After decades of globalization and relative stability, the world is at a turning point. Amidst rising geopolitical tensions, shifting supply chains and states’ embrace of national industrial strategies, policy and corporate decision makers are facing a host of new, challenging questions concerning technologies, markets, and supply chains crucial to economic and national security. These critical and emerging technologies are increasingly and intimately intertwined with geopolitical frictions, if not at their core. Thus, it is important to recognize today’s unique challenges that require innovative thinking and approaches in technology governance to strengthen and build resilient supply chains that are prepared to withstand and can adapt to new geopolitical dynamics.

Interconnected global supply chains based around comparative advantage and lower labor costs linked through complex logistics have proven to be a key component of globalization. However, the interdependence between economies, and the reliance on even geopolitical rivals, has revealed downsides that go beyond pure economic and efficiency considerations. Disruptions, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, have reinforced the need for states to assess risks across a variety of national industries and global market sectors. These domains range from critical food and medical supplies, to automotive, raw materials and other commodity markets, and especially high-tech supply chains, like in the semiconductor ecosystem. To address the issue of supply chain resilience, this assessment evaluates semiconductors as a case study and discusses the risks of disruptions to the supply chain and the measures governments across the globe have taken individually and collectively to strengthen this crucial industry.

Semiconductors, which underpin nearly all current and near-future technology applications in the commercial and military realms, are a key concern for nations’ economic, security, and foreign policies. Governments have chosen to manage dual-use technologies and their supply chains, including semiconductors, comprehensively through new export controls, tariffs, investment screening, and de-risking through investments, subsidies and international cooperation to mitigate risk from growing geopolitical friction. These efforts are primarily driven unilaterally, but collective action and cooperation will be pivotal to ensuring supply chain resilience moving forward for the United States and its allies and partners.

2. Semiconductor Ecosystem Primer

Designed for efficient operations rather than resiliency, semiconductor supply chains can be prone to disruption. To take advantage of massive economies of scale, clustering effects, and regional talent, components of chips can travel more than 25,000 miles and can cross more than 70 borders before reaching their final destination. At its heart, the semiconductor ecosystem consists of three primary phases – (1) design, (2) front-end fabrication, and (3) back-end assembly, testing and packaging. This is followed by systems integration of chips into products such as televisions, video game consoles, personal computers, and cell phones by adjacent industries for consumer goods, industrial goods, as well as defense and space industries. These phases are supported by core intellectual property (IP), electronic design automation (EDA) tools, and raw and processed material inputs, built with a series of sophisticated tools, and incorporate crucial subcomponents.

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As the US and its allies increase efforts to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductor chips, experts say the measures could impact Beijing’s development. But they will also cause collateral damage to US firms.

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While China’s support for Russia is widely reported, Hong Kong’s substantial contributions to Russia’s war efforts are less known. Recent reports have identified Hong Kong as a prominent node in Russia’s illicit procurement network, acting as a transshipment hub for diverting Western-made microelectronic components to companies affiliated with the Russian military. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hong Kong has doubled its integrated circuits exports to around $400 million worth of semiconductors in 2022, second only to China and far exceeding any third country in the volume of semiconductor trade with Russia. Many of these transactions violate U.S. export control regulations against Russia, and multiple individuals and entities operating from Hong Kong have been sanctioned for their involvement in the Russian military’s procurement network.

Hong Kong’s complicity bodog online casino in sanctions busting is not merely a byproduct of being one of the busiest shipping hubs in the world; it is a direct consequence of Hong Kong’s increased subservience to China, now that Beijing has wiped out the last vestiges of autonomy in the special administrative region. In today’s Hong Kong, the government follows Beijing’s orders in virtually all matters of governance, particularly for issues with geopolitical salience. High levels of semiconductor trade between Hong Kong and Russia, as well as the Hong Kong government’s public scorn for Western sanctions, have made Hong Kong’s allegiance clear: it sits firmly in the camp of an emerging China-Russia axis.

RUSSIA’S SEMICONDUCTOR SUPPLY CHAIN

Numerous reports indicate that despite sweeping Western sanctions, Russia’s defense industrial base has successfully established alternative routes to import dual-use components needed for manufacturing military equipment. Lacking scalable domestic substitutes, Russia relies on foreign-made microelectronic components to produce a range of military gear, including weapons like drones and cruise missiles. Examining Russian weapons captured in Ukraine, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) discovered in August 2022 that the majority of microchip components in Russian systems originated from the United States, East Asia, and Western Europe. Tracing the supply chain of microelectronics, RUSI concluded that “third-country transshipment hubs and clandestine networks operated by Russia’s special services are now working to build new routes to secure access to Western microelectronics.”

A leader in low-end microchip manufacturing and the world’s top chip importer, China is now the foremost supplier of semiconductors to Russia. In 2022, as Western countries restricted technology supply, Russia’s semiconductor imports from China skyrocketed, jumping from $200 million in 2021 to well over $500 million in 2022, according to Russian customs data analyzed by the Free Russia Foundation. Importantly, the Sino-Russian technology trade involves not only Chinese-made components but also products manufactured by top U.S. chipmakers such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and Texas Instruments. Nikkei Asia recently reported that exports of U.S. chips from Hong Kong and China to Russia increased tenfold between 2021 and 2022, reaching about $570 million worth. By one figure, China and Hong Kong together accounted for nearly 90 percent of global chip exports to Russia in the period between March and December 2022.

