Wasn't logistics the US's superpower? I'd expect someone to explain their chief that factories aren't monolitic objects that can be picked up and delivered to a new location and go right into production?
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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He still can't grasp what a tariff even is, after a decade of repeated explanations. Trying to explain to him global supply chain logistics is not a realistic goal.
The logistics accolade that you mention here is wartime logistics. That is ability to get the bullets and bandages to the places and people that need them all in a timely manner. The US is good at this because we have bases and transport logistics everywhere.
Military supply chain logistics(multiple sources for stuff, supposedly US companies...) is absolutely a consideration as well but this concept has been hallowed out over time. What used to be locally sourced materials and manufacturing by American companies is now much more dependent on overseas labor/materials. These 'American' companies might have corporate offices here and the c-levels, marketing/sales teams live here but all of the actual product is sourced/made in Mexico, Canada, China, India, Vietnam, etc. There are definitely specific industries like aerospace that still make a lot of stuff here but that is a small fraction of the larger whole.
Why does it seem tRump's answer for everything is, "Let's just steal it"?
The US invading Taiwan would be a hell of a reverse uno on the Chinese.
Oh my god.
That really would be the cherry on top of this goddamned clownworld timeline.
How to unite china in 1 step
And potentially also SK, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, etc.
It really would be like the dumbest possible thing the US could do.
He backed off Greenland. Taiwan would be an order of magnitude worse. The US could occupy any country on earth (maybe not China, without some Roman level war crimes) But it would be the end of us.
The US could occupy any country on earth (maybe not China, without some Roman level war crimes)
Hahaha, no.
The US could invade maybe two countries with a GDP around 1/4 ours, and actually persistently occupy them for maybe a few years.
Our economy is crashing extremely rapidly, we've functionally lost the ability to build new warships or aircraft in anything approaching a timely or affordable manner... and, because we have decided to tariff and threaten or militarily attack basically everyone everyone...
All of our supply chains for a great deal of our fancy schmancy military tech doesn't work any more.
You cant build complex guided missiles and computer chips and sensors that aim them or night vision goggles without access to a wide array or rare earth minerals, most of which China basically has a near total monopoly of.
We don't have the native industrial base to build anywhere near everything we would need to, to actually autarkicly sustain our own war machine.
... we can't even feed or house our population at a reasonable cost anymore, our internal infrastructure is physically falling apart, and our cybersecurity is beyond laughably comprimised.
There is no way this country would 'win' trying to occupy Taiwan.
China + Japan + SK + all of goddamned SEA + potentially even Australia vs US = we fucking lose hard.
We may be able to get away with some neo-Monroe Doctrine bullshit for a while.
And keep funding genocides in the ME, and doing random airstrikes and spec ops shennanigans in poorer countries.
Thats about it.
I meant we could occupy them like we occupied Iraq. We would win the military confrontation. The occupation would break us.
We could do it once, maybe twice or three times if the countries are small and weak, but it would break us. The rest of the world would adjust. We would all be poorer but the US would be fucked. Trump doesn't understand that we built a military too expensive to actually use. It made sense if we wanted to avoid conflict, and casualties, while still being top dog and getting our way, but actually going in and occupying territory is medieval thinking.
No, we would not win an invasion of Taiwan.
Realistically, no one would, it would probably basically result in either a nuclear exchange or some kind of mass infrastructure denial kind of attack, around many parts of the world.
But uh, we only have usually about 3 carrier groups in/around China/Taiwan at any given time.
And... our wargame scenarios only look maybe/probably winnable for fending off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan... if we have all of regional our allies to rely on.
If they are all against us, we lose badly.
China has more missiles and aircraft than we can hope to overcome without allies.
If... we were going to... do, what, a marine / paratrooper invasion... of Taiwan...
Where in the fuck would we stage that?
Okinawa?
You can't move the numbers of troops needed to do an invasion of Taiwan without a lot of people noticing... and we'd immediately become enemies of all the places we could launch the assault from, if we somehow did manage to move a few hundred thousand infantry without being noticed.
Like, it took us around a year to move everything over the countries neighboring Kuwait and Iraq, back in the Gulf War.
