The Taiwan Opening
More than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips are made in Taiwan.¹
That sentence should stop any government that reads it. It should stop the U.S. It should stop Canada.
The chips that run phones, hospitals, vehicles, data centers, communications networks, artificial intelligence systems, and advanced weapons depend on manufacturing capacity concentrated on an island China claims as its own. Taiwan sits about 100 miles from the Chinese mainland. The world has built its digital nervous system around a place Beijing says is not a foreign country.
This is what modern vulnerability often looks like: quiet, efficient, profitable, and invisible until it breaks.
Morris Chang helped build this world. In 1987, after decades in the American semiconductor industry, he returned to Taiwan with an idea that sounded almost dull: let some companies design chips and let another company make them. TSMC became the world’s first dedicated semiconductor foundry. Apple could design. Nvidia could design. AMD and Qualcomm could design. TSMC would make.²
The model helped create the modern digital economy. It also concentrated the hardest part of that economy in one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Taiwan was not the only country that proved specialization could create power. Philips, the Dutch electronics company, became an early TSMC partner when others hesitated. In the Netherlands, Philips and ASM International also helped create ASML, which now holds one of the most powerful positions in the semiconductor world. Its extreme ultraviolet lithography machines are essential to making the most advanced chips.³
The Dutch lesson matters. A country does not have to own the whole semiconductor chain to become indispensable. It has to master one hard part.
That should be Canada’s opening.
For decades, Canada could live inside a bargain it did not manage. Taiwan made the chips. China threatened Taiwan. The United States kept the balance from breaking. Canada, like many countries, could assume American power and Asian manufacturing would keep the digital world running.
That bargain is weaker now. President Trump has described Taiwan arms sales as a “negotiating chip” in dealings with China.⁴ The phrase matters because it places Taiwan’s security inside the vocabulary of a transaction. The American industrial answer has also become harder to read. President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act committed tens of billions of dollars to rebuilding U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and research. The Trump administration has since reopened parts of those agreements, slowing some payments and turning what had looked like industrial policy into another negotiation.⁵
Canada does not need to declare the United States unreliable to see the risk.