China’s support to Russia’s war effort is unsurprising. The two countries are aligned in their ambition to undermine the U.S.-led international order. Before the war, Beijing and Moscow declared that the countries’ friendship had “no limits,” and a Chinese top diplomat has recently reaffirmed that Sino-Russian relations are “reaching new milestones.” The summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, held in March 2023, further consolidated the importance of this strategic partnership. Less examined is Hong Kong’s role in Russia’s technology supply chain.

While most countries have begun to recognize Hong Kong’s loss of autonomy following the passage of the Hong Kong national security law in 2020, the city is still often treated as separate from China in economic and trade data. This is as much a matter of convention as an acknowledgement of Hong Kong’s unique function to China: the former British colony is highly integrated into the global economy, serving as China’s window to the world. Hong Kong’s connectivity with the world has allowed unscrupulous actors to hide their footprints amid the busy international flows. Its prominence in Russia’s technology supply chain exemplifies this point. Researchers and journalists have found that some Hong Kong–based companies have diverted significant quantities of Western-made electronic components to Russia since its invasion of Ukraine. Macro-level data bear out Hong Kong’s importance to Russia’s defense-industrial base (although export statistics vary depending on the source). The Free Russia Foundation found that Hong Kong doubled its semiconductors and integrated circuits exports to around $400 million in 2022, putting it second only to China’s $500-million-plus exports. China and Hong Kong far exceed any third country in the volume of microchips trade with Russia.

BEIJING PULLING THE STRINGS

What explains Hong Kong’s prominence in Russia’s effort to sustain war in Ukraine? The most immediate factor is Beijing’s increased control over all aspects of the governance of Hong Kong. Historically, Western countries treated Hong Kong’s exports as sufficiently autonomous from China’s strategic objectives. In 1992, the United States and other former Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) members designated Hong Kong a “cooperating country,” affirming that it possessed the necessary elements of an effective licensing and enforcement system.

The transfer of sovereignty to China in 1997 prompted fears that Hong Kong would become a hub for technology diversion into China and other so-called rogue states like North Korea. The principle of “one country, two systems” was designed to assuage such anxiety by promising that Hong Kong would continue to exercise independent authority over export controls, which the government interprets as a trade matter, meaning that it falls under the legal bounds of Hong Kong’s autonomy. Under the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, after China took over Hong Kong’s sovereignty in 1997, the “United States should continue to support access by Hong Kong to sensitive technologies controlled under [COCOM] for so long as the United States is satisfied that such technologies are protected from improper use or export.” As a result, Hong Kong was eligible to import, without license, extensive categories of U.S.-controlled dual-use items and was eligible for license exceptions for some categories. In contrast, China was required to obtain a license to procure items controlled for U.S. national security and was eligible for a license exception only when the destination was verified as civil end users. A 1997 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office (now Government Accountability Office) characterized Hong Kong favorably for having demonstrated “excellent cooperation with the United States on export enforcement activities, including sharing of information and cooperation on investigations, searches, and seizures of suspected illegal shipments.”

However, as Hong Kong’s autonomy has steadily eroded, so has its willingness to comply with Western export control regimes, especially when they contradict China’s strategic interests. Today’s Hong Kong scorns Western sanctions against Russia. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western governments launched a frantic campaign to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs, hoping to deter elites from aiding Russian war efforts. In sharp contrast, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee, himself sanctioned by the United States for suppressing the 2019 protests, said that the government would not recognize U.S. sanctions against Russia, asserting that Hong Kong has no legal obligation to enforce “unilateral sanctions” after a Russian oligarch’s yacht was spotted in Hong Kong in October 2022. Furthermore, Hong Kong has become a top alternative for Russian companies shut out of Western financial capitals like New York and London. As Bloomberg reported in October 2022, a number of major Russian companies, including state-owned enterprises, have sought to engage with Hong Kong law firms to help anchor them in a “friendlier jurisdiction.” A local research group later found that between February and October 2022, the number of Russia-affiliated businesses registered in Hong Kong reached thirty-five, more than doubled from the same period in 2021.

DOES THE CHINA FACTOR REALLY MATTER?

It is no coincidence that Hong Kong’s noncompliance with Western sanctions has been simultaneous with Hong Kong’s deteriorating political autonomy. Xi is determined to exploit Hong Kong’s advantages to further his strategic ambitions, even if it means tarnishing Hong Kong’s international reputation.

Some might argue that Beijing’s increased grip on Hong Kong has had little effect on the city’s attitude toward Western sanctions. After all, Hong Kong was already a major transshipment hub, even prior to signs of serious deterioration of its autonomy. The volume of dual-use items transshipped through Hong Kong has contributed to conflict and terrorist activities that had less strategic salience to China than the war in Ukraine has. For example, transshipped U.S. electronics components and devices were used to build improvised explosive devices that were deployed against coalition forces in the Iraq war, a conflict for which China largely stayed on the sidelines.

Additionally, Hong Kong’s status as a busy transshipment port to locations around the world naturally increases the risks of illicit technology diversion. Transshipment is notoriously hard to detect from trade data because it requires visibility throughout multiple stages in the supply chain. Due to the sheer volume of transshipment occurring via Hong Kong, it is hard for export control officials to conduct preshipment screening or postshipment checks. It is particularly easy to set up front companies in jurisdictions like Hong Kong. As a manager at a leading U.S. semiconductor distributor explains, “there are many formless shell companies and small trading companies in Hong Kong that serve as receptacles for secondary sales. . . . If you spot one illegal trade, they can just change their name or use their other trading companies’ names.”

