45 Sanctions

Welsh

Sanctions work on weak nations. They do not work on strong nations, or on nations which have strong friends.

Russia sanctions might have worked if China and India and most of the South had gone along, but since China was never going to let Russia be destroyed, and since Russia produces all the fuel and food and most of the minerals it needs, plus still has a fair bit of advanced and heavy industry, especially arms manufacturing, it was never going to happen.

Sanctions against China are insanity. All they do is accelerate local production.

The thing is that before the sanctions most Chinese majors preferred US or South Korean designed chips. They were considered better and more reliable. Executives would not buy Chinese chips, even when they were available.

But when the US first launched its chip sanctions they were clearly trying to take out Huawei, one of China’s largest companies.

Being reliant on western chips went from the safe choice to the insanely risky choice and China, both private and public, spent vast sums and made huge efforts to build their own chip industry (including lithography machines are alternatives.)

Where the industrial base goes, the tech lead goes.

Sanctions against China would make sense IF and only IF, you were going to take advantage of them immediately. In other words, go to war or make really radical changes to try and re-industrialized.

The US (and Europe) need a crash, not in living standards, but in price structures. That means the people at the top need to become a lot less rich, very very fast. America isn’t going to pursue them, so anti-China sanctions are basically pointless and actually accelerate their tech progress.

When the US sent its industrial base to China that became inevitable because all “end of history” bullshit was, in fact, bullshit. Capitalism doesn’t require representative democracy and neither does fast technological progress. It doesn’t need capitalism, per se, either, but that’s the only solution we know and it was necessary for China to do capitalism to get the industrial base transfer.

Our leaders, still only good at making themselves richer, worthless for all other purposes. In the end, the policies they pursued to make themselves rich will just turn them into the people running shithole countries which don’t much matter.

Welsh (2024) The Anti-China Chip Jeremiad Is The Stupidest Policy Imaginable