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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28423 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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I don't understand how you credibly commit to defending Taiwan's independence immediately after abandoning Ukraine in what seems like a pretty symmetrical situation. Is the justification that we need Taiwan economically in a way we don't need Ukraine? But the article also commits to expanding domestic industrial capacity so we no longer need Taiwan. I don't know how, as the Taiwanese government, you read this any other way than America's independence guarantee having an expiration date in the near future.

Meant this to be a reply to the OP...

I don't understand how you credibly commit to defending Taiwan's independence immediately after abandoning Ukraine in what seems like a pretty symmetrical situation.

You don't.

What im seeing from both Vivek and a number of his cheerleaders here is a very deterministic "assume a frictionless spherical cow" sort of view of game-theory/world politics. I saw another call it "video gamey" and that struck me as accurate. They seem to model world politics as if they were playing Civ2 (not even SMAC or Civ3) against the computer. The possibility of other players even existing nevermind having thier own agendas, opinions, histories, win conditions, etc... is just not something thier model seems to account for.

Taiwan is a rich developed country, Ukraine is not.

And this matters why?

Well, it makes Taiwan more important to the international economy, which affects the entire world.

Absolutely. See his radio interview that was also attacked by the foreign policy establishment and got a lot of negative press. Defend Taiwan for strategic reasons related to chips, once they are no longer the bottleneck they can go back to dealing with the cold civil war on their own and notionally the PRC would have less strategic reasons to invade once the US was no longer dependent on Taiwan.

China doesn't really care about the chips. They're buying them anyway, if spending a bit more because of lower efficiency of hardware they can buy.

However, Taiwan is a key naval strategic point and a renegade province.

Just speaking for myself, it’s absolutely economics and strategic interest. Taiwan makes a lot of high end computer chips — and while we’re working on building plants elsewhere my understanding is that we’re not doing very well at that. Given how absolutely vital computers are to every aspect of society, letting a geopolitical rival control such a thing is nigh on suicidal. Without chips, our military can’t function, without chips, our manufacturing can’t happen, our communications fail. Basically, the only things that we can do without computers are systems that haven’t been updated since the early 1970s.

By contrast, Ukraine isn’t a vital national interest. It’s largely agricultural, and while it exports grains, that’s not something that we cannot either grow ourselves or import from elsewhere. And as far as Ukraine being a first stop, I kinda doubt that simply because NATO has a presence there even if the countries in question aren’t literal members of NATO. We know this, and so does Putin. The specter of Russia invading Poland or Romania isn’t based on something he said he wants to do, or moves he’s made. The claim is entirely about keeping the proles on board with the money, weapons, and supplies being sent to Ukraine. It’s not much different than the lead up to Iraq — fighting them “over three” so they don’t “come here” — even if the groups in question have no interest in coming here.

I thought at least South Korea was able to compete with Taiwan on more or less equal terms in chip production?

No, TSMC dominates the semiconductor foundry market by a wide margin. The nearest competitor is South Korea's Samsung, which is still at a very distant second place. And most of TSMC's competitors cannot compete at scaled manufacturing and development of 5/3/2 nm chips.

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