It would be “impossible” to move 40% of Taiwan’s semiconductor capacity to the U.S., the island’s top tariff negotiator said, pushing back against recent comments by American officials who called for a major production shift.
In an interview with Taiwanese television channel CTS that was broadcast late on Sunday, Taiwan Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun said she had made it clear to Washington that Taiwan’s semiconductor ecosystem, built up over decades, could not be relocated.
“I have made it very clear to the United States that this is impossible,” she said, referring to the 40% goal the U.S. has floated.
That ecosystem will continue to grow in Taiwan, Cheng said, adding that the semiconductor industry would keep investing at home.
Why does it seem tRump’s answer for everything is, “Let’s just steal it”?
Yeah what really struck me about the whole thing is it’s not that he wants more investment in US manufacturing, it’s that he seems to want them to literally take their equipment (but presumably not the people because eww immigrants) and transport the whole lot to the US.
The US invading Taiwan would be a hell of a reverse uno on the Chinese.
Oh my god.
That really would be the cherry on top of this goddamned clownworld timeline.
How to unite china in 1 step
And potentially also SK, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, etc.
It really would be like the dumbest possible thing the US could do.
He backed off Greenland. Taiwan would be an order of magnitude worse. The US could occupy any country on earth (maybe not China, without some Roman level war crimes) But it would be the end of us.
Hahaha, no.
The US could invade maybe two countries with a GDP around 1/4 ours, and actually persistently occupy them for maybe a few years.
Our economy is crashing extremely rapidly, we’ve functionally lost the ability to build new warships or aircraft in anything approaching a timely or affordable manner… and, because we have decided to tariff and threaten or militarily attack basically everyone everyone…
All of our supply chains for a great deal of our fancy schmancy military tech doesn’t work any more.
You cant build complex guided missiles and computer chips and sensors that aim them or night vision goggles without access to a wide array or rare earth minerals, most of which China basically has a near total monopoly of.
We don’t have the native industrial base to build anywhere near everything we would need to, to actually autarkicly sustain our own war machine.
… we can’t even feed or house our population at a reasonable cost anymore, our internal infrastructure is physically falling apart, and our cybersecurity is beyond laughably comprimised.
There is no way this country would ‘win’ trying to occupy Taiwan.
China + Japan + SK + all of goddamned SEA + potentially even Australia vs US = we fucking lose hard.
We may be able to get away with some neo-Monroe Doctrine bullshit for a while.
And keep funding genocides in the ME, and doing random airstrikes and spec ops shennanigans in poorer countries.
Thats about it.
I meant we could occupy them like we occupied Iraq. We would win the military confrontation. The occupation would break us.
We could do it once, maybe twice or three times if the countries are small and weak, but it would break us. The rest of the world would adjust. We would all be poorer but the US would be fucked. Trump doesn’t understand that we built a military too expensive to actually use. It made sense if we wanted to avoid conflict, and casualties, while still being top dog and getting our way, but actually going in and occupying territory is medieval thinking.
No, we would not win an invasion of Taiwan.
Realistically, no one would, it would probably basically result in either a nuclear exchange or some kind of mass infrastructure denial kind of attack, around many parts of the world.
But uh, we only have usually about 3 carrier groups in/around China/Taiwan at any given time.
And… our wargame scenarios only look maybe/probably winnable for fending off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan… if we have all of regional our allies to rely on.
If they are all against us, we lose badly.
China has more missiles and aircraft than we can hope to overcome without allies.
If… we were going to… do, what, a marine / paratrooper invasion… of Taiwan…
Where in the fuck would we stage that?
Okinawa?
You can’t move the numbers of troops needed to do an invasion of Taiwan without a lot of people noticing… and we’d immediately become enemies of all the places we could launch the assault from, if we somehow did manage to move a few hundred thousand infantry without being noticed.
Like, it took us around a year to move everything over the countries neighboring Kuwait and Iraq, back in the Gulf War.
You can’t just steam a marine invasion flotilla from Hawaii to Taiwan.
Everyone has satellites. They’d see it. When we got near a staging port, world news would be going insane with ‘wtf is the US doing with this armada?’
This is why I said its like the dumbest possible thing we could do.
We are pretty much guaranteed to lose.
We could pull off something like that against smaller Central or smaller South American countries… not Taiwan.
To be fair, this all started under the Biden administration with the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.
The US is increasingly concerned that, if China invades Taiwan, it will completely lock them out from semiconductor manufacturing and crater the US economy. Rather than flex their soft power and exercise a little diplomacy like the US used to do in decades past, they’ve apparently decided that the invasion of Taiwan is inevitable and the only course of action is to bolster semiconductor manufacturing at home.
Trump, of course, has all the subtlety of a torpedo and his rhetoric here has been needlessly antagonistic… but yeah, this whole thing started under Biden and now Trump is pretending it was always his idea. So really the thing he stole was the policy.
While the CHIPS act was started under Biden, it was completely different from what is being done now. It was about developing a domestic source of semiconductors as a hedge against Taiwan being invaded and was done cooperatively with the Taiwanese with mutual benefits. The Taiwanese still owned the manufacturing here, so they would still benefit if the Chinese came invaded. Biden was doing what was smart to do and also had benefits for other countries, including EU allies, since everyone knows those plants in Taiwan are rigged to blow at the first hint of invasion…
Trump has removed the benefits and added tariffs and threats. He didn’t steal the policy. He inherited it and then changed it to be something evil.
The plants are rigged to blow in an invasion? That is smart. Iraq did that in the first persian gulf war, he blew the oil fields the Americans were seizing. We all expected him to do that in the Iraq war, but for whatever reasons they never did. He might as well have.
But that would be such a massive loss of investment, and probably a real disincentive to invasion, those factories are not something that can be replaced in one year. Especially with all the specialized machines, where there are only one manufacturer of.
I clearly don’t know it for a fact that TSMC has done that, but the idea is a widely talked about strategy for protection. U.S. politicians even talk openly to the press about us blowing up the fabs if Taiwan doesn’t.