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Comment by tmnvdb | Hacker News Reader

The idea that the US only cares about Taiwan because of chips is popular on HN but just dead wrong. Taiwan has been part of the China containment strategy before TSMC was founded.

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I think it cares about Taiwan as a democratic country but I think the chip fabs are becoming a geo-political factor as much as oil fields or other resources.

i.e. we don't want [Russia/China/Whoever] to invade Country X as Country X is an ally and a democracy, but as Country X has [Oil fields/Chip Fab/Lithium Mine] we REALLY don't want them to invade.

The difference between an oil field and a chip fab is that the equipment is more easily destroyed in a chip fab, vs a hole for an oil well. Not to mention that expertise in human capital required for chip fab is way higher than that of an oil field.

Even a successful invasion of taiwan guarantees either the people important to the fab will leave, and the equipment evacuated, or destroyed if unable to evacuate.

As Saddam’s Iraq unfortunately proved when invading Kuwait, it is really easy to destroy oil fields, and much harder to clean up the damage. I can’t see much difference between that and destroying chip fabs.

Exactly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_chain_strategy

So the US doesn't care about Taiwan, it cares about China. Taiwan is just a tool.

Well, yeah… The US doesn’t really have allies (the one exception some would say is Israel) - why would Taiwan be any different from the others? Interestingly, TSMC only became a stand-out player in the last 15 years, before then there were basically zero reasons for the US to care about Taiwan except to contain China. Now they have one reason apart from containing China, but it’s still mostly just about China.

The United States has many allies. Obviously the US and UK have a “special relationship.” Then there is AUKUS. Then NATO. DoD calls a number of SEA countries “allies,” including Japan and Korea.

Stating that the US has no allies other than Israel is unequivocally false.

The really before the claim suggests that GP is referring to internal attitudes, I would imagine that they are aware that NATO is technically an alliance.

There is probably no alliance on earth tighter than the U.S. and the U.K.

If that's not an alliance, then you might as well say that alliances don't exist anywhere. (And maybe that is what you mean to say.)

Even the alliance with Israel can't compete with the alliance between the US and UK from World War I to now.

> There is probably no alliance on earth tighter than the U.S. and the U.K.

I'd argue North Korea & China have a closer relationship.

That's less of an alliance and more of a dependance.

They do not. China sometimes — though not always — endorses and enforces Security Council sanctions against North Korea, and acts as a moderating force in its contacts with North Korean leadership. Substantial differences of opinion between the U.S. and the U.K., not to mention actual policy antagonism, is very rare.

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