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The post Ukrainian war situation seems ripe for its own discussion thread. To launch that I grabbed a piece from the WSJ that looks ahead and the complex issues involved.

The pdf is a chart related to the article. that is the only way to grab it.

How the West Can Win A Global Power Struggle

In an economic Cold War pitting China and Russia against the U. S. and its allies, one side holds most of the advantages. It just has to use them.

By Greg Ip

WSJ said:
In the years preceding its invasion of Ukraine, Russia set out to sanction-proof its economy by developing local substitutes for key foreign products, such as microprocessors. The only problem: Since it lacks advanced semiconductor fabrication capacity, production of these Russian-designed chips was outsourced, mainly to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. After the invasion of Ukraine, Taiwan joined the U.S. in banning the export of sensitive technology to Russia. TSMC immediately promised to comply.

Russia may be an energy superpower but Taiwan is a semiconductor superpower, and semiconductors are harder to replace than oil. Therein lies a critical insight about the emerging Cold War between Russia and China on one side and the West—the U.S. and its democratic allies—on the other. This Cold War will be much more of an economic contest than the first, and the balance of economic power favors the U.S. and its allies. And it’s not even close.

Chinese President Xi Jinping likes to boast, “The East is rising, the West is declining.” When the rivalry was limited to China and the U.S., this had some resonance: At current rates of growth, China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy as soon as 2030 despite U.S. gains in the last year. But with China partnered with Russia and the West more united than ever, this is turning into a contest of alliances, and Xi couldn’t be more wrong. In this framing, “East” and “West” are not geographic, but geopolitical, labels. If “the East” is defined as those countries with which China is closely aligned (it eschews formal alliances), only China is any sense rising. Russia was a stagnating petrostate even before sanctions eviscerated its economy. The others, such as Kazakhstan, Belarus, Pakistan, North Korea, Cambodia and Laos, are poor, slow-growing, or both. The West, defined as the European Union, the anglosphere (the U.S., Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand) and East Asia’s three big, rich democracies, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, may not be growing rapidly, but it is growing and has a gigantic head start. As former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said a Chinese official once told him: “You have all the good allies.”

By itself, China accounted for 18% of global gross domestic product at current exchange rates last year, based on International Monetary Fund data. Adding Russia and their assorted allies brings the total to just 20%. The U.S., meanwhile, accounted for 24%, and adding its allies vaults the total to 59%.

While sanctions on Russia demonstrate the West’s control of the global financial system, long-run economic advantage will come from technology and knowledge. In pure science—such as space travel and atomic energy— Russia and China certainly hold their own. But in commercially useful technology, Western companies lead in almost every field, from commercial aviation and biotechnology to semiconductors and software.

“If you have a coherent strategy across the major democracies, you’re in an enormously robust position in terms of financial, economic and technological leverage,” said former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, now president of the Asia Society think tank. Of course the East plays a central role in the global economy. As recent market turmoil illustrates, Russia is a Western companies lead in almost every field of commercially useful technology, from aviation to software.

key supplier of not just oil and gas but metals such as palladium, used in catalytic converters, and nickel. China dominates manufacturing of countless goods whose value became abundantly clear during the pandemic, when demand for some, such as protective personal equipment, skyrocketed.

To a great extent these strengths reflect Russia’s comparative advantage in geology and China’s in factory labor. The West’s comparative advantage is in knowledge. That’s why Russia and China court Western investment. For example, to develop a complex liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in the Arctic, Russia relied on Norwegian, French and Italian contractors for essential expertise, research firm Rystad Energy notes.

Catching up with the West is no easy task, as semiconductors illustrate. Western companies dominate all the key steps in this critical and highly complex industry, from chip design (led by U.S.-based Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm and AMD and Britain’s ARM) to the fabrication of advanced chips (led by Intel, Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung) and the sophisticated machines that etch chip designs onto wafers (produced by Applied Materials and Lam Research in the U.S., the Netherlands’ ASML Holding and Japan’s Tokyo Electron).

Russia and China have made efforts to reduce this dependence. Russia developed locally designed microprocessors called Elbrus and Baikal to run data centers, cybersecurity operations and other applications. Though neither has achieved significant market share, they “represent the pinnacle of local design capability,” said Kostas Tigkos, principal at Jane’s, a defense intelligence provider. Russia hoped that they would eventually displace chips made by Intel and AMD, he said. “This would not only have been the foundation for diversifying their installed base, but a stepping stone for exports of those processors to other friendly nations.” But without manufacturers like TSMC to make the chips, Russia is facing “the complete disintegration of their aspirations to develop their own industry.”

