Sanctioning Russia is easy for the West. Sanctioning China is a non-starter.

Disagree. War with China is worse than sanctioning China. Abandoning Taiwan means deatabilizing the region (Japan militarizes, China opposes Japan. NK does whatever they want. South china see conflict leads to vietnam,philipines joining,etc...).

China is very important but the shipping lanes to SE asia and regional stability is more valuable. You can sanction China and get in a sanction war with them until one side gives in. Or a trade war like trump tried.

Their focus however is to win the war before it starts unlike the US which is to win the war after it starts (imo).

If it gets to a full in sanction like russia, the western economy will tak a massive hit, but it isn' beyond recovery and might actually be good to force resilent supply chains. Especially with silicon fab.

War with China is worse than sanctioning China, but likewise, war with Russia is worse than sanctioning Russia. There's a reason why NATO is content to stand by and do nothing.

I can't tell you what will happen if Taiwan is invaded tomorrow, next year, or twenty years from now, but I can tell you that the US will think long and hard about whether or not it will want to get involved. And it might well choose not to.

NATO can only do something if NATO is attacked first. It can't do pre-emptive attacks. It depends a lot on the party in power in the US as well as the sentiment towards China. A lot of working class people might see it as a way to prove why shipping jobs and manufacturing there was a bad idea.

NATO absolutely can attack without being attacked first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Protector

I had no idea. Thanks

> force resilent supply chains

How many years do you think it would take to build up those resilient supply chains? 5 years?

That's 5 years without most products from AMD, Nvidia, Tesla and every other TSMC customer. Samsung can absorb some of that business, but not much. Intel will shoot to the moon in that scenario.

TSMC is already planning multiple factories in the US, India,etc... So is Intel. Raw materials are what are most concerning. Either way, it would be bad for the economy but war is profitable and war time powers can bend a lot of rules/companies.

The vast majority of TSMC manufacturing will still be in Taiwan. The US fabs are mostly for national defense products that legally need to be completely domestically sourced from what I can tell.

Maybe, but Taiwan has a treaty with the US and other countries meaning it’d escalate out of the gate. Ukraine, sadly, had none.

Taiwan does not have any treaties with the United States, because the United States does not recognize Taiwan as a country, or have normal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, ever since the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

The US _did_ have a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, but it was terminated by the Taiwan Relations Act after the US initiated diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China on Jan 1st, 1979.