It becomes even more challenging to distinguish between transshipment to sanctioned entities and transshipment to legitimate importers if the importing country has a large existing market for dual-use goods. According to trade data compiled by the Observatory of Economic Complexity, Hong Kong has consistently been the world’s top importer of electrical machinery and electronics since 2004. In the global trade of integrated circuits, for instance, Hong Kong imported 24.3 percent (or $162 billion) of the world’s trade in 2020, exceeding even China’s $114 billion imports.

But this line of argument fails to account for the big picture. While the problem of illicit trade has historically bedeviled Hong Kong, the government’s open defiance against Western sanctions since the Ukraine war signals its commitment to a deliberately lax approach to export controls. The sizeable flow of technology from Hong Kong to Russia is the result of an active political choice. The reactions from other major transshipment hubs, such as Singapore and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), illustrate that it is possible to stem the flow of technology to Russia if there is political will to do so. U.S. authorities have long recognized the prominence of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UAE in illicit trade networks. The three major transshipment ports reacted to Western sanctions regimes against Russia differently according to their geopolitical interests.

Despite being a U.S. security partner, the UAE has joined other Middle Eastern states in refusing to participate in Western sanctions regimes. It has abstained from voting in favor of a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) draft resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine, allowed Russian oligarchs to launder money through its ports, spurned Washington’s request that it pump more oil to diminish Russian oil revenue by reducing global oil price, and refused to crack down on the reexporting of electronic components to Russia. Data show that exports of electronic parts from the UAE to Russia increased sevenfold within a year to almost $283 million in 2022, while microchip exports rose by fifteen times to $24.3 million from $1.6 million in 2021. The Gulf country also sold 158 drones worth a total of $600,000 to Russia.

If the UAE has allowed tech trade with Russia to flourish out of self-interest, Singaporean leaders have pursued a different calculus—choosing to align themselves more closely with the U.S. position. In a statement made on February 28, 2022, Singapore’s foreign minister said, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a clear and gross violation of the international norms and a completely unacceptable precedent. This is an existential issue for us.” In a rare move, the city-state announced sanctions against Russia that included “four banks and an export ban on electronics, computers and military items,” becoming the only Southeast Asian country to impose sanctions against Russia in the absence of binding UNSC approval. According to the Free Russia Foundation, Singapore is among the countries that have most dramatically curtailed trade with Russia. In terms of semiconductors and integrated circuits, Singapore was the ninth-biggest exporter to Russia in 2021. A prominent node in the global supply chain, Singapore accounts for 19 percent of the global share of semiconductor equipment, providing Russia in 2019 with approximately $10.6 million worth of semiconductor devices. This has shifted since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Singapore chose to side with Western sanctions regimes. In 2022, exports of semiconductors from Singapore to Russia collapsed dramatically down to a negligible level.

Geopolitical interests explain both the UAE’s spike and Singapore’s plummet in exports to Russia. These cases illustrate that changes in economic and technology ties with Russia are largely driven by the countries’ stances on the Ukraine war, which are in turn motivated by their geostrategic calculus. Similarly, Hong Kong’s permissive stance toward trading technology with Russia is a product of Beijing’s geopolitical calculations. Repeatedly, Hong Kong officials have demonstrated that they have no ability to defy Beijing’s will and no interest in doing so, even if it means alienating the international community. If China is determined to help Russia wage war against Ukraine by extending a technology lifeline, Hong Kong will follow suit.

STILL ASIA’S WORLD CITY?

In July 2020, recognizing Hong Kong’s loss of autonomy, former U.S. president Donald Trump announced that Hong Kong “is no longer sufficiently autonomous to justify differential treatment in relation to the People’s Republic of China.” The United States would “suspend or eliminate different and preferential treatment for Hong Kong.” Shortly after, the Commerce Department began rescinding Hong Kong’s export licensing privileges, such as by equalizing the availability of license exceptions for Hong Kong and China. In December, the department declared that it would treat exports to Hong Kong as destined for China, effectively ending Hong Kong’s preferential status in the U.S. export control system. Some of the United States’ closest partners have implemented similar changes.

Stripping away Hong Kong’s preferential trading status is a good first step in stopping the leakage of sensitive goods to China and its autocratic allies. But unilateral action from the United States is not enough. While these restrictions have slowed the movement of export-controlled goods in and out of Hong Kong—for example, the Commerce Department detected a 17.4 percent decline in shipments under a Bureau of Industry and Security license exception between 2020 and 2021—Hong Kong on the whole remains relatively interconnected with the global economy.

Russia’s permanent seat on the UNSC has guaranteed the failure of any efforts to push for comprehensive UN sanctions and continues to provide political cover for jurisdictions like Hong Kong and the UAE to resist pressure to cooperate with Western countries. This, combined with Hong Kong’s posture as a busy shipping port that is inherently difficult to monitor, has given the Hong Kong government plausible deniability when accused of supporting Russia’s war machine. There is no clear answer to how Western countries should deal with nonaligned countries in the Global South that wish to stay out of what they perceive as a great power competition, but one thing should be clear: Hong Kong falls outside the nonalignment camp, since it has taken the side of the emerging China-Russia axis.