China has a much bigger semiconductor industry than Russia, and its partly state-owned national champion, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC), could in theory make Russia’s chips, but that would take at least a year, Mr. Tigkos said. Moreover, its efforts to catch up to its Taiwanese competitor have been set back by sanctions. In 2020 the U.S. required companies using American technology to obtain a license to sell to SMIC. This effectively limited its ability to acquire advanced equipment from

Netherlands’ ASML, which is critical for “any country that wants to have a competitive semiconductor industry,” Mr. Tigkos said. Why does all this matter to the outcome of the geopolitical contest? Over time economic weight, strength and vitality are what allow countries to sustain military capability, achieve and maintain technological superiority, and remain attractive partners for other countries.

Yet GDP does not automatically equate to strategic influence. To win a Cold War, it’s not enough for the West to hold the best economic cards, it has to know how to play them. Economic statecraft, as this is called, does not come naturally to the West: Its institutions are built on the assumption that companies are private enterprises, not instruments of the state. They do business wherever it’s profitable, regardless of their home countries’ strategic interests.

No such division exists in Russia and China. Russian President Vladimir Putin used state control of key industries such as natural gas to reward or threaten neighbors. The Chinese Communist Party insists that state-owned and even private enterprises give priority to the state’s interests. In return, China tilts the playing field in those companies’ favor at home and abroad. Chinese state-sponsored hackers steal commercial secrets from Western companies, the U.S. has alleged. China is a master of economic coercion, punishing countries such as Australia or Lithuania or companies that cross its diplomatic red lines by depriving them of access to the Chinese market, knowing other countries and companies will eagerly take their place.

China has also learned how to play companies and countries in the West off against one another—favoring whoever promises to share more of its technology with Chinese partners, or avoids criticism of China.

Western governments, such as Germany, exaggerate China’s economic power and underappreciate their own, said Luke Patey, an expert on China’s international economic strategy at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “Germany has a full house when it comes to geoeconomics but plays like it has a pair of threes,” Mr. Patey said. The West frets that Chinese companies lead in fifth-generation telecommunications equipment—such as Huawei Technologies— and electric vehicle batteries. But, he said, “We sell short the fact that up there with Huawei are Erics-son, Nokia and Samsung,” based in Sweden, Finland and South Korea, respectively. Meanwhile Japan’s Panasonic and South Korea’s LG “are making the most sophisticated electric vehicle batteries in the world.”

For the West to play this game, it will have to more skillfully employ its ample economic assets toward geopolitical ends. The sanctions on Russia show that it can: The West showed a remarkable breadth and unity in its willingness to sustain significant economic discomfort in order to punish Russia. When the Trump administration imposed export controls on China, Taiwan did not join in but its companies were forced to comply because they use U.S. technology. This time Taiwan itself locked arms with the U.S. “Taiwan strongly condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Our country joins the U.S., EU & other like-minded partners in sanctioning Russia,” its Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted.

Still, in one sense this is an easy test. Will the West’s unity persist if Ukraine slips from the headlines and economic pain mounts? More important, could it muster the same effort with China, a critical market and supplier to many companies and countries in the West?

If China attacks Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province, ostracizing it from the global economy would be next to impossible. Nonetheless, Western governments have begun circumscribing business ties with China in response to its more aggressive behavior toward its neighbors and “Made in China 2025,” an economic blueprint for dominance in key technologies. Germany and Italy are applying more stringent criteria to foreign investment in their companies, wary of advanced technology being transferred to Chinese competitors. Japan is now debating an economic security law to safeguard supply chains and screen foreign investment and equipment used in sensitive infrastructure. Companies that had prioritized expansion on China are now boosting their West-ern presence. TSMC is building fabrication plants in Arizona and Japan while Intel has announced new or expanded facilities in Ohio, France, Germany and Italy.

Western cooperation in such ef- forts, though nascent, is growing. When the U.S. and European Union settled a long-running dispute over each others’ subsidies to Boeing and Airbus last year, they also agreed to develop a common approach toward “non-market economies,” i.e. Russia and China, on civil aircraft. For example, they agreed those countries cannot make investment in their aviation sectors contingent on “the transfer of technology or jobs to the detriment” of the U.S. and Europe.