You can't just steam a marine invasion flotilla from Hawaii to Taiwan.
Everyone has satellites. They'd see it. When we got near a staging port, world news would be going insane with 'wtf is the US doing with this armada?'
This is why I said its like the dumbest possible thing we could do.
We are pretty much guaranteed to lose.
We could pull off something like that against smaller Central or smaller South American countries... not Taiwan.
That's true, Taiwan is armed to the teeth and our regional partners would not be partners if we actually went psychotic and tried to invade. Our supply lines are way longer than China and all the logistics in the world won't help if we don't have bases to operate from.
Xi: (surprised Pikachu face)
To be fair, this all started under the Biden administration with the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.
The US is increasingly concerned that, if China invades Taiwan, it will completely lock them out from semiconductor manufacturing and crater the US economy. Rather than flex their soft power and exercise a little diplomacy like the US used to do in decades past, they've apparently decided that the invasion of Taiwan is inevitable and the only course of action is to bolster semiconductor manufacturing at home.
Trump, of course, has all the subtlety of a torpedo and his rhetoric here has been needlessly antagonistic... but yeah, this whole thing started under Biden and now Trump is pretending it was always his idea. So really the thing he stole was the policy.
CHIPS was a response to the pandemic supply chain crunch. It was finding for local businesses to get up to speed so we weren't dependent on a single supplier on the other side of the planet. PEDOnald revoke the majority of that finding, and decided threatening taxes on US citizens to force that single supplier to also produce things here was somehow a better solution...
Biden's investments in the groundwork for future semiconductor manufacturing on US soil was intelligent planning for the future with little potential for short-term reward. A rare display of integrity for american politicians.
tRump slashed that funding, and is now demanding another country overseas, a traditional ally of the US, should simply move their manufacturing capabilities to the US because trump said so. It's idiotic.
The two things are absolutely not the same. Don't portray them in the same boat.
I don't call handing tax dollars to the richest companies in the world to set up for profit companies intelligent planning or a smart move. I call it corruption. Robbing the poor and paying the rich, to ensure the rich have enough product to continue to rob the poor as they are accustomed.
Makes perfect sense. He gets to grift, steal a Biden win, and please his big business donors
While the CHIPS act was started under Biden, it was completely different from what is being done now. It was about developing a domestic source of semiconductors as a hedge against Taiwan being invaded and was done cooperatively with the Taiwanese with mutual benefits. The Taiwanese still owned the manufacturing here, so they would still benefit if the Chinese came invaded. Biden was doing what was smart to do and also had benefits for other countries, including EU allies, since everyone knows those plants in Taiwan are rigged to blow at the first hint of invasion..
Trump has removed the benefits and added tariffs and threats. He didn't steal the policy. He inherited it and then changed it to be something evil.
So like in summary:
Biden Strategy: Bring taiwan companies to US as a redundancy and supply chain contingency.
Trump Strategy: Demand shit from Taiwan and threaten them when they fail to meet goals.
Like the trump strategy only incentivizes Taiwan to pursue a diplomatic solution with China.
The plants are rigged to blow in an invasion? That is smart. Iraq did that in the first persian gulf war, he blew the oil fields the Americans were seizing. We all expected him to do that in the Iraq war, but for whatever reasons they never did. He might as well have.
But that would be such a massive loss of investment, and probably a real disincentive to invasion, those factories are not something that can be replaced in one year. Especially with all the specialized machines, where there are only one manufacturer of.
I clearly don't know it for a fact that TSMC has done that, but the idea is a widely talked about strategy for protection. U.S. politicians even talk openly to the press about us blowing up the fabs if Taiwan doesn't.
Yeah what really struck me about the whole thing is it's not that he wants more investment in US manufacturing, it's that he seems to want them to literally take their equipment (but presumably not the people because eww immigrants) and transport the whole lot to the US.
Rapist mind.
With 40% semiconductor capacity loved to the US, the US will have no more reason to defend Taiwan, it would be suicide
Also, when trump gets his grubby hands on ASML systems you can count on it that he'll sell it to the Chinese for a few millions right after
If they moved enough to the US we could stop supporting them in case of China taking them. That is the subtext here and it's not lost on Taiwan. No amount of tarriffs would convince them to give up their flagship industry to their biggest customer and lose their importance.
