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The silicon shield became a slogan that has only been popularized in recent years. The potential crisis of war has been there for more than half a century (even before semiconductors became a thing). The real value proposition of the status quo is the freedom of navigation between the northeastern Asian countries and the SEA (the Strait of Malacca, aka the lifeline of energy imports), and the consequential domino effect of the entire western Pacific.

Also, not sure why everyone forgets about it. People should have learned from the experience of the pandemic that the cutting-edge foundry nodes are not really the crucial ones, as being the bottleneck of industrial infrastructure. A delay of the next-gen iPhone or RTX gaming card isn't that catastrophic. But a shortage of embedded MCUs, which are actually fabricated by mature nodes, could stall the entire industrial base of a country.