World War 3 to Be Fought over Semiconductors?
goldsilver.com
goldsilver.com
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.
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.
[1] https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-rare-eart...
> Even more so if they annex/invade Vietnam.
Don’t you think that will start WWIII in itself? Vietnam definitely won’t go down without fight, and they have a pretty good track record.
edit: Apart from that, what would that stupid act do to the economy of the involved parties, and the world in general?
It's all interwoven.
Fuck it all, and great reset, or what?
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.
I mean... TSMC is right here: https://www.google.com/maps/search/tsmc/@24.7768163,120.9992... If China wants it, their problem is not that they don't know where it is.
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.
Nobody thought it would get as bad as it did
The entire moral of the story is "maybe don't back Poland." (WW2)
WW1 was stupid but inevitable, in that if it didn't happen then it would have happened soon after. A lesson all had to learn.
> 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.
Paul Johnson, Modern Times.
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.
"In 1862, Richard Jordan Gatling invented a multi-barreled, rotating gun operated by a hand crank that could fire up to 200 rounds a minute."
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/gatling-gu...
I'm not sure what war you're thinking of.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
By destroying the fabs, China would drastically level the playing field, putting those Taiwanese semiconductors out of reach of the US too.
Sounds like you just described the Oil/Gas industry, in which about a dozen wars have started over the last 100 years.
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.
MARKET CAP:
Uber (2x) > Ford
Airbnb (3x) > Hilton
The entire gig economy is this premise, so what's your point?
Fabs are a human resource, if you kill their staff or destroy them, their value is $0
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.
For some people it doesn't mater how stupid a war is. Only if it's profitable.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/semiconductor-shortage-us-te...
Okay, the U.S. destroys the Taiwanese fabs to keep them from communist China. Then what?
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.
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.
Everyone else's military is also.
> Everyone else's military is also.
Great. So if we are losing a war anyway, let's hit the enemy very hard by destroying the semiconductor industry.
Same tactic as some nuclear powers' doctrine, “if our country is going to be destroyed, let the world end too".
This is a strange reading of deterrence. Both MAD and credible minimum deterrence.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
But not World War 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sXu0nZoamk&feature=youtu.be
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/09/21/dou... Joe Biden and son are corrupt
https://www.dailynews.com/2021/09/19/patriot-or-traitor-mill... The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has said openly he would coordinate with the Chinese against America
The concept of nations bribing individuals to sway World Wars occurred in the last one:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/23/mi6-spain-200m-br...
"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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto
"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:
https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/paul-murray/frightening-s...
This is a country that America has just agreed to share nuclear technology and submarines with...
"Yale group spurs Mao's emergence" [0]
[0] https://psypolitics.org/2020/07/05/the-political-career-of-m...