When the U.S. updated its export controls on semiconductors at the end of October, the Bureau of Industry and Security document contained the phrase “national security” 11 times. Helpfully, it also contained a definition of U.S. national security in relation to semiconductors, provided by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. “These controls maintain our clear focus on military applications and confront the threats to our national security posed by the [People’s Republic of China] Government’s military-civil fusion strategy,” she said. This was then followed by a section specifically outlining the aim of limiting China’s “Advanced AI capabilities … that can be used to improve the speed and accuracy of military decision making, planning and logistics.”
This matches the initial justification for sanctions on China given in October 2022 and appears relatively clearcut. The U.S. says it is concerned civilian technological innovation within China will be coordinated with military goals of a government that doesn’t share its values and whose military and security strategy is regarded as America’s “pacing challenge.” Thus, it wants to cut off access to technology and resulting financing to slow its military progress.
And yet, if you spliced open the overall policy approach to semiconductors and looked at all of the official justifications for it, the cross-section would look more like a collage than a single image.
In the 2019 sanctions on Huawei, which were a precursor to the broader semiconductor sanctions to come, it was the possibility of cyber espionage that was flagged as a justification, though the actual reason Huawei was placed on the trade blacklist was because it had been illegally dealing with Iran. This has continued to be a concern echoed elsewhere in reports about the possibility of “hardware backdoors” in chips that could ultimately undermine U.S. military technology.
Moving forward to the Biden administration, there has been a split emphasis between limiting Chinese military capabilities and protecting U.S. ones. This has arisen because sanctions are seen as complementary to a policy of protecting U.S. access to supply chains by “on-shoring” or “friend-shoring” production. The argument here is that it is unwise for the U.S. to rely on and help fund semiconductors and semiconductor materials being made in China, or in Taiwan, because of the risk of supply chain shocks. This can refer to either natural disasters or conflict, where chips could be used as a bargaining … chip.
Both these justifications still fit within a narrow definition of national security as military advantage. However, the focus on protecting U.S. access to supply chains is an important addition because that is often justified with reference to protecting national infrastructure, which relies on the same supply chains, not just military technology. This segue then gives way to a further segue into justifications that sit within a far broader definition of national security.
In a February speech, for instance, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Raimondo listed “preserv[ing] our global economic competitiveness” alongside “protect[ing] our national security” as justification for the current overall approach to semiconductors. She defined the benefit of said economic competitiveness as adding “well-paying jobs” in the U.S. This, not for the first time, explicitly moved beyond the concept of defending against supply chain vulnerabilities ahead of potential crises and into the territory of proactive industrial policy.
And the rhetorical shift did not end there. Pointedly, Raimondo echoed language from President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address in talking about semiconductors as a unifying national project, equivalent to going to the moon. This was a reference to a key victory in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and a nod to the main point of the speech. Titled “The CHIPS Act and a Long-term Vision for America’s Technological Leadership,” Raimondo’s speech framed the economic advantages of moving more semiconductor production to the U.S. as a part of a plan to build “resilient semiconductor industry that protects America’s technological leadership for the coming decades.”
In other words, to Raimondo, control of semiconductors means global technological leadership, or as she later added, being a “technological superpower.” That phrasing is ambiguous — it could refer to attaining economic or military power — but it expresses an intention to use semiconductors to exert a broad influence on world affairs.
If we follow all of these threads, then, official justifications for the U.S.’s current semiconductor approach can take us all the way from a narrower conception of national security as maintaining military advantage over China, to a broader conception of national security that involves protecting or even expanding the U.S. economy, and then on to attaining “global leadership.” Which has primacy?
The answer is that there is no conflict here. For two reasons.
Firstly, the U.S. view of national security has for decades been quite openly interchangeable with acquiring various forms of supremacy. As Perry Anderson’s book “American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers” describes: “Since the Second World War, the ideology of American foreign policy has always been primarily Wilsonian in register — ‘making the world safe for democracy’ segueing into a ‘collective security’ that would in due course become the outer buckler of ‘national security.’ In substance, its reality has been unswervingly Hamiltonian — the pursuit of American supremacy, in a world made safe for capital.”
The last part of that definition may well be contested by many, who say that it is U.S. values that are being protected, but the key point is that the U.S. views supremacy (or “leadership”) as security.
That leaves only the question of whether security/supremacy is gained through economic or military means. And admittedly, here, different people believe the emphasis lies in different places. But the two sides can be brought together.
Seemingly leaning toward the importance of economic power, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan wrote in a Foreign Policy op-ed before taking office that “While military power will still matter, the emerging great power competition between the United States and China will ultimately turn on how effectively each country stewards its national economy and shapes the global economy.” Meanwhile, in the speech described above, Commerce Secretary Raimondo echoed similar sentiment, specifically regarding semiconductors: “As global competition becomes increasingly about technology and chips, rather than just tanks and missiles, it’s the countries who invest in research, innovation and their workforces that will lead in the 21st century,” she said.
On the other hand, many observers of U.S. policy on semiconductors, such as “Chips Wars” author Chris Miller, note that “Export controls [on semiconductors] remain fairly narrow.” Speaking at a Nikkei Asia forum last week, Miller said the fact that sanctions still focus on the most advanced chips underscores the idea that “when the U.S. government thinks about chips it thinks about AI” — which has clear military applications, as well as commercial ones.
Miller said this view holds even if, as has been mooted, sanctions are extended to less advanced or “lagging edge” chips. “I think there are security ramifications in the sense that even a lot of ‘lagging edge’ semiconductors require very specific knowledge,” he told Domino Theory via email, offering the example of “chips that are used for sensors and communications, which are broadly used in civilian applications but also military applications.”
However, ultimately, there is not really a binary choice here either. Because even if military power leads, relative economic power over China remains intimately tied up with it insofar as the latter directly facilitates the former: “I think there are security ramifications that stem from growth in [the] Chinese chip ecosystem and any decline in the Western ecosystem caused by Chinese subsidization,” Miller pointed out.
Thus, what starts out looking like a collage of different justifications ends up looking like a pretty coherent whole. You can suggest that there is more emphasis on the economy than the U.S. official statements on sanctions maintain, but it ends up as a moot point in semiconductor terms, because economic and military aims are so closely entangled. Creating well-paid jobs in U.S. fabs simultaneously protects supply chains and helps ensure military advantage over China. This leads to national security and technological supremacy, which exist on a continuum. There are no real divides.
Photo: CFOTO/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
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