen wars have started over the last 100 years.
The difference is that it's basically impossible to take control of a fab the same way you can for an oil well. No matter your military advantage, the people you're trying to take the fab from will just destroy it, and odds are good that you can't rebuild it yourself. You may as well skip the war altogether and begin researching how to build your own fabs since you need to do that anyway.
And yet fabs aren't reliant on minerals that are rare and geographically concentrated (for the most part, I'm sure they rely on some rare earths. The point is silicon is hilariously common).
Fabs also capture very little value. TSMC and Intel aren't the trillion dollar companies. Google, MS, Amazon, etc. are.
So there's really no upside. Only the downside of a large fraction of the world's high end fab capacity disappearing overnight. It'd be one thing if one side of the US and China had their own backup capacity. But they don't. And they won't for at least a decade, in my non-expert opinion.
yes but in an oil/gas war the same resources can be tapped again with new infrastructure. If you destroy one of ASML's machines you need to recreate the entire global supply chain that constructed it.
Beyond the points others are making about oil/gas being different, major powers don't fight each directly over oil and gas.
At beat up on countries who can't fight back. And even then, its not really to steal oil, but just ensure that it is flowing.
The only real attempt to seize foreign oilfields was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. That didn't really go well for Iraq. And, on their way out, they scorched earth and lit 80% of the wells on fire.
Plus while building fab plants is certainly difficult and expensive, its hard to imagine a cost-benefit analysis where fighting a major war is cheaper and easier then just..building your own fab plants.
…if China invaded _their own province_. A province over which their claim is stronger than the US' claim to Hawaii.
I keep thinking there's hope to avoid this war, but the way people comment here and on Reddit (in abject ignorance of geopolitical reality), I fear it's inevitable.
Fifteen (!) countries support Taiwanese sovereignty. The _rest of the world_ respects China's claim. It's insane that this rhetoric is even present in Americans' minds.
By the same train of thought, if USA stops the flow of semiconductors towards China, the game theory based proper response would be to bomb them to achieve parity?
I read somewhere that the fabs are already equipped with bombs that can be made to explode if there is an invasion from China. Considering how clean those places have to be in order to work, this can cause immense damage to those fabs.
Not sure they have bombs but they are pretty delicate.
In reality China has another option. They could just demand semiconductors or else they would close the tap on rare-earth elements [1] and by doing so crashing the economy.
Even more so if they annex/invade Vietnam.
Other countries have availability, but only China has the supply chain to extract and process these elements at scale. For any other player to step up production to match current demand it would take years.
Yeah thanks to the fact that you need international collaboration to scale cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing it's very unlikely that a single nation, even if they discovered general AI, could terrorize the world with an autonomous robot army, because even general AI needs chips to run on.
It seems pretty weird to go to work everyday with bombs set all over the factory you work in. What if it blows up by accident or a disgruntled worker pulls the bomb lever.
I don't believe that for a moment. Much more likely the complex machines could be simply disabled and their firmware wiped by remote management. This happens with other stuff too, you can't even stealthily move it, because of embedded GPS and the like.
edit: Apart from that, what would that stupid act do to the economy of the involved parties, and the world in general?
I would bet on the US letting them take it. Like they let the Taliban take Kabul. There's little appetite for starting a new war after Afghanistan, and wouldn't starting a war with China send civilization back to sticks and stones?
Unless in the lead up to war each country hides its valuable targets. They could probably create hundreds of decoy facilities within a few months to throw attackers off the mark.
I’d bet the big players already have plans for introducing decoy trucks, trains, planes & ships in the event a war breaks out in our age of unlimited surveillance.
> Unless in the lead up to war each country hides its valuable targets. They could probably create hundreds of decoy facilities within a few months to throw attackers off the mark.
I think the order of operations is backwards here.
China wouldn’t start a war over semiconductors, but if the supply had already been cut off and internal economic collapse was imminent, it could drive a military response. Something similar to what the oil embargo (arguably) drove Japan to do in 1941.
Chinas primary military advantage is that the one or two million PLA soldiers with AKs don’t require semiconductors to be effective and western powers lack the willpower to engage in conventional warfare.
But they lack a navy sufficient to control the open seas. They can control their territorial waters well enough with their anti-air and anti-naval systems but beyond that they don't have the reach. Basically neither the US nor China can hit each other well enough to make a decisive war so there's no real incentive right now. But I can imagine Xi and company coming up with some nonsensical patriotic reason to get people mad enough to at least embargo the US even if it hurts them more in the long run.