Sustaining an economic edge also requires continuous reinvestment. At present, the West holds a comfortable lead. Based on purchasing power rather than current exchange rates, China and Russia spent $570 billion on research and development in 2019, the latest figures available; the U.S. and its largest democratic allies spent more than twice as much, $1.5 trillion, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

When it comes to human capital, the lead narrows slightly: Russia and China have 2.5 million researchers, the U.S. and its allies about 5.2 million. It’s in the future talent pool that the gap really starts to close. China alone awards more science and engineering undergraduate degrees than the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea combined. Students in China are more likely to pursue science and engineering than in other countries. This pool of talent is a formidable engine for domestic innovation and a magnet for foreign and domestic investment. The lack of a similar pool constrains American efforts to bring critical manufacturing back to the U.S. In a speech in Taiwan last year Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, complained that American engineers “don’t want to work in the manufacturing industry… Taiwan’s superiority in this is that it has a large number of excellent and dedicated engineers willing to throw themselves into manufacturing.”



PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN OLBRYSH; ALAMY ( BOOKS)



Russia’s innovative Arctic liquid natural gas facility in Belokamenka relies on Norwegian, French and Italian firms for its design and construction.


The West makes up for the shortage of homegrown talent through immigration. A study by the Peking University Institute of International and Strategic Studies earlier this year lamented that 34% of China’s top artificial intelligence talents worked in China while 56% worked in the U.S., whose “relatively relaxed and innovative scientific research environment is…favored by scientific and technological talents.” Tech entrepreneurs are motivated by freedom and wealth, both of which are slipping out of reach in China and Russia.

Thus a key factor in whether the West can sustain its edge is whether it can remain a magnet for talent. Yet the West’s openness to trade and immigration and even its commitment to democracy have come under stress. In the last decade support in Europe and the U.S. has surged for right-wing populists opposed to immigration and free trade, skeptical of NATO, and admiring of Mr. Putin. These include Marine Le Pen, a contender for president in France’s elections this spring, and former U.S. President Donald Trump, who may seek the White House again in 2024. Democracy has backslid in Hungary, Poland and the U.S., according to the think tank Freedom House. This points to the final and perhaps biggest challenge for Western nations. Having shown how effectively they can sever ties with Russia, can they be equally effective in strengthening ties with each other and unaligned players like India, Brazil and Vietnam—and thus be an attractive alternative to the autocratic East?

After World War II the U.S. used trade to strengthen other democracies and bind allies, and its reward was a democratic and prosperous West. Yet since the 2000s Americans have soured on this model, as expanded trade with the likes of China brought economic turmoil and little geopolitical benefit. Mr. Trump saw trade as a zero-sum game and hit allies and adversaries alike with tariffs. He pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 other Pacific rim countries, a pact covering not just tariffs but investment, intellectual property, data and the behavior of state-owned enterprises, intended as an alternative to China. Mr. Biden has resolved tariff disputes but pushed to expand “Buy American” regulations that penalize imports. He has offered no trade-agreement analog to his expanded military ties with allies in Europe and Asia, although he has promised a less ambitious “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.”

Meanwhile, China is fast cultivating its own economic sphere of influence, via foreign investment, its “Belt and Road” infrastructure initiative, and trade agreements, even applying to join the TPP, renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“China has studied very carefully the American postwar model of how their global and regional military domination was augmented by financial and economic domination,” said Mr. Rudd. China, he said, seeks to achieve its foreign policy aims by making countries throughout Asia, including American allies, dependent on its trade and investment, and eventually its currency. Mr. Rudd urged the U.S. to return to the TPP and revive a similar pact with Europe. The U.S. needs to recognize where its strategic advantage lies, “which is through free trade, open commerce and open capital flows.”

Over time economic weight, strength and vitality are what allow countries to sustain military capability and technological superiority.
 

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Good old global dominance. :)

It is 25 years old, but I think @Anysense linked this subject back in December.


The 5 pivot countries are Ukraine, Turkey, Iran, South Korea, and Azerbaijan (north of Iran + east of Turkey)

If we are beating on China, then we can lump Taiwan in with South Korea now since they have all the computer chips ya.


Grand strategists like Churchill were always obsessed with the Turks for some reason.

Lots of complaints too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Turkish_sentiment
 
It is a game countries like to play and as time moves along the rules and players change, as well as, the strategic elements in play. If oil is fading and chips coming forward, then that is an important change.
 
That's why I said there is going to be a war in the Congo as well as one within Brazil's Amazon Basin (like the under-explored part where the uncontacted tribes live).

War for control of rare earth metals (used in those chips) as well as China's long term plans for converting the jungles into agricultural lands to feed their people.
 
Another war I see happening in the future, but one that would be dismissed as completely wacko, would be a civil war in Canada over the breakaway regions of Quebec and New Brunswick (which will be renamed to Acadia).

