THE LONG VIEW

It happened before in the silicon shadows of the Cold War: when the West barred transistor exports to the USSR, Moscow responded not with surrender, but with a crash program that birthed the Elektronika series and laid the groundwork for a self-contained computing industry—one that, while lagging, proved resilient enough to sustain military and space ambitions. Fast forward to today, and Beijing watches Huawei unveil AI chips forged in the fire of American denial. The pattern is unmistakable—every embargo carries within it the seeds of its own obsolescence. The U.S. export controls of 2022, like the CoCom lists of 1980, are not closing doors but redirecting rivers of innovation. China’s semiconductor foundries may still trail TSMC, but they are no longer following—they are charting. And as history whispers, the greatest risk to hegemony is not competition, but the illusion that control can be maintained by restriction alone. As with Japan’s rise in automotive engineering after U.S. trade barriers in the 1970s, the pressure is becoming propulsion [Citation: Lindsey, R. (1986). 'The U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Trade Conflict,' Foreign Affairs; Bown, C. P. (2023). 'US-China AI Chip War: WTO Challenges Loom,' PIIE Working Paper].