A wider recognition of Hong Kong as a geostrategic asset of Chinese statecraft is in order. Hong Kong’s government is investing large sums in a charm offensive to rehabilitate its international image and attract international business. In a promotional video for the government’s $2 billion HKD “Hello Hong Kong” campaign, Lee claimed, “Hong Kong is now seamlessly connected to the mainland of China and the whole international world.” But the findings presented in this article show that a portrayal of Hong Kong as a neutral trading hub connecting East and West no longer holds up. Western leaders should be aware of the geopolitical costs of Hong Kong’s position as a major center of global trade and the advantages that subsequently accrue to Beijing.

Correction: This piece has been edited to reflect that Chief Executive John Lee said Hong Kong would disregard U.S. sanctions on Russia, not those on China.

Brian (Chun Hey) Kot is a research assistant in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program.

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Mary Lovely is the Anthony M. Solomon senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.

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BERKELEY – To be effective, economic sanctions depend on multilateral coordination. Freezing the Russian central bank’s holdings and kicking Russian banks out of the SWIFT financial messaging system for international payments in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are groundbreaking moves. But such measures will be successful only if there are no (or at least very few) ways to circumvent them. Their implementation and enforcement must be truly multilateral, extending beyond NATO and the transatlantic community.

The unprecedented multilateral response to Russia’s war is an opportunity for the United States and its allies to strengthen their collaboration on a wide range of shared security and economic issues. Consider the semiconductor industry, which is crucial for today’s economy and for national security. The sanctions limiting Russian access to semiconductors depend on support from TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea, the leading global producers of both commodity chips and the more advanced chips used in many weapons systems.

Policy collaboration in the semiconductor sector can and should extend beyond the sanctions. There are many promising opportunities for collaboration among the economies that form the core of today’s complex semiconductor supply chain: the US, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel. All are investing significant public funds and deploying industrial, research, training, trade, and cross-border investment policies to increase their semiconductor producers’ capabilities.

Multilateral policy coordination in the semiconductor industry should aim to ensure a competitive, resilient, secure, and sustainable (CRSS) supply of semiconductors to meet the significant increase in global demand over the next decade. Given the global dispersion of research, production, talent, and knowledge, this goal cannot be accomplished through technological autarky or isolationist self-sufficiency.

The concentration of chip production in Asia – where China accounts for a growing share – poses a long-term threat to CRSS. The solution is to invest significantly more in US and European semiconductor production capabilities, particularly for the most advanced chips. This need not exclude Asian companies and Asian allies. For Asian producers, locating some production facilities in the US and Europe would provide protection against regional supply-chain shocks.

There are several important issues to consider in moving toward more multilateral policy collaboration in the semiconductor industry. For starters, proposals for policy interventions in Europe and the US come in many forms depending on the national context. Among the options are competitive grants, capital subsidies, tax credits, and funding for research and development.

The challenge will be to ensure that these policies increase investments in production capabilities rather than fund wasteful zero-sum competition among governments to attract private investment that would have occurred anyway. Competing national industrial policies, however well motivated, can quickly lead to counterproductive bidding wars of the sort we have seen before among US states and European countries. Government interventions should come with clear conditions and metrics on business performance to counter the incentives for private companies to exploit promised subsidies for their own benefit and that of their shareholders.

Assuring competitive markets for commodity and advanced chip production is important in its own right. But chip fabrication and production also provide leverage throughout the semiconductor supply chain – from equipment, materials, and design to integrating customers’ future plans and needs into the development of new products. Maintaining a competitive edge in fabrication is thus crucial for developing the equipment and materials needed for ongoing innovation throughout the supply chain. The US and Europe have strong competitive positions in these areas; however, those positions need to be defended and strengthened.

That will take time and substantial investment. Construction of a new fabrication facility is estimated to require 3-5 years, at a cost of $10-20 billion. Congress is currently considering legislation that would allocate $52 billion (mainly in the form of grants) to catalyze US-based fabrication by both domestic and foreign firms. That is a large number, representing about three times more than what the US government spent to support COVID-19 vaccine development and manufacturing. But it is a small fraction of the capital investment needed to build and operate fabrication facilities required to meet US military and commercial needs over the next two decades.

A second consideration is that building and operating competitive new fabrication capacity in the US and Europe will call for more than capital investment. It will also require regulatory support to facilitate environmental reviews and permitting of high-tech production facilities, as well as complementary investments in infrastructure, including energy, water, and transportation networks.

Third, semiconductor companies (both domestic and foreign-owned) will base their decisions about where to build on access to talent, skills, and university research. Revitalizing US semiconductor production thus requires both physical and human capital. In the medium term, that means issuing more visas for highly skilled and experienced foreign workers; and, over time, it means increasing the number of Americans graduating from college with engineering degrees.

The ability to prototype, produce, and scale up innovations can be severely hampered by “lab to fab” gaps in funding and talent along the innovation pathway. Multilateral collaboration among the US and allied governments to create and fund joint pre-competitive research programs, including shared R&D facilities, can fill these gaps, accelerate innovation, nurture the development of new companies, and maintain technological leadership throughout the supply chain.

