America can save Taiwan from Chinese invasion by promising to destroy it, or at least its chipmaking capability, argues an article in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College's quarterly. In "Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan," Air University's Jared McKinney and Colorado State University's Peter Harris say that Taipei and Washington should make the island "unwantable."
"The United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain," they write in the U.S. Army War College's most-downloaded paper of 2021. "This could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the most important chipmaker in the world and China's most important supplier."
McKinney and Harris explain their title by citing a Chinese proverb: "Beneath a broken nest, how can there be any whole eggs?"
Americans design the world's fastest chips but make none of them.
Taiwan does. The island is by far the world's leader in the manufacture of semiconductors. One firm, TSMC, as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is known, makes more than half of the planet's made-to-order chips and about 90% of its advanced processors. TSMC and Samsung Electronics are the only two companies that can produce 5-nanometer chips, the most advanced anywhere.
"Today, if you control access to microchips then you can control the world," writes Bob Anderson on the Federalist site. Taiwan is so important that people there talk about their semiconductor industry providing a "silicon shield" against a Chinese invasion.
The shield argument, whether made by Taiwanese or Americans, is wishful thinking. Yes, Beijing has spectacularly failed to develop its own semiconductor industry and, yes, China is critically reliant on Taiwan's chips. Yet Chinese ruler Xi Jinping is not going to be deterred by the prospect of losing TSMC or, for that matter, all of Taiwan's semiconductor industry. He will take the island even if he has to make it a radioactive slab uninhabitable for a thousand years.
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