Chris Miller, author of Chip War, spoke to Freddie Sayers about how semiconductors became such a vexed issue, the purpose of America’s protectionist CHIPS Act, and the chances of military confrontation over Taiwan, the world capital of microchip manufacturing, which he places at 20%. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Why have microchips become a geopolitical issue?

Chris Miller: If you look at the production of advanced processor chips — the types of chips that process data that you find in a smartphone and PC, or a data centre — around 90% of them are made in Taiwan, which also produces over a third of the new computing power in the world each year. Taiwan’s importance is really extraordinary when it comes to all of the world’s technology. And it’s managed to acquire this position largely thanks to the efforts of a single company called Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), founded in 1987. Since that time it has grown inexorably: today, it’s both the world’s most advanced chip-maker and also the world’s largest manufacturer of silicon chips.

FS: And this pre-eminence can be traced back to TSMC’s founder, Morris Chang. Is he still involved?

CM: He’s officially retired, although he still plays a big role in the company’s decision making and in the company’s culture. He played a critical role in building the entire chip industry. He was in Texas when the first chip was invented in 1958. He played a major role in Silicon Valley’s decision to globalise the industry and build assembly facilities in East Asia, places like Hong Kong and Singapore, and especially Taiwan. More than anyone else, he can claim to have made possible the semiconductors on which the modern economy is critically dependent.

FS: Do we know anything about his politics — his contemporary relationships with China and the US?

CM: He’s done such a good job in business, in part by managing relations with multiple different governments. He was born in mainland China; his father was an official in the nationalist government. When the Communists took power in 1949, he and his family fled. He moved to the US and enrolled at at Harvard, then he spent 30 years working in the US chip industry — he held the US security clearance for working on specialised chips that went into defence systems. And then he got a job offer to start this company in Taiwan, backed by the Taiwanese government, which put up three quarters of the money needed to found TSMC. And since then, he’s lived in Taiwan. He’s still a US citizen. But he’s one of the most influential people in Taiwan because he founded and for a long time ran a business that contributes around 10% of Taiwan’s GDP. But he has generally stayed out of politics. Most of TSMC’s facilities are in Taiwan, a couple of small facilities in China, and a couple of small facilities in the United States. But it’s predominantly focused on production in Taiwan.

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FS: How did this history lead to the conflict we see today?

CM: The problem is that TSMC has grown its capacity in Taiwan over the last two decades, just as America’s military advantages around Taiwan have been deteriorating, and China’s have been growing. And so it’s in some ways really the fault of the United States for failing to keep deterrence in the Taiwan Straits effective. Two decades ago, it was obvious, in the event of world war, who would win. Today, it is not at all obvious who would win. That uncertainty created by our decision to let our military advantages over China deteriorate — that’s why we’re concerned about production in Taiwan.

FS: Do you think chips specifically are making the possibility of conflict between China and the West more likely?

CM: I think when Chinese leaders assess the situation in Taiwan and think about their goals vis-á-vis Taiwan, they’re not primarily thinking about semiconductors. The reality is, the Chinese Communist Party has wanted to control Taiwan since before the first semiconductor was invented. When they talk about Taiwan, they talk about the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, these broad ideological slogans rather than anything specific, technological or economic in nature. If we’re trying to understand policymaking in Beijing, leaders in China realise that Taiwan produces a lot of chips, but that’s not at the centre of their thinking. Now, some people say that Taiwan’s role in chip-making deters conflict, because China knows that if it were to attack Taiwan, it would destroy the chip-making facilities and the entire world, including China, would pay a massive economic cost. And it’s true, the cost would be tremendous. But there’s lots of examples of wars in history that have been waged by leaders who have decided the economic costs were worth it, or underestimated the economic costs — look at Putin, for example. I think anyone who is betting on “mutual-assured economic destruction” to maintain the peace doesn’t have much grounding in history on which to base that faith. And if we were to lose access to Taiwan’s chips through a war or a blockade, the impact on global manufacturing would be as dramatic as anything we’ve seen since the Great Depression.

FS: Biden’s CHIPS Act is a response to this threat — what does it do and is it making the situation more or less dangerous?

