Ah,the brave new world of everyone for himself. i ecpect finland,svedes, korea and japan and the poles to announce nuke ownership any day now. Lessons were learned, the isolationism has been planned for.
Another possibility is that see a new doctrine of "what's in it for me?" That's similar to, but not quite the same as isolationism. It would start with isolationism as the ground state, but then seek to depart from that in mutually beneficial ways.
Seen from that perspective, this 2nm ban might not be the final word, but rather the first step of a negotiation process.
Someone should explain to The Diplomat that diplomacy has no room for wishful thinking. Not a mention that Taiwan and TSMC might have a secret "what we will do if China takes over" department.
This can be reasonable protectionism too. Why allow your highest value add products to be manufactured outside when you can keep them on your own land and thus taxes from them. That makes absolute pure economical sense.
TSMC and Taiwan don't want secure global chip supply chains in the event of a Chinese invasion. They want any invasion to crash the world's technology markets & prevent any company or government from accessing their most advanced fab processes, because those are powerful deterrents. This absolutely will fly.
TSMC or its US subsidiary may have agreed to it at the time, but it sounds like the Taiwanese government has other ideas:
> "Since Taiwan has related regulations to protect its own technologies, TSMC cannot produce 2nm chips overseas currently," [Minister of Economic Affairs] Kuo said at a meeting of the Economics Committee in Taipei, reports Taipei Times. "Although TSMC plans to make 2nm chips [abroad] in the future, its core technology will stay in Taiwan."
Yeah I guess regardless of the contract between the US government and TSMC, TSMC has the right to veto certain activities of Taiwanese companies. I'd feel a little bait and switched if I was the US government right now though.
The ideal situation in an invasion for Taiwan is for the US and Europe to have just enough cutting edge chip production to be able to produce missiles and jets.
But not enough capacity left for anyone to get new phone, laptop, or PlayStation for potentially years unless Taiwan is defended. Nor enough capacity for data centers so corporate HQs also demand action.
Good, relying too much on an external force/coalition was foolish from the start. Expecially for the Nato countries that dont meet basic military capabilities