Finally, joint research programs involving companies, universities, and government partners can be designed to address other shared challenges like climate change (semiconductors are critical inputs in solar, wind, and other forms of alternative energy), security vulnerabilities, and the risks associated with artificial intelligence. Such programs will require agreements among participants on intellectual-property rights, trade, and cross-border investments.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has highlighted an essential feature of the semiconductor industry. The technology and trade sanctions come at a moment when the US, Europe, and other key nodes in the semiconductor supply chain are planning large investments to address both economic and national security concerns. There is no better time to collaborate in developing a CRSS global supply of semiconductors.

Laura Tyson, a former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Board of Advisers at Angeleno Group.

John Zysman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, is Co-Founder of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy.

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The Biden administration is being accused of being soft on China, primarily by Republican senators running for president and looking for an issue. This is an easy issue to demagogue, but that can lead to policy mistakes that will actually harm our security. This is typified by the argument over how best to control semiconductor exports. The core problem is that for the chip companies, China is both the biggest threat and the best customer. China clearly plans to become a world-class competitor in this sector, which in the long term poses an existential threat to the U.S. industry, not to mention the challenge that it will pose to our national security should China develop independent capabilities equal to or better than ours. At the same time, while exports of cutting-edge products are restricted, older, lower-level chips are not, and they provide an important source of revenue for U.S. companies—revenue they need to produce the next generation of chips that our own national security will depend on. This has been a carefully constructed balancing act over multiple administrations. Action in Congress threatens to upset it via amendments that were initially proposed to the EAGLE Act—the House China bill—and defeated there in committee. Now it appears some of them may be resuscitated in the Senate.

A particularly complicated one is the foreign direct product rule, which the Biden administration has retained from the Trump administration. It created a license requirement for items—primarily chips—that are foreign products directly produced by U.S. equipment and software. It was aimed at Huawei, but now there are calls to expand it and make it standard U.S. policy. That would create a significant disincentive to buy those items, which would make the chip shortage even worse than it already is. It would also be a significant expansion of the extraterritorial reach of U.S. law that goes after the very countries we want to cooperate with us on export controls, like Japan and South Korea. It would also push research and development offshore as foreign companies try to avoid the reach of our law—exactly the opposite of what the administration is trying to accomplish.

Equally problematic are proposals intended to take us back to the Cold War days when we controlled entire classes of items rather than the case-by-case approach that examines specific end users, which we have used since the Clinton administration. If, for example, Congress compels the administration to treat semiconductors as a “foundational” technology and impose broader controls on them, including re-controlling older chips, it would starve the U.S. industry of revenue, set back our own development of next-generation chips, and compromise our security.

Instead, the challenge is what it has always been—to navigate the fine line between too little control, where technology leaks out to our adversaries, and too much control, which undermines U.S. industries’ ability to innovate and “run faster” than the competition. Table-pounding from Congress does not make that any easier.

The administration’s approach so far seems thoughtful—to retain but not expand the tools developed in the last administration, such as the direct product rule and the military end-use/end-user definition, which have enabled them to control foreign production based on U.S. technology more effectively and to reach out more actively to our allies and partners who make comparable products and try to get them on the same page. In both these areas they are focusing more on the technology for making semiconductors than on the chips themselves, which is the right approach because it makes it more difficult for China to develop competing capabilities. Sweeping efforts to broadly control chips will do more harm to our own industry than to China. Working with allies will also be more effective than simply relying on the extraterritorial aspects of U.S. law; an advantage in this case is that there are not many other competitive manufacturers, and they are in countries that share our concerns.

Congress should also remember that the administration’s wisest action so far has been to focus on the “running faster” part of the equation—making sure our own industries are equipped to stay ahead of their competitors. We should not expect more from export controls than they can deliver. They play a critical role in our national security, but they cannot substitute for a sound technology policy that helps our industries grow and prosper. I hope senators keep that in mind as they take up the annual defense authorization and reject ill-considered amendments that would compromise our security by kneecapping our high-tech industries. Their efforts would be better spent passing the CHIPS Act, which was passed by the Senate but has been languishing for months since then.

William Reinsch holds the Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. 

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During the pandemic, globalization has also been blamed for putting the United States into a position of excessive dependence on foreign supplies as varied as medical equipment and semiconductors.

This has led many politicians — Democrats and Republicans — to a subject that was also for a long time a dirty term: industrial policy. They seek a bigger role for the U.S. government in shaping what gets made where. The idea has been championed by Presidents Donald Trump and Biden and members of Congress from conservatives like Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley to progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.

But this enthusiasm for directing billions of dollars at certain industries may not work in today’s globalized economy. If the point is to focus on clearly defined and agreed-upon goals — including some that may involve sacrificing a bit of economic efficiency to achieve national security or pandemic preparedness — then an industrial policy that bodog poker review is entirely domestic may actually backfire.

Instead, to succeed, it will take what we think of as a hybrid industrial policy. This would integrate some of the good aspects of globalization, preserve competition and coordinate policy with like-minded countries to achieve common objectives.

A couple of examples suggest the opportunities — and potential pitfalls.

Personal protective equipment and semiconductors

The main argument for an American industrial policy in both P.P.E. and semiconductors is the risk that foreign sources of supply are too concentrated geographically.

For P.P.E., when the coronavirus hit, the lack of hospital gowns and masks globally — let alone in the United States — set off alarm bells among policymakers. There was extra global supply, but it was stuck mostly in China.

To remedy that, the Defense Department spent nearly $1.2 billion. Dozens of American companies now make N-95 respirators, surgical masks, hospital gowns and gloves, and even some of the key raw materials the supply chain needed to ensure production could be secured in the United States.

