“The United States and its allies are never going to let those [semiconductor] factories [in Taiwan] fall into Chinese hands,” said former White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien in an interview with Semafor. Alexander Rubinstein reports in The Grayzone that O’Brien likened the destruction of TSMC to the U.K.’s World War II bombing of a French naval fleet following that nation’s surrender to the Nazis.
Taiwan is by far the world leader in semiconductor manufacturing, with 65% of semiconductors and nearly 90% of advanced chips produced in Taiwan.
Rubinstein notes that O’Brien, who served as Trump’s National Security Advisor, traveled to Arizona in 2020 to celebrate the opening of a $12 billion TSMC factory.
Bloomberg reported in October 2022 that Elbridge Colby, a lunatic anti-China former Pentagon official, called for the potential destruction of TSMC: “We can’t allow such a valuable equity to fall into Chinese hands.”
In 2022 the U.S. Army War College posted a paper calling for the U.S. and Taiwan to “lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth policy.... This could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to TSMC.”
The consideration given to the tens of millions of people living in Taiwan is clear from a report by CSIS on war games simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan: the U.S. would have tens of thousands of casualties, while “Taiwan saw its economy devastated” in the scenario.
Are the Taiwanese people to be treated like the people of Ukraine—expendable victims of a war against China and Russia?
