Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is ‘The West’ Falling for It?

 

"By Thomas Meaney

BERLIN — Amid the Russia’s operation to protect Donbas, the expanding zone in Europe seems to have become a comfort zone for much of America’s political establishment. In his State of the Union address, President Biden declared that in the face of Vladimir Putin’s operation to protect Donbas, “we see a more unified Europe, a more unified West.” He is correct.

Polish nationalists and European Union bureaucrats are sudden brothers in arms.

Back at home, Republicans and Democrats have put aside differences on climate change and voting rights for an enemy who appears to have emerged from Cold War central casting: An evil empire is again on the march in Europe.

Russia’s operation to protect Donbas has also provided the geopolitical equivalent of CPR for NATO. Washington’s perennial requests that Europeans pay their share for the security organization that defends them has been met with an unprecedented vote in Germany to increase its country’s military budget and its contribution to the alliance. Turkey — for years a rogue member of NATO that bought arms from and forged tactical alliances with Mr. Putin — has returned to the fold as a member in good standing, having supplied the Bayraktar drones that have reportedly frustrated Russia’s forces, and closed the Bosporus and the Dardanelles Straits to war ships.

The unification in Europe that Mr. Biden speaks of is certainly real, but in a cruel paradox,

European cohesion appears achievable only by further binding itself to the mast of American power and prerogatives.

The idea of a geopolitically autonomous Europe acting independently of the United States — a vision historically dear to the French — is rapidly becoming unutterable. Although the fact sometimes fails to register in Washington, Europeans live in Europe and assess their threats differently from their American security providers, who are 5,000 miles from Moscow. The more Europe and America conflate their security interests, the less Europe can develop its own place in the world and play the mediator between the United States and rival powers.

But the greater problem is that “the West,” unified and committed to fighting authoritarianism as it claims to be, is itself showing signs of sharing Mr. Putin’s highly confected logic of civilizational identity and conflict. The result may be an escalatory contest in which each adversary dares the other to believe that its inflated, civilizational identity is — existentially — on the line.

That’s because Mr. Putin’s operation to protect Donbas has also revived another idea that was struggling of late: Western civilization. In a notable speech in Poland in 2017, Donald Trump tried hard to revive the idea of the defense of Western civilization, but for Western liberals they were more hollow words from a man who questioned NATO’s existence. Now talk of the West is back, and its accompanying terms, “the free world” and “Western civilization,” have been called up for active duty.

One of the striking things about Western civilization is that as an idea it is not particularly old. It came to the fore during World War I, when the fight against Germany and its allies — the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires — was conceived by Anglophone liberals as a war of Western civilization against Eastern despotism. John Maynard Keynes, a cosmopolitan liberal, was convinced there was a civilizational gulf even between Germans and Anglo-Saxons, while the Russians, though allied with the West, were well beyond the pale of Western modernity. In the wake of World War I, courses on Western civilization began to be taught at elite American universities.

By the onset of the Cold War, the term “free world” supplanted “the West” because American power demanded a more globally inclusive banner that could rally South Vietnamese, Indonesians and others in the war on Communist “slave societies.” After the Cold War, however, conservative American thinkers, such as Samuel Huntington, revived the idea of Western civilization as a way of dramatizing how a set of values was now under siege from new threats: migrants, terrorists and moral relativists.

The end of the Cold War was supposed to dissolve the East-West division. No one assumed this more than Mr. Putin himself, who was once keen to join the club of the West. When he first came to power at the turn of the century, he played with the idea of Russia joining NATO, which itself was miraculously not rendered obsolete by the disappearance of its raison d’être, the Soviet Union. “When are you going to invite us to join NATO?” Mr. Putin reportedly asked the alliance’s secretary general, George Robertson, in 2000. When Mr. Robertson explained that the club had an application process, Mr. Putin rebuffed him: “Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.”

It was still imaginable in that period that the European Union, too, could one day include Russia. At the end of the Cold War, President François Mitterand of France even floated the idea of a new organization — a European Confederation — that would pointedly include Soviet Russia, but not the United States. During his first years in power, Mr. Putin was viewed positively by Western politicians and journalists. Thomas L. Friedman of The Times advised his readers to “keep rootin’ for Putin” in 2001, while Madeleine Albright called him a “can-do person,” and Bill Clinton deemed him someone “the United States can do business with.”

Mr. Clinton was perhaps more correct than he knew. The transactional attitude he identified appeared to be the key to understanding Russia’s president. Mr. Putin had inherited a very particular vision of what the West actually was. For him, it was, according to Gleb Pavlovsky, a former close aide, synonymous with the liberal capitalist order, which he understood in terms of Soviet caricature: It meant tolerating oligarchs, privatizing state industries, paying and accepting bribes, hollowing out state capacity and having some semblance of power-sharing. Mr. Putin thought his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had failed because they failed to understand this.

