• darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    7 hours ago

    I don’t get why people think this. They’ll just ban RISCV or at least any productions of it from outside western aligned foundries. If national security claims aren’t sufficient they’ll claim that all Chinese foundries are staffed by child slaves and beaten monkeys and no one else and slap bans on their use anywhere in the west. What this all accomplishes is creating a bifurcated tech world.

    As these lay out you’ll have three types of countries:

    1. Imperial core loyal, can only use and allowed to use western tech, patents, chips, etc, restricted from sales to 2, 3
    2. Chinese/Russian core and their periphery of most loyal customers who choose to endure blistering western blockade on import of any western tech and other coercive measures against them and thus are able to use whether they like it or not only Chinese/Russian chips, brands, tech.
    3. Non-aligned just like the first cold war, nations that the US allows some sales to but puts restrictions on them, prevents re-export to countries under 2, and they can’t get the very best stuff western because they haven’t agreed to exclude Chinese/Russian tech and adopt western “clean network”

    It’s all part of a larger coercive paradigm to build a tall fence around the western controlled yard and drag as many countries as they can to within that, isolate China and Russia and crank up the heat on trade war, embargo basic materials, cut off exchange of scientific knowledge and figure they come out on top. As it stands the US navy and NATO navy are much stronger than Russia and China’s combined fleets, the Chinese in particular have entirely structured themselves around near defense of their coastal waters with very limited long-range capabilities which means the US can interdict off the coast of say Africa or South America to enforce blockades, to do piracy and hampers and harass Chinese and Russian development. Eventually the Russians and Chinese will have to respond but they’re very hesitant to react and keep on flinching which is why the west is confident in continuing this strategy and in the near-term it certainly looks like it will bring the west benefits in terms of delaying the decline of their hegemony somewhat and in fact increasing the level of coercion. They believe the best time to strike is now while they still have dollar hegemony, while they still have SWIFT, while they still have the upper hand in many areas and they’re not wrong. The only reason they aren’t moving faster on this is they are beholden to not totally wrecking their own capitalist/corporate interests and need to give companies time to wind down and change supply chains which takes years. The west let’s not forget has a stronger starting position and hand thanks to centuries of colonialism and plunder, thanks to a century of successfully waged cold war which they won, thanks to extensive experience and prep-work for stay-behind, for destabilization, for funding militants, for control of cyber-space from their commanding heights of control of the major internet companies which are all western based and control discourse and online life for much of the globe. (Also why they want to ban tiktok, they will not accept any cracks in their total dominance of the internet and the web)

    The US may not succeed in pulling as many countries into their orbit and their tall fence small yard as they wish, then again they may. They ousted Assad after a decade, they’ve had their proxy crush Iranian influence in the middle east, they have many more color revolutions, islamist proxies, etc to throw in the fire. Nothing is certain other than that trade barriers are going up and the ability of those in the west to access tech not completely compromised by the NSA/eyes is decreasing rapidly as the boot comes down, as the progressive veneer drops, as companies drop even the pretense of caring about trans people, about LGBTQ rights, about racial justice, etc. They need to keep a lid on their own populations as well as maintain hegemony and turn up the pressure to isolate, cook, and destroy China/Russia or at least build their own independent kingdom and some outlying regions they subject to neo-colonialism to sustain capitalism in a different form.

    • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 hours ago

      Non-aligned just like the first cold war, nations that the US allows some sales to but puts restrictions on them, prevents re-export to countries under 2, and they can’t get the very best stuff western because they haven’t agreed to exclude Chinese/Russian tech and adopt western “clean network”

      I’m going to be a GPU/CPU smuggler