> The US saw putting semiconductor production in Taiwan and a way to reduce cost and challenge the Japanese, but also a way to imbed incentives into our foreign policy for protection of tenuous Taiwanese democracy and independence.

That's such a silly statement, and completely taking away the ingenuity of the Taiwanese. Taiwan(and Korea)'s semiconductor rise came specifically because the US hammered Japan's semiconductor industry in hopes of taking over their market share. It also happened in part, because the US massively attacked the RoC(Taiwan) nuclear industry, which left a lot of those engineers without a future, add on top of that a national strategy that caused two different strategies between UMC, TSMC.

This is a culmination of heavy engineering focus in Government, higher education and national support, along with a market gap created by clobbering the dominant player in the industry at the time.

What the US is doing right now does the opposite. It creates a market gap in the industry due to Taiwan being completely beholden to the US. The only reason for the rise in domestic semiconductor production and supply chain in China is specifically because the US tried to restrict China's access to these goods and in turn inadvertently created a similar situation for Taiwan that it did for Japan 1986. Leaders with cooler heads like the Mediatek CEO acknowledged as much and warned that this is what is going to happen.

> The US saw putting semiconductor production in Taiwan and a way to reduce cost and challenge the Japanese

Considering AMD, Nvidia, Supermicro and many others are all headed by Taiwanese CEOs etc I think this has more of an influence than otherwise. The community and ecosystem was built way before anyone saw it as a thing.

Japan had no chance with the conglomerates like Fujitsu still stuck in their ways.

> Why is this situation with Taiwan so difficult to unwind? In the West there is a fantasy that if war breaks out, we will just load all the Taiwanese onto a starship and bring them over to the US where they will happily resume their work in OUR fabs. But they don’t want that. They want their home and ideals to be defended, and they’re willing to do the work… from their soil.

Who is saying or even implying this? I've never heard this anywhere. Otherwise there wouldn't be all these folks gaming out war scenarios because the US would never need to get involved.

Oh I fully agree the situation is precarious. It's just fun seeing people independently start waking up to that fact.

I mean, you could probably see the latter being a cause of the former (if people generally realized the world was no longer that of the 1990s maybe they would on the margin encourage even more proactive/effective policy).