To be honest, I’m amazed it took til Biden before we saw more pressure on TSMC as a flashpoint.

Even if we’re on nominal good terms because they’re a capitalist democracy, nobody likes single points of failure (earthquakes and industrial disasters happen even without geopolitical tensions)

But we’ve handled it miserably-- throw some money at Intel who can’t innovate out of their gilded cage anymore, and try to get a few TSMC facilities stateside-- when we should have been trying to completely diversify the supply chains with new players and new geographies.

In fact, it’s amazing that we lost the concept of second sourcing. That ensured no one vendor held you hostage. Like 8 different firms made 8088s, on up to the 486, but after that it dried up fast. You saw a few IBM badged Cyrix 6x86s, but who else sells a pin-compatible Ryzen?

I hope once China gets far enough up on the tech curve, they see distributing fab tech as a BRI programme. No reason your next bag of 74LS04s, or the 30-cent MCU in your thermostat, can’t be made on a 28nm fab in Burkina Faso.

Operation Bernhard is a literal example. The Nazis tried to flood thr UK with counterfeit notes to undermine their economy.

I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.

It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.

The equivalent of “Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes”

Y’know, considering they’re trying to garner international sympathy, why is there no blanket “hide the Nazi apologetica until after the war” directive?

Even in the US, the military tries to nomibally keep a damper on that stuff.