Don’t let Taiwan’s silicon shield become a US silicon trap

Résumé détaillé

As the midterms loudly demonstrated, there is considerable gloom over the US economy. Cause for economic optimism is in short supply, though there is some encouraging news…

As the midterms loudly demonstrated, there is considerable gloom over the US economy. Cause for economic optimism is in short supply, though there is some encouraging news regarding US-based semiconductor fabrication spurred by enormous investments from the huge Taiwan company TSMC.

According to a recent New York Times report, the company is pouring in a quarter trillion dollars to build 10 chip production plants that could “provide a winning formula for American reindustrialization.”

Though this is good news worth celebrating, there is also a dangerous side to this US-Taiwan technology partnership. The massive TSMC investment could help drag the US into the middle of Asia’s biggest powder keg.

The risk is that with its new TSMC presence, America could gain a sizable economic interest in protecting Taiwan from China. But guarding TSMC production facilities in Taiwan cannot constitute a rationale for US military intervention in a China-Taiwan conflict.

In theory, building a semiconductor plant in the US should enhance American national security by making it less dependent in a crisis on foreign supply networks.

However, in reality, the Taiwan investment may come to seem like a large bribe intended to solidify Taiwan’s so-called “silicon shield,” the effort to make Taiwanese chips so indispensable that Washington has no choice but to try to safeguard the island with its military forces.

Officials in Taipei are even trying a direct approach by appealing to US foreign policy elites with the idea that “Taiwan is indispensable” for US economic and national security.

In a recent Foreign Affairs article couched in sweeping ideological rhetoric, the Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung asked: “whether it will be democracies or autocracies that set the standards and values of the new digital age.”

He goes on to argue that “Taiwan is a force multiplier for the United States in artificial intelligence: it has the capability, reliability, and values necessary to support the United…

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