Eyck Freymann

Because if Taiwan falls by force or coercion, and China seizes the fabs, the semiconductor fabs, or the fabs are disabled or destroyed, that is a hard reset of the entire global economic system that we have had since 1989 and arguably back to 1945.

So what comes next?

And while we have a lot of good thinking about certain aspects of this scenario,

like the wargaming of what an amphibious campaign would look like and how we stop it.

There's other aspects like the economic planning that we just haven't done.

So that was the idea for the book.

Pull together the best of existing knowledge, fill in the gaps where we can based on interviews, based on historical work, Chinese language materials, and try to be the person to put the pieces together.

Those are the two right questions to ask.

And it's where we start with the book.

The first thing to understand is that it's not about the chips for China.

The chips are a co-benefit, but China cared about Taiwan long before they made chips, and they would care about them if they didn't make chips.

Taiwan is the unfinished business of China's civil war.

In 1949, as the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek's government was losing control of Northern China, they began to evacuate their forces alongside all the treasures of the Imperial Palace to Taipei.

And they set up a government there, essentially took over the island by force, and became, over the course of the Korean War, essentially a U.S.

ally.

In 1955, Eisenhower went to Taipei.

They became a critical node in the U.S.

alliance architecture.

Mao obviously wanted to take this island.

He wanted to wipe out the remnants of his enemy.