CM: The CHIPS Act is trying to make it less costly to build chip-making facilities in the US. The goal is to reduce reliance on Taiwan by building new capacity in the US and providing subsidies for companies to do that. So both US firms and also foreign firms that build in the US will be able to apply for subsidies to help defray the cost of production. And it’s already clear that there’s new investment coming in to the US that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, thanks to the subsidies. The challenge is that we’ve allocated $39 billion to subsidies, when one new chip-making facility can cost $20 billion. So $39 billion sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not that much. And our reliance on Taiwan is so substantial, that we’re going to need vast new construction not only in the US, but also in Japan and Europe and Singapore and elsewhere to really diversify the manufacturing base.

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FS: The CHIPS Act also really tightens sanctions on China specifically.

CM: The CHIPS Act bans any company that receives US government funding from also investing in cutting edge facilities in China, and then, relatedly, the US government last year banned the transfer of cutting-edge chip-making tools and cutting-edge AI chips to China. And although Taiwan is the country that can manufacture chips most efficiently, the tools inside the facility in Taiwan and inside of every advanced shipping facility in the world are produced by US, Japanese and Dutch firms. The US wants to stop these tools from going to China, with the aim of stopping China’s chip industry from catching up. And this is going to cause dramatic problems for Chinese firms, because, for the past several decades, they’ve made real advances, but they’ve relied on imported tools. There are no Chinese firms that can produce comparable tools domestically. China’s ship industry faces a dilemma whereby they can produce not-cutting-edge chips, using tools they import, but they can’t produce cutting-edge chips because they can’t get the machinery that’s necessary from the US, from Japan or from the Netherlands.

FS: Is this a rare case of sanctions actually working?

CM: I think they’re certainly working in terms of having an impact on the Chinese ship industry. But that’s only the intermediate goal. The long-run goal of the export controls is to stop China from developing advanced AI systems that can be deployed for military and intelligence uses. And to train an AI system, you need access to the most advanced chips in a vast data centre. The US’s goal over the next decade is to make it harder for China to acquire the chips needed to train AI systems, so that China’s intelligence and military systems are less capable, and America is able to apply AI faster than China. That’s the goal. The success or failure of that will be measured over five or ten years; it can’t really be measured today.

FS: Do you think it’s the military application of this that makes it so central?

CM: The concern isn’t only the specific chips that are in missiles or in planes — more important than that is the chips that are in the data centres where AI systems are trained. So if you want to train a car to drive autonomously, or a drone to fly autonomously, you do it in a data centre. And these data centres are immensely computationally intensive. If you want to train a computer-vision algorithm to recognise a cat versus a dog, you need to show it millions and millions of pictures of cats and dogs before it learns. And you need ultra-advanced chips to do that processing efficiently. So for training drones for defence systems, advanced data centres are key, which means advanced chips are key and that’s what militaries are really focused on right now. If you want more autonomous, smarter military systems, you need to train them in advanced data centres. That’s the key use of chips in next-generation military systems.

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FS: Given their value, might a black market for chips develop?

CM: It’s certainly going to happen — we see that with Russia today. It’s now illegal to transfer many different types of chips to Russia for military purposes, but Russia’s smuggling them in from Turkey and Kazakhstan, and from China. The types of chips the US is controlling for AI purposes are different, because they’re only used in a relatively small number of use cases. And the data centres that we’re worried about are vast buildings that can be seen from space. So it’s hard to say if we’re going to stop 100 types of a given chip from getting into Russia — I’m pretty confident the Russian security service services can smuggle most of those in. But if you’re talking about bringing in tens of thousands of chips to fill up an advanced data centre, that’s a much more tractable problem for intelligence agencies to keep an eye on.

FS: So it’s a race between the US and China as to who can onshore sophisticated chip production fastest?

CM: I think that’s how China sees it. I think the US sees it slightly differently, because the US is capable of producing advanced chips, not on its own, but in cooperation with Japan, with the Netherlands, with Korean, with Taiwan. It’s only by acquiring software designs, machine tools, and materials from all of those countries that you can make an advanced chip. The US strategy is not to onshore everything; it’s not to create a self-sufficient sphere. It’s to cut China out of the international supply chain, but keep all of its existing allies together. And the goal of that is that we collectively are going to produce chips and sell them to 80% of the world economy; China’s going to try to produce chips using less advanced machines and sell it domestically to 20% of the world’s economy. That puts China in a very bad competitive position: smaller market, worse machine tools, starting from a position of backwardness. It’s a race that China doesn’t look likely to win.

