The whole premise of TSMC is that losing TSMC would cause such a global economic collapse that defending Taiwan is the only option to prevent this from happening. All high-performance computing is dependent on TSMC right now.
This never works. The security through economy pitch. It has never, ever worked.
America was a reliable security guarantor. We promised to protect and had honour. Honour isn’t in the American cultural vocabulary anymore. So the guarantees are proven useless and everyone has to scramble back into realpolitik.
TSMC just hits the media often. If Taiwan goes the global economy will have way more problems than just TSMC. There is a long list of companies in many supply chains that would be impacted (not just computing).
How many of us really depend on the latest cpu to survive ?
The question is, is it better to wage a massive war that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives than to make an equal investment into the semi-conductor industry.