[rjzzleep]

> The US saw putting semiconductor production in Taiwan and a way to reduce cost and challenge the Japanese, but also a way to imbed incentives into our foreign policy for protection of tenuous Taiwanese democracy and independence.

That's such a silly statement, and completely taking away the ingenuity of the Taiwanese. Taiwan(and Korea)'s semiconductor rise came specifically because the US hammered Japan's semiconductor industry in hopes of taking over their market share. It also happened in part, because the US massively attacked the RoC(Taiwan) nuclear industry, which left a lot of those engineers without a future, add on top of that a national strategy that caused two different strategies between UMC, TSMC.

This is a culmination of heavy engineering focus in Government, higher education and national support, along with a market gap created by clobbering the dominant player in the industry at the time.

What the US is doing right now does the opposite. It creates a market gap in the industry due to Taiwan being completely beholden to the US. The only reason for the rise in domestic semiconductor production and supply chain in China is specifically because the US tried to restrict China's access to these goods and in turn inadvertently created a similar situation for Taiwan that it did for Japan 1986. Leaders with cooler heads like the Mediatek CEO acknowledged as much and warned that this is what is going to happen.