For semiconductors, no one seemed to care just over a year ago about U.S. dependence on high-end chips made in Taiwan and South Korea. But with the global shortage, we all do now — automakers in particular.

Both countries are geopolitical hot spots and not immune to droughts, typhoons and other natural disasters that can disrupt supply. Congress is using the situation to push ahead bipartisan legislation for upward of $50 billion in federal subsidies for the American semiconductor industry.

But the objective should not be national self-sufficiency at any cost. When the pandemic recedes, there will be less demand for some of these products, and prices will come down.

For P.P.E., that means budget-conscious hospitals will look to buy cheaper, non-American-produced options. The U.S. companies will want continuing subsidies or protection from imports. In fact, a group of small companies have already organized into the American Mask Manufacturer’s Association to complain that foreign-made masks are being “dumped” in the U.S. market, and they may seek tariffs to stop imports. But duties would raise costs for a health care system that is already extraordinarily expensive.

The industrial-policy goal should be to preserve the right amount of domestic capacity to be at the ready for the next health emergency with the equally important objective of keeping medical costs low. Targeted government subsidies, as well as regulations that medical distributors, states and hospital systems hold more emergency inventory than they did heading into the pandemic, would be better industrial policy than blunt trade restrictions and blank checks.

For semiconductors, congressional efforts to shift capacity to the United States through subsidies pose additional challenges. The potential good news is that the bulk of the subsidies might be one-time payments that provide equal opportunity to leading-edge manufacturers — not just American businesses but also some abroad, like Taiwan’s T.S.M.C. and South Korea’s Samsung. Yet there is no guarantee that the foreign companies would start making their leading-edge products on American soil. In fact, they are less likely to do so if Washington continues to adopt unilateral export-control policies that can limit where American-made semiconductors can be sold — i.e., not China.

And there are also downsides to bringing back production. The United States is not immune to geographically concentrated risks, as February’s Arctic storm in Texas revealed when a disruption to the electrical grid temporarily shuttered a cluster of semiconductor plants. And if the costs of chips made in America are too high for automakers, keeping those product lines going may require more than just those one-off payments to companies.

A better “Made in America”

For both economic and security reasons, more geographic diversification is needed. A better “Made in America” policy would allow for globalized production chains, particularly with trusted suppliers in like-minded countries.

This implies that, if the goal is to diversify away from China — or, for certain items like semiconductors, Taiwan or South Korea — the United States and its allies should take a coordinated approach. That requires setting limits on government payments to industry and working out who in the supply chain does what — a high level of policy cooperation.

Without such coordination, even like-minded countries might end up in bidding wars by giving ever larger subsidies to lure semiconductor manufacturers to their shores. That could result in industry excess capacity, trade disputes and tariffs that close off markets.

This is not a fanciful scenario. The United States and the European Union have long fought over counterproductive agricultural subsidies, and the two sides recently resolved a costly, long-running battle over subsidies to Boeing and Airbus that also included tariffs on completely unrelated goods, like wine and cheese.

Furthermore, at the same moment that the United States is working with the other major economies to eliminate tax havens and impose a global minimum tax on multinational corporations, governments should not be competing to hand tax revenue back to those companies some other way.

The Biden administration seems willing to try this coordinated approach. At the Group of 7 summit in June, the administration agreed to a proposal highlighting both P.P.E. and semiconductors that aspired to achieve “open, diversified, secure and resilient supply chains.” In a summit in September, the administration and the European Union agreed to try to avoid a semiconductor “subsidy race and the risk of crowding out private investments that would themselves contribute to our security and resilience.”

Cooperating on the details will prove hard. A hybrid industrial policy is extremely difficult to achieve, but it is also the one most likely to work. It accepts for security reasons some costs to moving some production away from where it is currently abroad but without requiring self-sufficiency and a complete unraveling of international production chains that give Americans access to the best products at reasonable prices. It accepts that some coordination with allies is necessary but seeks to avoid managed trade or government-protected cartels that reduce competition. In short, it relies on a sound economic strategy in the service of national security.

Chad P. Bown is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Douglas A. Irwin is an economics professor at Dartmouth.

To read the full commentary from The New York Times, please click here.

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Tokyo’s vision for the semiconductor industry is particularly striking. Just as the United States has identified chips together with large-power batteries, pharmaceuticals, and critical minerals as sectors that are not only essential for the country’s economic as well as broader security moving forward, Japan too has put semiconductors at the top of the list of priority sectors to invest in. Yet Tokyo’s focus is as much about addressing the shifting needs of the demand side as much as the supply side. That is to say that whilst Japan too wants to boost domestic chip production in an effort to enhance resilience, it is also looking at systemic shifts in the global semiconductor supply chain network as an opportunity to redefine Japan’s economic focus.

Questioned about how Tokyo expects to foot the costs of the heated global chips race recently, Japan’s former economy minister Akira Amari argued that simply investing in producing ever more powerful and smaller chips at home in itself is not a strategic vision for competing in the semiconductor sector. Rather, Amari argued that Japan should concentrate on lowering the cost of advanced chips, and focus on furthering the end use of cutting edge chips.  That plan may actually play far more to Japan’s strength as a hub of technology application rather than research.

