> From other statements, it seems clear the administration thinks Taiwan is a critical national interest while Ukraine is not.

This is true. And it is the main driver behind the United States' renewed interest in domestic fab capability:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7178

Taiwan isn't explicitly mentioned but it plays a large role in the reasoning behind this.

Your domestic fab capability can't run without thousands of consumables, and services only available in Asia. USA is not semiconductor self-sufficient since eighties, and cannot be any more, just like anybody else.

Semi is the most globalised industry spanning 28 countries, with USA, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, SK, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands being able to singlehandedly stop the whole of it.

It's a naive thinking "once TSMC will complete Arizona megafab, we can abandon Taiwan." There, are as I said, hundreds of critical single supplier globally pieces of equipment, services, and materials that most of the world had zero idea about. How about nanoneedle probes capable of testing M0 the entire industry depends on, for which there is 1 small company for the entire world.

The USA has a long, long history of being able to move when it has to. I'm pretty sure that if they want to re-create a particular level of expertise that they will be able to do so, given enough time.

Time is the crucial part, IMO.

The DoD has identified the loss of manufacturing capability as a national security risk. Maybe lower labor costs were the impetus of off-shoring manufacturing, but nearly 40 years since globalization took hold there's also a lot of manufacturing that has to go overseas simply because America is no longer able or willing to do it. Could the US bring back that capability? As you said, even if there was the will it wouldn't happen overnight.

I think you have no idea what entails what you are talking about. The world of semi has moved enormously since eighties, when the only country outside of USA with serious chip industry was Japan. Aside from "end of the pipe" fabs, and fab owners, everything else moved out, or never ever been a thing in USA.

US semiconductor equipment from LAM, and Applied Materials are more than half imported parts. US semi industry never used OSATs, until it had to ship their chips to Asia for that, and thus missed out on most of new packaging, and test tech which evolved outside of the US. Similarly for almost everything else.

Replacing Asian material suppliers for the US will be as hard as for China to develop a domestic photolithography stepper.

> I think you have no idea what entails what you are talking about.

Ok, then we'll stop talking.

I am not telling you to shut up, and I am telling you to take a deep breath, and think this over after reading up on topic a bit.

"We will betray our allies, and they will leave us alone" is a form of defeatism, and entertaining others into this way of thinking is not what a citizen of NATO country should do, let alone a public figure.

I don't think the argument should really be framed that the goal is for the US to become fully fab self-sufficient. Rather, this is about a very specific risk scenario. I think the distinction is that Taiwan is in a particularly precarious situation with a rising superpower openly wanting to reclaim it. And that rising superpower has some cultural distinction that make it a liability to US interests. The other single-point failures in the supply chain don't appear to be at that level of risk.