Comment by ein0p
I wonder what makes people believe that the US currently enjoys any kind of a meaningful "military advantage" over e.g. China? After failing to defeat the Taliban and running from the Houthis especially. This seems like a very dangerous belief to have. China has 4x the population and outproduces us 10:1 in widgets (2:1 in dollars). Considering just e.g. steel, China produces about 1 billion metric tons of it per year. We produce 80 million tons. Concrete? 2.4B tons vs 96M tons. 70+% of the world's electronics. Their shipbuilding industry is 230x more productive (not a typo). Etc, etc.
The short term profits US businesses have been enjoying over the past 25 years came at a staggering long term cost. The sanctions won't even slow down the Chinese MIC, and in the long run they will cause them to develop their own high end silicon sector (obviating the need for our own worldwide). They're already at 7nm, at a low yield. That is more than sufficient for their MIC, including the AI chips used there, currently and in the foreseeable future.
a) just because the government has policies that doesn’t mean they are 100% effective
b) export controls aren’t expected to completely prevent a country from gaining access to a technology, just make it take longer and require more resources to achieve
You may also be misunderstanding how much money China will spend to develop their semiconductor industry. Sure, they will eventually catch up to the West, but the money they spend along the way won’t be spent on fighter jet, missiles, and ships. It’s still preferable (from the US perspective) to having no export controls and China being able to import semiconductor designs, manufacturing hardware, and AI models trained using US resources. At least this way China is a few months behind and will have to spend a few billion Yuan to achieve it.