Certainly, the Japanese auto sector has benefited from that end-user approach. After all, cars were not invented in Japan, and yet once automobiles became more of a necessity rather than a luxury item, it was companies like Toyota and not Ford that excelled in mass producing affordable high-quality cars. Given the track record of Japanese companies improving existing technologies, the plan to have Japan improve the way semiconductors are used to enhance living standards and deal with some of the most pressing global issues of the day including climate change could be part of a broader roadmap for Japan’s future growth.

That vision, however, depends very much on close cooperation and sharing of technology with the United States and the European Union as well as South Korea,Taiwan, and other like-minded governments. It’s clear that the long and complex chain of semiconductor research, design, development, and manufacturing is ripe for multilateral cooperation, if only to be more cost-effective. At the same time, a global approach is also necessary to withstand the competition and technology influence posed by China. Tokyo’s bid to focus on enhancing the use and improving the production cycle of semiconductors can further Japan’s position not only in the global supply chain, but also reinvigorate not only Japan’s technology sector but economic foundation more broadly. The role Tokyo can and should play in overcoming the global trend of unilateralism and press for further cooperation in securing the future of supply chains is only increasing.

Shihoko Goto is the Deputy Director for Geoeconomics and the Senior Northeast Asia Associate at the Wilson Center’s Asia Program. She is a leading expert on economics and politics in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, as well as U.S. policy in the region.

To read the full commentary from the Wilson Center, please click here. 

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The current global semiconductor shortage illustrates how geographic clustering of input suppliers can generate upheavals in the rest of the world. Business leaders and policymakers must think now about how to minimize the effects of future exogenous shocks on production networks and the global economy.

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But the supply of semiconductors was at risk long before the pandemic, and the virus is only partly to blame for today’s shortages. One of the biggest culprits was a sudden shift in U.S. trade policy. In 2018, motivated by national security concerns, the Trump administration launched a trade and tech war with China that jolted the entire globalized semiconductor supply chain. The fiasco contributed to the current shortages, hurting American businesses and workers. Now, the Biden administration must pick up the pieces.

In its first five months, the Biden administration has laid the groundwork for a more resilient semiconductor supply chain. Discarding the nationalistic policies that got the United States into this mess, the Biden administration has reached agreements at summits with Japan, South Korea, and the European Union to cooperate on a new semiconductor strategy. With their overarching goal now set, Washington and its partners must turn to the hard work of hammering out the details. Only then will they be able to protect their national security and stave off another economic crisis.

Weaponizing Trade 

The troubles for the United States’ multibillion dollar semiconductor industry started when the Trump administration used it as a pawn to go after Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant and a major chip consumer. For years, Western policymakers worried that Huawei’s shoddy gear was vulnerable to cyber-hacking and thus a threat to critical telecommunications infrastructure. More worrisome were the company’s close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, raising the prospect that Beijing would use Huawei’s 5G network equipment to spy on rivals and steal their military intelligence, governmental communications, or trade secrets.

In January 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Huawei for financial fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of justice, and sanctions violations. On paper, the case had little to do with concerns about national security and 5G networks, but there was no doubt that those issues motivated prosecutors. Unusually, the Trump administration chose not to punish Huawei with financial sanctions. Instead, it weaponized trade. The administration restricted companies from selling to Huawei from the United States by imposing export controls in an attempt to starve Huawei of inputs, especially semiconductors.

The Trump administration had a clumsy approach to a complex supply chain. Modern semiconductor manufacturing is a fragmented process, and even the chips developed by U.S. companies are often not made in the United States. Qualcomm and Nvidia, two major U.S. technology companies, design world-leading semiconductors, but they often farm out the production of those chips to foreign firms, especially Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract manufacturer of chips. Because U.S. law was designed to stop exports leaving the United States, the Trump administration’s export control rollout in 2019 could do nothing about chips being made abroad, blunting the policy’s effectiveness.

Export controls imposed by the United States alone were bound to flop. Non-American companies make great chips, too, allowing Huawei to swap out the American semiconductors it used in its 5G equipment with those from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or Europe. The policy was lose-lose: it ended up hurting U.S. companies and failing to mitigate the national security threat. What is more, the export controls discouraged chip manufacturers from investing in the United States. American producers ultimately faced trade limits that no country besides their own was applying.

Undeterred, the Trump administration reached deeper into the semiconductor supply chain. Huawei’s other suppliers all needed cutting-edge equipment to produce their chips. But many of those tools were also made by U.S. companies, such as Applied Materials, KLA, and Lam Research. So beginning in mid-2020, the administration tried to use the dominance of U.S. equipment manufacturers as leverage with foreign chipmakers that were still selling to Huawei. It presented companies such as TSMC and Samsung with an ultimatum: stop selling to Huawei or lose the ability to use American tools.

These export controls have also had nasty side effects. To TSMC, Samsung, or any other company that was about to invest hundreds of millions of dollars on new chip-making tools produced by U.S. companies, other equipment makers—including Tokyo Electron in Japan or ASML in the Netherlands—were suddenly much more attractive suppliers.

Furthermore, China threw even more money at its already heavily subsidized chipmakers. Under pressure to accelerate its industrial development, Beijing has sought to quickly free itself from the tight grip of Western technologies. Simultaneously, the fear of losing access to the Chinese market has the U.S. semiconductor industry now seeking upward of $50 billion in federal subsidies as part of legislation now winding its way through Congress. By the industry’s reckoning, the conflict with China could threaten a third of its revenues, requiring a new funding source to spur the research and development of future chips.