Why would the US ever engage in a conventional war against a global power ever again? There's a reason why the US hasn't adopted a no first use policy for nukes.
China won't invade Taiwan because of industrial assets.
China has time.
Only when it becomes convinced that there is no hope for peaceful reunification will it dare to invade.
And it is not clear whether they are even capable of doing so.
The last successful amphibious invasion of similar magnitude was D-Day.
Keep that hope alive and you have a more relaxed situation in a couple of generations.
China must be limited, but it must not be snubbed.
The perception of deepening relations between Taiwan and the US diminishes their hopes.
They will wait long time, but they won't allow Taiwan to be taken away by a western power.
This is such a dumb proposition. Even if you get military presence in a country for fab, a fab will loose the competitive advantage in just two years. And there are slots available in fabs that China could easily obtain for money/other deal rather than going for war.
> a fab will loose the competitive advantage in just two years
Not really. First, almost all fabs for modern chipset structures are located in Taiwan which means China won't invade Taiwan for a fab but for all fabs.
Second, the market is glowing so white hot that - even assuming China manages to take over all Taiwanese fabs intact and with staff cooperating, which is quite unlikely - there will be more demand than supply for many years to come.
No. Supply might play a part in a conflict, but I don't see this as being the cause.
"China's manufacturing economy AND its military are entirely dependent on foreign-sourced semiconductors."
Why would they risk a global conflict that would weaken its military that would implicitly be weak from a shortage? The only reason I could see them taking this approach is if the foriegn suppliers stop providing the chips and they don't ramp up their own production during an existing conflict, backing them into a corner to take over production in another country (good luck having those facilities intact and staffing them).
> (good luck having those facilities intact and staffing them)
This is the problem with the whole "take Taiwan for the semiconductor industry" line of thinking. China needs foreign scapegoats (it's all _____'s fault that your life sucks) and prizes (look! we took back what is rightfully ours) so it can keep control of it's increasingly oppressed people.
Oil/gas are basic necessities. Without oil and gas it is impossible to continue a war, to feed the population (fertilizers are made from oil and gas, tractors run on oil), to make electricity for the industry and population, to warm houses during winter. Even "green" energy cannot exist without fossil fuels.
30-40 years ago the world wasn't so dependent on semiconductors. If all the semiconductor factories would be destroyed now, it won't be end of the world. They're not required to survive. I'd easily survive the winter without laptop and smartphone. But without heating it would be impossible.
I haven't watched the video but I can already say no to the question.
First, China doesn't want to invade Taiwan for its semiconductors industry. They see Taiwan as part of their territory and view reuniting it with the mainland as the conclusion of the revolution. Also they want control of the Taiwan strait to secure the South China sea.
Then, Europe most likely wouldn't follow the USA into a war with China and as colonial empires don't exist anymore neither would Africa so it wouldn't be a world war.
The real question there is "would the world go to war with China to protect what is left of Taiwan's freedom?" You only have to look at diplomatic attitudes of the past decades to know that the answer is "of course not".
It would certainly cause massive upheaval if China tightened its grip on Taiwan, diplomatic and economic sanctions, a massive shift in semiconductor production, a change in status for other semiconductor producing countries and a delay in the forward march of computing technology.
Why have we placed all our chips on Taiwan? With China muscling in on Taiwan shouldn't the first order of business be setting up chip manufacturing in the US?
Peter Zeihan (American geopolitical strategist) recently did a short video on this (3 mins). Tl;Dr: He's not worried because supply chains will re-order
The political and military 'elite' of the USA have been compromised. If there is a hot war with China, it will be one that America has been pre-arranged to lose, as part of a transition in hegemony.
"MI6 spent the present-day equivalent of more than $200m bribing senior Spanish military officers, ship owners and other agents to keep Spain out of the second world war"
Spain entering WW2 on the Axis side would have meant the Allies would be completely locked out of the Mediterranean, and probably changed the course of history. Bribing foreign government officials yields great ROI!
History has other examples of Autocratic competitors using Liberal nations' Democratic procedures against them:
"The liberum veto was a major cause of the deterioration of the Commonwealth political system... when foreign powers bribed Sejm members to paralyze its proceedings, and resulted in the Commonwealth's eventual destruction and the partition of Poland"
The State Premiere of Victoria, home to the city (Melbourne) with the world's longest COVID lockdown, signed secret deals to partner with China for infrastructure development:
If China invaded Taiwan to controls fabs, the USA would just destroy them with air power. And that's assuming Taiwan didn't sabotage them first.