Coercing Right Back at the US

a few ideas country by country

Things are very, very bad. What options do other countries have to push this conflict to end quickly? There are two ways to reduce the squeeze in energy markets: getting China to act helpfully in the short term but ultimately getting the United States to wrap up this conflict and face the fact that in a world of drones a blue ocean navy is not what it once was. Physical and material realities do not care about your feelings, and I have written about these changed physical realities here.

A problem with the political economy of the United States today is that it is heavily influenced by the tech right. This group is immensely clever and talented at an extremely narrow range of things more specifically writing software. They are familiar with dependencies and recursions as problems you can fix in an afternoon, not a decade. They are enormously talented in a narrow way like the Zunfte or guilds of Zurich in the Middle Ages. Capable, rich, and wholly unfit to run an empire where you have to think about the agency of others and hard assets and physical limits - not least of all new agency enabled by technology you yourselves developed like drones. I will write more on these parallels another time, but Switzerland is a great place that never had a massive supply chain empire for numerous reasons. If the tech sector wants to be the Swiss they probably should not have hopped in bed with the GOP fossil sector and should have practiced some kind of cleantech / supply chain security isolationism. It would work a lot better than whatever this is - “frat boy at the dive bar starts fight with meth head and gets glassed” kind of foreign policy.

All these folks who are major GOP donors in Nocal need memory and logic. Producing memory and logic predominantly happens in South Korea and Taiwan. It is an assumption online that Korea will keep the fabs open among the West Coast tech twitterati. This would be bad and dumb policy by Korea because it imposes no pressure on Trump or his donors notably the likes of Greg Brockman of OpenAI. If there is no compute for large tech model providers then there is no growth, no subsequent equity round and perhaps a collapse in US growth and capital expenditures. Korea’s government is elected by Korean voters who like to have food and drive their cars, not the oligarchs of Nocal. A good way to explain this to the US is that “no LNG, not enough power, we choose aircon over chip fabs, sorry”. Not a whole lot the US can do about that. The howls from Palo Alto would be extraordinary.

Damage we are already seeing in Qatar has probably ended this datacenter boom anyway - turbine markets were tight along with heat exchangers and having the IRGC blow up half of Qatar’s liquefaction plant is not helping here. Either chips need to use a lot less energy or its very much going to be constrained brutally from here.

South Korea: Restrict chip exports over summer due to power availability. Go wholly nativist on any product and actually seek ways to cause production interruptions in GOP aligned sectors in the US. Claim you need the power for defense and materials as well as aircon. Easy because it is true.

Australia: Australia exports a lot of LNG which is in demand and is horrifically short oil products. Australia should restrict exports to any country not providing it products, starting today most especially China. With regards to the US I think it is worth talking very frankly about basing rights if this is not wrapped up soon. How exactly has the US supported security and stability in the region in the last two years? Could we spend vastly less on submarines and develop our own green hydrogen to ammonia and fertilizer supply chain for less? The answer is yes.

Taiwan: Not dissimilar to Korea but actually vastly worse on grid stability and LNG import dependency because there is a lack of nuclear restarts. Tell Jensen no wafer starts in the summer because you need aircon and watch the US fold. Weaponize TSMC and do not be shy about it. Sell US equities for FX stabilization. That goes for everyone really. Worst case they hand your over to the Chinese navy but honestly that’s the default setting given how they are running down munition stockpiles.

Japan: Startup all the nukes to attenuate the LNG issue. Go after any and everything to hurt US tech. Drive the yen up through changes to capital regs to force sales of US equities and restrict investments in US private equity and VC.

Singapore: Something of a linear combination of the above with some US basing capacity and a lot of tech and a large financial surplus.

None of this is pretty, people will be upset but there is a sense in quotes from Vance that the US can insulate itself from its own idiocy:

This is peak Austro-Thielian isolationism - the kind of belief set you can only hold if you’ve spent your entire existence drinking mélange at Cafe Landtmann Pre-World War I, or doing deals in the valley today. It is born of a kind of systemic autism, unaware of the broader system that the surplus your enjoyment is built on - the extracted grain surplus of the Austro-Hungarian empire then, the energy supply chains and willingness to trade freely in tech services with the US today.

Policy in Asia should be to get the United States to wake up and realize that “we’re in this together”.

Edit: someone pointed out that the deeply secure supply chain “paranoid style” stuff was the whole body of work I have worked on with Employ America. That is at least partially true and it is a physically coherent position unlike “you can just do things” which is sometimes true, sometimes not and most importantly there is no git restore on the high seas.