Quebec has a source of rare earth metals and reports of Uranium having been discovered on native land. I therefore suspect certain corporate interests or foreign states might back a French secessionist movement if the Canadian government refuses to give them a good deal towards access to such valuable goods.
 
I think it is remarkable how the West allows a communist dictatorship like China control Western companies through coersion. I think that there would be broad support across the West and across party lines against this kind of behavior.

This is just an idea, but if, for example, China wants to punish a company for operating in Taiwan, or for not sharing their business secrets with the Chinese, we could set punishment tariffs against against all of China. With a coordinated response, we could stop China from dividing and conquering us. I think it's simply outrageous how China economically bullies companies and even whole countries for taking a stance in favor of democracy.

Moreover, I think that sanctions against China, while they might hurt us in the short run, could actually be very helpful on the long run. We could bring manufacturing and at least some jobs back to the West, while being less reliant on a communist dictatorship. I think that it would also benefit in the fight against climate change. Our greenhouse gas emissions would rise, but overall emissions would decrease when industry is forced back to the West with more stringent regulations. China isn't like Russia. We can't really set up out own oil wells to replace Russian oil, but Chinese manufacturing could easily be replaced in due time.
 
the West is going to sink . Rightly so .
 
Maybe resources other than oil and gas will come into play.
They don't buy your bs, and you don't buy theirs. :p
But...
From:
How Russia’s War in Ukraine Is Choking the World’s Supply of Natural Resources
18 March 2022.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-russia-commodities-shortage/
fert.png

And many people depend on Russian wheat...
wheat.png
 
the West is going to sink .
Sea levels are rising in lots of places. For sure Florida and the gulf coast are in danger of disappearing.
 
yes , and it will now be faster by thd brilliant plan of stopping the very notion of going Green or whatever , through war making hydrocarbons wildly profitable again . And yes , the Republicans will never be satisfied with Ukraine . Happy resistance against the Trumpists .
 
Another war I see happening in the future, but one that would be dismissed as completely wacko, would be a civil war in Canada over the breakaway regions of Quebec and New Brunswick (which will be renamed to Acadia).

Quebec has a source of rare earth metals and reports of Uranium having been discovered on native land. I therefore suspect certain corporate interests or foreign states might back a French secessionist movement if the Canadian government refuses to give them a good deal towards access to such valuable goods.
What people speculating about Quebec separatism don't tend to take into account is that the indigenous peoples' treaty rights and negotiations are with the Crown. It would be impossible for Quebec to unilaterally leave with its present borders intact and not expect constitutional and other sorts of protests.

This is one reason why the Alberta separatists are so ridiculous. Treaty situations exist all across the country, and while they can sometimes be really inconvenient, there are other times when they've stopped some other things - things that would not have benefited the country at all - right in its tracks.

So... armed conflict? Maybe. But not until every last constitutional argument has been deemed impossible to resolve.
 
Not a single word about freezing Russia's foreign reserves?

I get that it is a power move that can be used once to great effect.

But will anyone be foolish enough in the future to have freezable assets?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-cur...money-the-world-is-in-for-a-shock-11646311306


I would bring every gold bar and stack of cash home.
If the trend to holding physical assets at home over accounting assets overseas goes long term, that would certainly impact world economics. Everything would slow down and put pressure on transportation of key material from one nation to another. Fancy bartering system? the nature of national wealth might revert back to "barrels of untapped oil reserves."

But if value moves away from commodity items to something like "the capability to actually use such commodities to make cool stuff" like chips, the the game changes once again. Oil is useless unless refined; rare earths are useless unless made into chips; etc.
 
Its interesting to see WSJ acknowledge the primacy of TSMC and ASML in particular here. My first instinctive response to Putin invading Ukraine all of two weeks after palling around with Xi was dire concern over Taiwan. The US has two major chip fab facilities being built currently. One by Intel and the other by TSMC. Of note is TSMC since they are the only ones that have "sub 9nm" chip production and basically all high end electronics (like literally all of them as Intel's latest generation of CPUs are now fabbed by TSMC as well) are thus born in Taiwan. My concern was Russia invades and get's a tepid western response and China decides now is the time then to move on Taiwan. This would inevitably instigate WWIII and quite rapidly actually. The miscalculation on China's part I feel like was a real possibility. To the US State Dept., Ukraine is a pawn in a game to contain Russia and keep it isolated, Taiwan is foundational for western economic growth... It is curious to not ethe stupidity of foresight that got us here. Not only do we suffer in good times do to bottlenecking on all our high end chips (go find yourself a Xbox X or PS5 or any video card made in the last four years...) but we also exposed a strategically vital asset in an incredibly insecure area. This is why I've supported the response to Russia, it might be the only reason I support our course in pumping weapons to Ukraine, otherwise I jsut feel guilty that we've used them as pawns (@Ferocitus is right in his measure of that despite all protestations from westerners in here).