It's also an empty tarriff threat. Taiwan has more semiconductors than there are people to buy them. We need the chips, they don't need to sell them here specificially. I really don't think the US has any leverage beyond supporting them against China, and the supply chain, which the netherlands and other countries have as much leverage as we do with.
The real impossibility is the work force, as far as my knowledge is knowledged from a while back.
Also if they did move 40% of production to the US, I can't personally see that meaning the US would drop taiwan and let china take it. If you think about that for 1 second longer, you think they'd surrender 60% to china? If I had the best chips, I wouldn't let anyone else get anywhere near them, lest they steal the secret recipe. (Just my thoughts on the matter).
(p.s. im not smart so maybe im wrong?)
I dont think you can explain to an importing country that tried to start a tariff war
And it would be a tactical blunder to give the US any access to their current generation of chips. Even more so while Trump is in office. Taiwan should look into ending relationships with the US and getting closer to the EU, South/Central America, and Africa.
Why even say 'we cannot move production to the USA'?
Why not just say 'Are you actual crazy? Fuck right off, don't bother me'
I just wanna say. The main issue has always been - American capitalists went to China for manufacturing and shipped all the know how and technologies there.
Because they wanted profits over the country.
This is the result.
Blame capitalist owners
Everyone seems to have thought that is was a great idea to let pretty much every core manufacturing competency die in the US over the last 30 years or so. How's that working out for us now?
The blame is at least as old as Reagan, really accelerated with Clinton (NAFTA, China entering the WTO) and only got worse from there.
As much as I hate to admit it, tariffs are the answer. I also think that it's important to understand that Trump's tariffs exist only for extortion and bribes that benefit him personally. Tariffs can be used to encourage domestic production of goods and services that are clearly not something that we want to depend on other countries for merely for the sake of enriching the same circle of already rich assholes in perpetuity. Rich assholes would just have to keep resorting to pumping up immigration to suppress wages for these domestic goods, like they have always done for hundreds of years at this point.
Tariffs are not the answer, they are part of a reasonable answer. By themselves they're not going to being back the tech manufacturing industry. You also need incentives on multiple levels, government funding into relevant education, etc.
You also need time. All the money in the world won't cause a world-class industry to spring up overnight; you need sustained investment over years, if not decades.
We've already been providing direct subsidies and tax subsidies for all of these companies for decades. Nothing comes from it and as a member of the tax bracket that actually pays taxes I am not willing to keep doing it. If we need to nationalize truly mission critical companies I would rather just do that instead of continuing to privatize profits and socialize costs.
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Except we can't just insource production of cutting edge computer chips. We literally don't have enough people to build smart phones. Those require a global supply chain to be remotely affordable. Having a global economy gives us access to technology we would simply have to go without if we try to do everything ourselves.
Tariffs are not going to encourage local producers. They're just going to make the products more expensive for the consumers. If you want to encourage the industries to be built here, then subsudize their development.
We should have tarriffs on goods to make up for labor and environmental costs that are cheaper in those other countries, to offset the race to the bottom.
That was a union issue, the republican nominee just co-opted it, because the democrats became more conservative than Bush Senior let alone Nixon, while the rest of the republicans are like Henry Ford, veritable nazis.
He was never going to do it well, he's too corrupt and greedy and mean spirited, it was always going to be more of a shake down racket and a cudgel to use against our allies like Canada and Europe that do not undercut us on labor and the environment and therefore should not be tarriffed at all.
We shouldn't be rejecting everything about something because it was co-opted by the president, like rejecting pressuring drug companies to offer us good deals because the president has some half baked website for that purpose. Just as we shouldn't support everything about something they attack unfairly. Ie a government agency, any of them, attacked for not being bad enough, say the fda, then we support everything about them, as if they aren't run by drug companies and failing in their statutory duties.
Guess we'll just fall behind
I guarantee if they really wanted to, they could pack up a fab and they could move the entire building on a boat.
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