Will this attempt work out commercially? Maybe, maybe not. But more interesting here is the strategic situation beyond the currently understood tech.
The US has made it clear that it sees semiconductors as a vector to attack power centres in Asia. Today it is China. Democracies are notoriously fickle, tomorrow it could be India, Japan, Korea or anyone really. There is a strategic need here to break the remaining European monopolies on equipment supply. For China the need is urgent but for all the Asian powers the need is real.
Given the manufacturing powerhouse that the collective Asia represents, I expect they'll figure all these details out and become technologically independent at least on paper. They've had more than a century of experience in dealing with the west, the risks of the status quo are too obvious once the US is overtly exploiting it.
Are you really suggesting that we have oversight and people being held responsible? Not in the Netherlands in any case, where did you think this was happening?
> At least in democracies things require oversight, debates and people are being held responsible.
I'm scratching my head at this one. Why do you think they are doing those things if not because they are constantly re-evaluating their direction? If you're just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again there isn't much need for debate. The oversight and accountability mechanisms are all-weather good ideas, but typically the US is using them to constantly adjust and change policy responses.
Compare that to somewhere more authoritarian where they can't change policies precisely because those 3 aspects are quite weak. They find their groove once and stick to it for decades, and anyone trying to shake things up gets mired in institutional inertia. Sure a supreme leader could force sudden change in theory, but why are they going to do that? He's got everything set up how he likes it and his view of the world fossilised maybe 10, 20 years ago.
Democracies are absolute monsters. The moment they detect that their interests have changed they'll vote out the old mob, bring in a new one and do things differently. The US went Obama to Trump in one election cycle, which was probably a shock for anyone trying to negotiate with them.
Your description of democracy doesn't match with existing capitalism. In capitalism, what matters is the individual capitalist desire to achieve profits. The economic decisions are made by a few oligarchs on top, not by the population.
Fickle? It’s been Russia and China for like 100 years. I’m no expert but it might be due to crushing political oppression and aggressive empire building. Japan, S Korea, and Taiwan are all chip manufacturing power houses, and the only one not happy to see China blockaded is China. Though I’m sure they’re working on hacking into and stealing these new designs as we speak.
It hasn't been. The US was one of the key players who built China up to what it is today, for a significant chunk of the past century they were strategic partners against Russia.
And it is worth remembering that post WWII the US was busy marginalising the Europeans, making sure Germany was prosperous but didn't execute an independent military resurgence and helpfully euthanising the British empire. There were enemies other than Russia and China over that period. It just happens that the other European powers were broken to the point where their resistance was ineffectual and the process was mostly amicable - if they'd been more competent it'd have been a lot nastier.
>The US has made it clear that it sees semiconductors as a vector to attack power centres in Asia. Today it is China. Democracies are notoriously fickle, tomorrow it could be India, Japan, Korea or anyone really.
Sorry but this sounds more like propaganda. China also sees supply chains "as a vector to attack power centres in Asia", that's applicable to anyone and anywhere. I'm not sure why Asia is a singled out here, sounds like one to trying to construe a racist motive when there is none.
The aformentioned India, Japan & Korea aren't worried about USA, their primary concerns are China and their neighbours. China's explicit objective to control the entire supply chain places them at a direct conflict of interest with those countries. They've already tried sanctioning Korea and Japan over petty issues like Fukushima water waste. Trying to appeal to some vague "Asian" solidarity as opposed to the existing OECD and actual shared norms sounds more like an attempt to divide allies rather than actually caring about those countries' interests.
The radiation can't be detected even a couple of kilometers away from the discharge. China is >1000km away, so there's 6+ orders of magnitude more dilution by then.
If I pee in the lake you're swimming in, that's kind of gross... but it ends up being an incomprehensibly tiny fraction of the contaminants and gross stuff you're swimming in.
The US has made it clear that it sees semiconductors as a vector to attack power centres in Asia. Today it is China. Democracies are notoriously fickle, tomorrow it could be India, Japan, Korea or anyone really. There is a strategic need here to break the remaining European monopolies on equipment supply. For China the need is urgent but for all the Asian powers the need is real.
Given the manufacturing powerhouse that the collective Asia represents, I expect they'll figure all these details out and become technologically independent at least on paper. They've had more than a century of experience in dealing with the west, the risks of the status quo are too obvious once the US is overtly exploiting it.