US Sanctions Helped China Supercharge Its Chipmaking Industry

In several years time, the US semiconductor industry will go under like the auto industry, the paper industry, the textiles industry, the home components industry, the steel industry, the electronics industry, the home appliance industry, the ....... (you can finish the list for yourself).

All of those new Chinese fabs will be out-competing the older US fabs. And the US is in too much debt to be able to afford the billions (trillions?) required to upgrade its crumbling technological infrastructure.

And all because the Chinese were perfectly happy buying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of semiconductors every year, and those sales to China were banned. Another case of "foot, gun, leg, bang!".

problem with sanctions is that they work best on small countries with non-diversified economies. It is totally possible to strangle economies like Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, but each is progressively more difficult to degrade the larger and more sophisticated those economies are. I fear the US has gotten used to applying sanctions at very weak countries and now expect the same results for much stronger ones.