FS: In the next five years’ time, do you think there will be a major military standoff in the area around Taiwan, which would lead to major global hostility?

CM: I think the most likely outcome is that we have a period of tension, but we avoid a major military standoff. But if you asked me to put a probability on it, I’d give you a 20% probability over five years. And that’s a much higher probability than I put on it five years ago. I think — if you accept my probability of 20% — a 20% probability of both a very dangerous military situation and an economic crisis that would be equivalent to the Great Depression in terms of its shock to manufacturing: we ought to be willing to spend a lot of money, diplomatic attention and military resources to avert this type of crisis. My fear is that we’re not spending nearly enough given that the probability is far from zero. And the magnitude of the shock would be catastrophic.

On the one side, the Chinese regime is a dystopian model of high-tech authoritarianism, which has forced tens of thousands of its Uighur subjects into concentration camps as part of a campaign of forced ethnic displacement, and which controls the political choices of its citizens to a degree intolerable to our professed values.

Openly siding with China is not a desirable option then, even if our status as an American client state permitted it. Indeed China’s penetration of our industry and infrastructure, including that central to our own national security, is a scandalous and catastrophic succession of errors carried out by notionally conservative governments.

China’s breach of the terms by which we relinquished Hong Kong humiliates the United Kingdom, though, in reality, there is nothing we can do to prevent it. And when the state-run newspaper China Daily threatens us that, in limiting Huawei’s access to our infrastructure we should expect a “retaliatory responses from Beijing”, it is a signal we must undo as urgently as possible a dependence on China which should never have been permitted in the first place.

Yet we must remember how we got here. Driven by self-interest and idealism alike, America dismantled the last great European empires, those of Britain and France, and took them for its own, ensuring our strategic decline just as it had by dismantling and acquiring Spain’s empire at the beginning of its ascent. While France took from Suez the lesson it would need to preserve its autonomy from the Atlantic superpower, we took the opposing point of view, that it was only by adhering close to the United States we could advance Britain’s interests in the world.

As the scholar of liberal imperialism Patrick Porter notes, as a result of “the United States’ dismantling of the economic order of imperial preference and the sterling bloc”, and the Suez crisis revealing “Britain’s vulnerability to U.S. coercion”, British governments repackaged our decline as necessary modernisation for domestic audiences. In doing so it “redefined Britain’s status around alliances and nuclear weapons, presenting retreat from empire as a graceful management of change”.

Yet arguably, in a Europe shattered by war and threatened with Soviet invasion, we had no choice. American largesse rebuilt continental Europe, turning Germany into an industrial superpower once again, even as we frittered away our ruinously expensive war loans, only paid off in 2006, on propping up the dwindling empire.

Vastly more powerful than today, though far from equal, Britain was throughout the 40-year military standoff with the Soviet bloc in the German countryside a far less subordinate partner than eventual victory would make us. After the fall of communism, we, along with our EU allies, cashed in the peace dividend to splurge on our consumerist dreams, eviscerating our armed forces and increasing our dependence on our transatlantic patron.

The Warsaw Pact was dissolved, yet NATO remained and expanded. What was once an alliance for Western Europe’s defence mutated into first a pan-continental empire, and then a coalition to export liberalism to unwilling or uninterested peoples across the world.

Yet while our European neighbours managed, for the most part, to politely decline Washington’s invitations to remodel the world according to the grandiose dreams of American ideologues, the United Kingdom rushed headlong into America’s failed and bloody adventures in the Islamic world. Swept along in these liberal crusades by prime ministers devoted to their American patron and vainly hungry for a place in history, the Britain of the neoliberal era thus helped bring about the age of populist anger threatening to tear it apart.