By cutting off Huawei’s access to semiconductors, the full suite of U.S. export controls imposed in 2019 and 2020 may ultimately hurt the company’s 5G equipment sales enough to protect U.S. national security, although it is too early to say for sure. Nevertheless, the extreme collateral damage from the episode demands that policymakers find a new way to ensure the resilience of the semiconductor supply chain.

The Shortage Heard Round the World 

By the time U.S. President Joe Biden took office, the COVID-19 pandemic had laid bare the extent of the semiconductor crisis. Carmakers overreacted to the initial shock of COVID-19 and, in early 2020, slashed orders for chips. By the time the auto companies realized their mistake, chipmakers were already at capacity supplying the suddenly booming market for work-from-home goods. The perfect storm only got worse: Arctic weather in Texas, a drought in Taiwan, and an earthquake and fire in Japan all worked to slow production.

U.S. trade policy also squeezed supply. In July 2018, the Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on imported chips as part of its trade war. Despite growth in the global semiconductor market, the tariffs meant that the United States was buying half as many chips from China in 2020 as it was before the trade war, and imports from elsewhere did not replace those missing semiconductors. Making matters worse, Chinese buyers, fearful of the ever-tightening U.S. export controls, hoarded chips, thus contributing to the global shortage.

The semiconductor shortage was high on the agenda in April when Bidenwelcomed to the White House his first foreign leader, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. Although there was nothing Biden or Suga could do to immediately boost production and alleviate the shortages facing their auto sectors, they agreed to “cooperate on sensitive supply chains, including semi-conductors.” Similar priorities were set in May at Biden’s summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and in June with leaders from the European Union.

Washington’s efforts to shore up the semiconductor supply chain require bringing each partner into the fold. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Europe are home to some of the world’s most important equipment suppliers and chipmakers. Getting everyone on the same page will require a deft diplomatic touch. Relations between Tokyo and Seoul remain tense, in light of a recent flare-up that led Japan to impose export controls on chemicals critical to South Korean semiconductor producers. Because its companies produce most of the world’s leading chips, Taiwan must also be central to Washington’s efforts. But coordinating policy with Taipei inevitably antagonizes Beijing, which views the island as a renegade province and seeks to eventually reunify it with the rest of China.

On export controls, the semiconductor saga has revealed the need for a common policy that Washington and its partners agree on. Broad, unilateral, and extraterritorial U.S. export controls are not a viable long-term strategy to protect national security. U.S. partners won’t put up with them for long, since democratically elected leaders face domestic pushback when they cede sovereignty to Washington and impose huge commercial costs on their companies. European firms, for example, were quick to accuse the Trump administration of designing its export controls less to address any Chinese national security threat and more to advantage their American competitors.

Extraterritorial controls also won’t work for long, because foreign semiconductor manufacturers will seek to swap out U.S. equipment with tools from alternative suppliers. Once they have done so, Washington loses the only short-term leverage it had over them and over the ultimate target, Chinese firms buying the chips. Preventing this outcome requires collaboration. U.S. partners must both buy into the security threats that China poses and enforce the commonly set export limits on their own firms. Given the difficulties with multinational enforcement, overly broad attempts to control everything are likely to end up controlling nothing. Success may instead demand tighter export limits but on fewer technologies.

Washington and its partners will also need to get more creative. Both the U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-South Korean summits signaled the potential embrace of an innovative policy called “Open RAN.” Under this approach, policymakers would agree on common industry standards that force greater compatibility between different types of 5G equipment. The end goal is to prevent Huawei—or any other 5G equipment provider—from dominating global telecommunications infrastructure. This policy would introduce competition and could weaken the market power of major vendors. It may also be more effective than the existing approach: better to allow for a diversity of suppliers than dedicate resources to killing off one bad actor, such as Huawei, only to see another take its place.

Nevertheless, the United States and its partners will have to accept that aligning their policies comes with costs. If they agree to common export controls, for instance, China will almost certainly carry out a more confrontational foreign and economic policy, intensifying its own efforts to decouple. In turn, semiconductor firms in U.S. partner countries will likely join their American counterparts in losing commercial access to the Chinese market.

Washington and its partners must thus prepare for their semiconductor industries to lose revenues, which fund their considerable R & D expenditures. To ease the sting, they should jointly fund an R & D consortium for firms in allied countries along the semiconductor supply chain.  R& D consortiums, which pool resources for chip research to prevent each company from having to reinvent the wheel, are nothing new for the chip sector at the national level. In fact, Japan developed one in the 1970s, as did South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States shortly thereafter. Here, coordinating a new multilateral consortium could also help allied countries withstand pressure to compete among themselves, thus preventing excessive subsidization and a race to the bottom.

Given the uncertain pace and trajectory of semiconductor innovation, there will be bumps in the road. But failing to coordinate the export controls needed to mitigate the most critical national security threats, develop common industry standards, and prevent excessive subsidies to stave off infighting over suppliers—that would be much, much worse.

Chad P. Bown, Reginald Jones Senior Fellow since March 2018, joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics as a senior fellow in April 2016. His research examines international trade laws and institutions, trade negotiations, and trade disputes. With Soumaya Keynes, he cohosts Trade Talks, a weekly podcast on the economics of international trade policy.

To read the full commentary from Foreign Affairs Magazine, please click here. 

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