US and the west place a lot of strategic importance in Taiwan so they may come to the defense, but it is unlikely to be defendable for long.
We are seemingly moving towards another Cold War: China and Russia vs US and NATO.
If Taiwan doesn't already have plans to destroy them in case of an invasion I'm sure they are the target of some missiles from outside the country.
The next step if China were to move on Taiwan, other than getting all the data and IP from TSMC's internal networks, would be to spin up a US division and assign that IP to that new corporation. And then the US should try to get as many of TSMC's employees to the US that they can.
Operation Paperclip TSMC.
Sure an important part. But lets not forget that there is a lot of knowledge in TSMC too. And China is trying to slowly buy their engineers.
Intel and AMD (now Global Foundries) both had access to same Dutch company's product and they didn't or barley managed to keep up.
The western alliance has not only rebuffed Russia, it has expanded eastwards against promises made and thus provoked the current situation in Ukraine.
What would the US do if the soviets were to expand into Mexiko? Or... Cuba? We know how that went. If the mission of NATO was to secure peace, why would they reject Russia? It makes no sense from that perspective.
The answer is that there are other reasons NATO exists and what it is being used for.
Every country is free to join NATO if they want, Russia has no say in it. And the reason why most Russia neighbors want to is because Russia is a bully, and NATO can protect them from being bullied.
> What would the US do if the soviets were to expand into Mexiko? Or... Cuba? We know how that went.
Well, for one the US did not attack Cuba... Also, Soviet Union was aggressor side for the whole duration of Cold War, that move was just prelude to further aggression against the West.
> If the mission of NATO was to secure peace, why would they reject Russia
Because the best way to secure peace is to keep Russia at bay.
> Russia as a white-majority christian country shares many values and culture with the others.
LOL, no. Russia does not share western values, such as democracy, freedom of speech or other human rights. They do not belong in Europe, they belong in Asia.
Instead they’ve had a string of bad actors taking bad actions and just going back to a dictatorship doing all the same things as the USSR.
Why allow them to join and give them all our strategic information just for them to use it against us?
"If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”
-- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