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Like a cuckold convincing himself his misfortune is a lifestyle choice, we exulted in our strategic fealty to the United States, even as our household fell apart around us. Successive British governments convinced themselves they could moderate the superpower’s excesses. This delusion ought to have bled out in the dust of Helmand or Basra, but staggers on in the myth of the special relationship with which successive British premiers console themselves.

America’s catastrophic act of self-sabotage is a historical drama which will be pored over and debated for centuries; the idea we should follow its architects into a far more gruelling contest is highly unconvincing, simply as a matter of self-preservation.

The tragedy for us was not that the US failed to remake the world in its own image after the Cold War, but that in our own country, it succeeded. America’s ferocious culture war, which suffuses all aspects of life, is now the superpower’s most successful soft power export, and its baneful effects have poisoned our politics, perhaps beyond repair. While Chinese culture and its attendant political malignancies are of only marginal appeal in Europe, whatever strange new fixation captures Americans is soon transmitted to us, entering our political bloodstream, and debilitating our body politic.

When we see British Black Lives Matter activists chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” at bemused and unarmed British policemen, or Katie Hopkins tweeting about non-existent London No-Go-Zones for the largesse of their American patrons, or Emily Maitlis channelling Rachel Maddow’s moralising sermons for bluecheck approbation, we sadly apprehend our subordinate place in the global system.

If the Brexit vote had not corresponded so closely in time with the American presidential election, and if our journalist class were not so slavishly in hock to their more glamorous American counterparts, perhaps we could have escaped from the past four years with a healthier politics, but we did not. We imported not just the content of the American culture war, but even the form in its entirety, with the same elaborate conspiracy theories of Russian meddling, the same cast of grifters and demagogues, rogue bureaucratic Twitter accounts and #Resistance judges.

Like backwoods Gaulish or Dacian chieftains donning togas and trading clumsy Latin epithets, our elites have adopted the fashions of the imperial metropolis wholesale as a mark of distinction.

As proved in London at the weekend, the political disturbances of the metropole soon make their way to our distant province. In the very definition of subject status, events we have no power to influence roil our politics, and threaten our social order.

Just as we began to quell Europe’s worst outbreak of the virus from our East, the more insidious virus coming from our West may well now send our infection and death rates soaring once again. It is in these questions of life and death, for whom one is prepared to kill or die, that national identity is determined. The lives of unknown Americans are demonstrably more real and valuable to many of our citizens than those of fellow Britons, or even their own families. Far too late, with no cultural antibodies to protect us, we realise our exposure to the virulent American strain of politics.

It is worth turning our gaze from the turmoil on America’s streets to the more rational calculations in European capitals for clues as to how the new Cold War will play out on our continent. When major think tanks such as the European Council for Foreign Relations note that it is impossible to align European foreign policy with America’s, for the simple reason that America’s will be violently overturned with every electoral cycle, and the country is therefore too unstable and divided to even possess a coherent foreign policy, we see the greatest challenge facing the United States in a new Cold War: only those allies most severely threatened by its rivals, like Taiwan by China, or the Baltic states by Russia, will take its side. For everyone else, the safest option by far is staying neutral.

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In a speech to Germany’s leading diplomats last week, the European Union’s Foreign Policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles made the stakes clear. “Analysts have long talked about the end of an American-led system and the arrival of an Asian century,” he observed: “This is now happening in front of our eyes.”

Borrell also made clear that the continental bloc will choose neutrality, stating that “the pressure to choose sides is growing. As the EU, we should follow our own interests and values and avoid being instrumentalised by one or the other.” Merkel last week emphasised that Europe has a “great strategic interest” in maintaining its relationship with China, and warned that “we Europeans will need to recognise the decisiveness with which China will claim a leading position in the existing structures of the international architecture”.

France, too, will safeguard its own national interests rather than those of the disordered hegemon. Its Foreign Minister, Yves Le Drian, reassured the French Senate last week that ”regarding China, I do not think we should be locked into a logic of confrontation bipolar world. To not start a second Cold War we must affirm Europe’s autonomy.”

