Comment by Pet_Ant 4 days ago
This redundancy makes me worried that the US will view Taiwanese sovereignty as disposable. While the US has given much for the defence of Ukraine, it’s always been careful to make sure it’s not enough for Ukraine to win but only enough to make it expensive for Russia hopping they’ll reconsider. Russia has won there and I suspect they’ll joe be willing to let China have the islands now too.
TSMC is a publicly traded company and like all publicly traded companies it has no allegiance to any country (other than historical legacy and emotions) and will always relocate to where it's most safe and profitable for providing returns to its shareholders, just like how many profitable companies moved to UK, US and Switzerland during WW2 and how many EU companies are doing the same thing today.
If the US will provide TSMC with better deals on all fronts than what the Taiwanese government can, then there's nothing that can stop them from slowly abandoning Taiwan and moving the HQ and vital operations to the US over time, especially that the Taiwanese government is not a major shareholder in TSMC.
How does this invalidate what I said?
Have you heard of Operation Paperclip? The moment China steps in Taiwan, all those vital TSMC engineers will be flown to the US along with the critical IP and given a blank cheque to replicate Taiwan operation on US soil ASAP. TSMC is preemptively building the infrastructure there in preparation for such an event, so it can outlive whatever happens to Taiwan. TSMC has little inventive to tie itself to Taiwan and its people who are not its employees. Every big company thinks and acts like this. Taiwan can't force TSMC to stay there if it doesn't want to.
It's about as close as you can get though to capital efficiently allocating itself
In the game betwen China and the US, the legal status and 'allegiance' of TSMC is not relevant. What is relevant is who controls the fabs, i.e. where the fabs are physically located.
It is also naive to think that governments (US and especially ROC/Taiwan) do not have influence over TSMC. This sort of thing is not necessarily measured by level of shareholding.
Short of nuclear weapons, I'm not sure what would allow Ukraine to "win". Even given all the hardware, Ukraine doesn't have the staff or experience to field a full NATO air wing and integrate it to fight according to NATO combined arms doctrine -- if that even WOULD produce a "win" (there is an untested assumption that a NATO-standard military could trounce Russia)
Ukraine needs to hold the line, keep Russia sanctioned and let it burn itself out economically...or wait for Putin to die.
The Russian economy is grinding to dust right now, and the Soviet vehicle inheritance evaporating.
At some point, they stop being able to pay workers and troops, and while martial law can keep things moving, it's all getting much more expensive after that.
Putin has been very careful to try and keep the war awaybfrom his Moscow powerbase...so it's clear he recognises his authority and position is far from unlimited.
I agree with all that, but none of that translates to a traditional battlefield triumph. Maybe providing more long-range weapons would enable symbolic strikes near Moscow or on oligarchs' dachas, but that's the only case I can think of where materiel might help with that strategy.
Ukraine needs more soldiers, hard without full conscription, with the pool of heroic volunteers already committed, and it needs more artillery shells, that NATO can't readily supply because NATO never imagined playing quartermaster this kind of warfare in the 21st century.
Ukraine can't even properly equip the soldiers it already has. Supporting countries could dig a lot deeper in their supplies, they will have ample time to rearm.
TSMC being 2-4 years ahead of Samsung/Intel has nothing to do whether US would be willing to go on a nuclear war and move the entire world decades if not millenias back. No one can go on a direct war with a country with nukes unless they are ready for mutually assured destruction.
Russia thought the same when it thought it could hide behind its nukes. Alas.
And it did. US could do very very significant harm to Russia's military if nuclear retaliation wasn't a threat. And probably that would be cheaper than the weapons/training that they are giving to Ukraine.
Well I commend you that would rather live in a post nuclear hellscape dystopia rather than be the citizen of a vassal state of a Nuclear Power.
the current regime will make choices based on what's profitable for the companies involved. It's unlikely that losing TSMC will improve profits for American companies, so having this redundancy is for short term applications.
The business interests _are_ the political landscape today.
> they’ll be willing to let China have the islands now too
The islands are Chinese. The US back Taiwan as an anti-communist and anti-China (divide and conquer) tactic, including because its location. If the communists had lost the civil war, the mainland and Taiwan would all have remained under ROC control and it would have been interesting to see what the US would have come up with, instead (academic and thought experiment but interesting to imagine nonetheless).
In Ukraine the US don't want to be dragged in a war against Russia and things have played well for them so far (really the US are the only winners so far).
> The islands are Chinese.
"In June 2008, a TVBS poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as "Taiwanese" while 18% would call themselves "Chinese".[33] In 2015, a poll conducted by the Taiwan Braintrust showed that about 90 percent of the population would identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.[34]" [1]
Selling the secret sauce to US definitely make Taiwan disposable. But I also bet TSMC doesn't have a choice as whoever in power in US can also impose sanction/tariff or whatever they can to make TSMC to compile.