George Hahn

defense commitment, even though we dropped our recognition of Taiwan in 1979 in order to normalize relations with China.

Two decades later, there's a crack in the Silicon Shield.

The single biggest threat to the world economy, the single biggest point of single failure, is that 97% of the high-end chips are made in Taiwan, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant said in January at Davos.

If that island were blockaded or that capacity were destroyed, it would be an economic apocalypse.

Another way of putting that, if push comes to shove, the U.S.

and the rest of the world would likely choose stability over Taiwan's sovereignty.

Actually, we might not have a choice, considering how drones have disrupted warfare.

China produced 2.5 times the number of drones we produced in 2025, but as Noah Smith observed this week, drones use lithium-ion batteries and rare-earth electric motors, both of which are almost entirely manufactured in China.

Currently, China controls 60% to 70% of rare earth mining and 90% of the global processing capacity.

As Deng Xiaoping famously said in 1992, the Middle East has oil.

China has rare earths.

Adding chipmaking to its economic arsenal would give China unilateral power to tax the global economy, as well as leverage over other nations that far exceeds the $1 trillion it deployed to fund infrastructure projects around the world via its Belt and Road Initiative.

In his 2017 book, Destined for War, former U.S.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison wrote, When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should sound, danger ahead.

As a rapidly ascending China challenges America's accustomed predominance, these two nations risk falling into a deadly trap first identified by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.

At their summit, Xi asked Trump whether the two nations could avoid the Thucydides trap and forge a new paradigm for major power relations.

Trump registered the insult, the implication of U.S.

decline, but blamed Biden and insisted that the U.S.

is the hottest nation anywhere in the world.

Future historians will likely have trouble gauging Xi's skill.