In a Chinese readout of a conversation between Macron’s chief diplomatic advisor Emmanuelle Bonne and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Bonne is stated as affirming “France’s readiness to step up strategic communication with China, strengthen mutual trust and maintain coordination in the multilateral arena,” and assuring China that “France respects China’s sovereignty, appreciates the sensitivity of Hong Kong-related issues, and has no intention of interfering in Hong Kong affairs.”

While this may be a popular tactic with European voters — a recent ECFR poll across EU countries shows that the vast majority support neutrality in a conflict between China and the United States — history has a habit of forcing itself on even the least willing protagonists, highlighting the potential fractures within Europe.

While the Baltic states and Poland depend on America for security from Russia, and will likely remain faithful allies, the EU’s Western liberal democracies are ironically more likely to incline towards China, or at least adopt a pose of studied neutrality.

While Germany’s Atlanticist thinktank class is committed to the American alliance with an emotional passion not seen elsewhere in Europe, the country’s powerful business lobbies are drawn towards China as the growing economic engine of the world, creating an unresolvable tension within the country’s foreign policy.

Merkel may view the European Union as little more than the geopolitical wing of the German car industry, but Macron’s France likely sees the coming great power confrontation as a means to accelerate European autonomy, attempt to incorporate Russia as a security partner, and by weakening both superpowers afford more space to extract rewards for cooperation by playing both rivals against each other.

China’s soft power efforts have played well in Italy: despite being the source of the virus, and doing much to exacerbate its lethal spread, it has manouevred itself into a position of most trusted ally, eclipsing the EU itself, and creating a dangerous moment for European unity. The Channel will only keep growing wider then, as America’s internal political conflict drags us deeper into its chaos, and the eastward shift of economic gravity pulls our closest neighbours towards Beijing’s new order.

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In Europe’s east, China has invested in infrastructural projects like the highspeed rail link from Greece, where it has bought the busy port of Piraeus, to Budapest, linking the Balkans to its trans-Eurasian Belt and Road initiative.

The likely framing of the superpower confrontation as an ideological battle between democracy and authoritarianism will not necessarily work in America’s favour in a Central Europe successfully dismantling liberal norms.

In a fiery speech last week on the centenary of the Treaty of Trianon, Viktor Orban seemed to reposition Hungary in the Chinese camp, exulting that “ The United States is no longer alone on the throne of the world, Eurasia is rebuilding with full throttle,” and declaring that “a new order is being born. In our world, in our lives as well, great changes are banging on our gates.” The EU will therefore find it difficult to strike a common position on China, opening up the continent to influence campaigns from both sides, and deepening political instability.

Merkel may have launched a campaign to use this crisis to Make Europe Strong Again, but to be torn between two great powers struggling to establish their respective spheres of influence is not a comfortable place to be. As Borrell nervously remarked to the German ambassadors this week, “it is fashionable to say that we are reaching a Thucydides moment. Let’s hope not!”

The United Kingdom is, then, placed in a difficult position. The timing of this crisis so soon after Brexit is unfortunate: dependent on trade deals with both China and the United States to make good the loss of our European markets, we are likely to be forced to choose one, and bear the reprisals of the other. The Chinese government is unfortunately only being truthful when it warns us, through its flagship newspaper, that “while the UK is no doubt hoping that toeing the US line … will help it gain a favorable trade deal with the United States, with which it began negotiations this month, the benefits are likely to be offset by the losses.”

The Global Britain fantasy of notionally right-wing Brexiteers was always parasitic on the American-led order maintaining access to Asian markets for us: a vision dubious at the time of the 2016 vote, and already vanished in 2020. As Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London notes in a recent survey of Britain’s unpalatable foreign policy options, our postwar supposed role was “a position within an international system that was ordered and stable, but that no longer exists”.

But instead of quietly reflecting on their role in dragging us into this disaster, Britain’s prominent neoliberals are instead promoting the absurd idea of importing Hong Kong’s three million British Nationals (Overseas) to a yet-to-be-built megacity on unused marginal land, surely the least thought-out program of imperial population resettlement on these islands since the Plantation of Ulster.