Otherwise and all other things considered its not even close, China's growth is slowing and India will be lucky not to fall into civil war (of course the same can be said of the US as well). The west might not be ascendant but its descent will not be precipitous. We are talented, strong, numerous, and well weaponized. If we could only do a better job distributing wealth we can avoid falling apart internally too... Honestly I feel like Russia and China got a little too eager thinking Covid hurt us worse than it did... Covid was a blip population loss wise and economically we could have done so much better and we still need to move to change the things we learned during these last two years and secure at least some stupid semblance of representative democracy.

Also, asteroid mining lets get it going already.

Planned U.S. semiconductor manufacturing growth and the middle market (rsmus.com)
 
So... armed conflict? Maybe. But not until every last constitutional argument has been deemed impossible to resolve.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. The U.S. or China would totally back the armed insurgents or only step in to save the Canadian government if it promised to give away all it's rare earth reserves.

This would all likely be triggered should the Canadian government ever shift too far left and deny American and Chinese corporate interests (either for environmental or nationalization reasons).

The other option that might be taken rather than instigating the Frenchies would be to organize a coup to depose of the left wing government in Ottawa and replace it with an ultra right wing trick down economics style regime.
 
"sub 9nm"

For 2022 is planned the production of the successor generation of EUV chip machines, the high-NA technology, starting at 3 nm.

Price tag per machine 270 million Euro. Comparing that for example with an Airbus A380 of 350-400 million Euro gives a feel for that latest generation machine.

EDIT
the point as well:
Considering the enormous amount of mass tourism airplanes being there, you can really wonder why this whole chip manufacturing bottleneck does uberhaupt exist.
Instantism consumerism completely overwhelming sensible strategic long term investments for a more solid and stable economy.
 
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I suppose the primary advantage in very high speed chips etc. is going to
be in battles between AI controlled networked drone swarms in WW3.

So China may threaten to invade Taiwan to capture/destroy that capability.
 
That's exactly what I'm talking about. The U.S. or China would totally back the armed insurgents or only step in to save the Canadian government if it promised to give away all it's rare earth reserves.

This would all likely be triggered should the Canadian government ever shift too far left and deny American and Chinese corporate interests (either for environmental or nationalization reasons).

The other option that might be taken rather than instigating the Frenchies would be to organize a coup to depose of the left wing government in Ottawa and replace it with an ultra right wing trick down economics style regime.
Isn't that what the "Freedom Convoy" was supposed to do - give Canada its very own "January 6" coup, get rid of Justin and the Liberals (who really aren't as left wing as some think) and replace it with whichever of Stephen Harper's lapdogs might be around?

Oh, right. A couple of them are currently vying to become the new Reformacon leader.
 
For 2022 is planned the production of the successor generation of EUV chip machines, the high-NA technology, starting at 3 nm.

Price tag per machine 270 million Euro. Comparing that for example with an Airbus A380 of 350-400 million Euro gives a feel for that latest generation machine.

EDIT
the point as well:
Considering the enormous amount of mass tourism airplanes being there, you can really wonder why this whole chip manufacturing bottleneck does uberhaupt exist.
Instantism consumerism completely overwhelming sensible strategic long term investments for a more solid and stable economy.

A passenger airplane can fly for 30 years. 30 years ago, the structure size of microchips was something like 800nm. The market is so fast - paced that only very few companies can keep up. And if you don't keep up, you are out of business soon.
 
A passenger airplane can fly for 30 years. 30 years ago, the structure size of microchips was something like 800nm. The market is so fast - paced that only very few companies can keep up. And if you don't keep up, you are out of business soon.

Whereby noted that this is valid for the high end
Low end like chips in washing machines is where these machines will see their second life.
The chip machine manufacturer ASML is doing critical maintenance and continuous upgrading on the so far 4,000 sold machines in the last two decades and I understand that almost ALL of these machines are still operational, also because ASML attaches value to that as selling point.

But what you say should go in the equation:
for the high end that 270 million should perhaps be multiplied with a factor like 3-4 for its first life to get more like for like with A380 airplanes ?

Still, I think the point I made stays (consumerism vs sound economics)
There are not that much EUV machines in the world.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has as of now ca 35 EUV machines and globally there are ca 70 EUV machines.
 
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