Removing Beijing’s political opponents en masse presents not the slightest threat to the Chinese regime, and instead strengthens it. It may lock us into a permanent state of tension with China unlikely to end in our favour. This is not serious foreign policy, but empty signalling primarily  for domestic purposes, Palmerston’s civis romanus sum speech for a country that has decommissioned all its gunboats. So much for Global Britain: halfway through 2020 it has already shrunk to a speculative high-rise refugee camp in North Lincolnshire.

What options are available to us in the real world? They are very limited indeed. As Freedman asserts: “No wonder the British foreign policy establishment is at a loss about what to do next… if the new big project is containing China, it is one in which the interests of the two countries do not wholly coincide and to which the United Kingdom could make only a limited contribution.”

Yet neither can we aim for strategic autonomy, because, “British intelligence and defense capabilities are deeply intertwined with American ones, and it would not be easy to disentangle them in short order. The most substantial recent investments, including in Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines, Queen Elizabeth–class aircraft carriers, and F-35 fighter jets, all rely on U.S. technology and facilities.”

The MoD’s recent program of military modernisation, paid for by winnowing down our troop numbers to dangerous low levels and carried out with the ostensible aim of enhancing our global reach in a world of greater strategic competition, has therefore only cemented our dependence on a declining hegemon. British politicians would do well, then, to match our rhetoric against China to our actual capabilities. If this is indeed the dawn of the Chinese century, our strategic considerations should look far beyond the headline-grabbing soundbites of the moment, plotting the onerous path ahead in decades rather than news cycles.

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A closer relationship with Europe might seem attractive, if Brexit had not poisoned the waters: but a Europe torn between Chinese and American influence will be a difficult relationship to maintain, if our closest neighbours maintain their links with China while we align with the United States for the sake of Hong Kong, or simply of nostalgia for better times. The practical and moral arguments against deepening relations with China are clear and compelling: yet those against tying our nation’s fate to that of a rapidly declining power merit serious consideration.

The handling of the Covid crisis has not enhanced our government’s reputation for either foresight or planning capability. Serious debate is needed before we are distractedly hurried into a generational struggle against a vastly superior opponent, with only an unreliable and now increasingly unstable ally for support.

In terms of the models they set for us, we are presented with a battle between two rival dysfunctional systems: where China’s foreign policy is excessively cynical and self-serving, America’s is excessively naïve and inept. China’s domestic politics suffers from an excess of stability, culminating in totalitarianism; but America’s from an excess of volatility, culminating in chaos.

The right balance for us is surely somewhere in the middle, maintaining as cordial a relationship as we can with each party, while ensuring as much individual freedom of action as possible, and as much strategic, economic and supply chain autonomy as can hurriedly be rebuilt after three decades of historic profligacy. Our future will not be autarkic, but it will be far closer to autarky, as much by necessity as by choice, as any mainstream commentator would have imagined just two months ago.

Britain reached its diplomatic height in an earlier period of multipolarity, during the long years between the Congress of Vienna and the Battle of Sedan when, as the most cynical and relentlessly self-serving actor on the world stage, we played rival powers against each other and avoided foreign entanglements as far as possible.

As Palmerston remarked in 1848, in a bon mot borrowed by both de Gaulle and Kissinger, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Our interests now are to get through the coming decades of strife as safely, securely and peacefully as we can. It is no great hardship to quietly abandon our permanent subordinate role in a Transatlantic alliance that has not, in recent years, served us well. The Special Relationship was always an unrequited passion, and America’s postwar hegemony the merest blip in our history.

In Freedman’s survey of Britain’s now urgent foreign policy dilemma, he suggests that “the country enjoys relative security as an island at the more tranquil end of the Eurasian landmass, with a decent economy, a moderate climate, and a high standard of living. Because of this, the case for a quiet life, for steering clear of trouble elsewhere, is not so unreasonable that it can be dismissed out of hand.”

This is the case for national Hobbitism, and it is an attractive one. It is not immediately clear that Japan or Switzerland or Sweden are worse models for us than America or China. To our nation as much as to the individual families of which it is composed, Covid has unleashed a world suddenly filled with hardship and danger, where the familiar has become filled with risk and threat we are unable, on our own, to manage. We may think of it as the sensible precaution of societal distancing: quietly withdrawing from a threatening world, completing the necessary domestic repairs we long put off, and waiting watchfully for better times.