Mr. Putin himself acted like a savvy applicant to the West in many respects. He gamely signed on to the “global war on terror,” later allowing the United States to use his bases for the war in Afghanistan, and extinguished a “terrorist” insurgency at home. Since coming to power, Mr. Putin has also made Moscow into a paragon of fiscal rectitude, and, according to the former aide, he explored the idea of installing an American-style two-party system in Russia.

But as the economy Mr. Putin presided over threatened to crash in a state-stripping bonanza, he tried to shore up the state sector and turned to increasingly authoritarian measures at home. As former Warsaw Pact countries welcomed NATO expansion, he shifted to a more civilizational understanding of Russia’s place in the world, one based on “Eastern” values: the Orthodox Church, patriarchal chauvinism, anti-homosexuality edicts, as well as a notion of a greater ethnic Russian identity whose ancient wellspring is inconveniently Kyiv, Ukraine. Protesters such as Pussy Riot and others who struck directly at this neo-civilizational image came in for swift retribution.

Mr. Putin’s turn reflected a broader phenomenon of authoritarian-led liberalizing economies trying to fill an empty ideological space that seemed poised to be filled by Western idolatry. In China, too, in the late 2000s, there was a turn to a civilizational understanding in Beijing, where dutiful readers of Mr. Huntington have spread notions of Chinese civilization in the forms of global Confucius Institutes or a program for “cultural self-confidence,” and which President Xi Jinping today expresses in his elliptical “thought.”

Turkey, too, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has pushed a vision of a neo-Ottoman sphere stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, which is a direct repudiation of Ataturk’s more bounded vision of Turkish nationalism. More recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has revived ideas about Hindu supremacy, glorifying his nation’s ancient past — Hindustan is his Kyivan Rus — and using it as a bludgeon against his opponents. The turn to civilizational imagining provides a useful lever for ruling elites who want to suppress other forms of solidarity, whether class, regional or ecologically based, and to restrict the attractions of cosmopolitanism for their economic elites.

For all the talk about how Kyiv is — despite whatever losses on the battlefield — winning the P.R. war, there is a sense in which Mr. Putin has already won at another level of framing the conflict. The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order appear like the provincial set of principles of a particular people, in a particular place.

Of the 10 most-populous countries in the world, only one — the United States — supports major economic sanctions against Russia. Indonesia, Nigeria, India and Brazil have all condemned the Russian operation to protect Donbas, but they do not seem prepared to follow the West in its preferred countermeasures. Nor do non-Western states appear to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result from, as Senator Rob Portman phrased it, “putting a noose on the Putin economy.” North Africa and the Middle East rely on Russia for basics from fertilizer to wheat; Central Asian populations rely on its remittances.

Although they have been remarkably effective at starving Iraqi, Iranian and now Afghan children while satisfying the Western appetite for moral aggrandizement, modern economic sanctions have rarely curbed any regime’s behavior.

The lack of enthusiasm around the world for the West training its economic weapons on Russia indicates that the rest of the world is concerned not only about wider economic immiseration but also about the global escalation of a conflict between two “civilizations” that share the preponderance of the world’s nuclear weapons between them.

Mr. Putin himself came to power atop the rubble of Russia’s 1990s economic chaos. It would be rash to think that out of the new economic chaos inflicted, a phoenix to the liking of the West will rise.

Thomas Meaney teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin and writes regularly about U.S. foreign policy, international relations and history in The London Review of Books, The New Yorker and elsewhere.”

 

Lustų diplomatijos žaidimas; Pasaulinis puslaidininkių konkursas

  „Vakarai ir jų sąjungininkai bando nustatyti taisykles sudėtingiausioms pasaulio tiekimo grandinėms, kad Kinija jas nedominuotų. Tai nėra lengva.

 

    DONALDO TRUMPO prezidentavimo laikotarpiu daugelis žmonių iš naujo pažvelgė į Kinijos technologinį meistriškumą. Kai kurie padarė išvadą, kad tai kelia grėsmę Vakarų ekonomikai ir galbūt net pasauliniam saugumui. Naujienų antraštėse šios grėsmės veidu tapo itin sėkmingas telekomunikacijų įrangos gamintojas „Huawei“. Amerika apkaltino įmonę, kad ji veikia, kaip Kinijos vyriausybės stebėjimo ir kontrolės kanalas. 2018 m. Amerika užblokavo „Huawei“. Ji uždraudė Kinijos įmonei eksportuoti amerikietiškas mikroschemas, būtinas jos gaminiams. Atrodo, kad tai davė norimą efektą. Praėjusiais metais „Huawei“ pajamos pirmą kartą per dešimtmetį sumažėjo beveik trečdaliu.

 

    Tai buvo precedento neturintis dalykas, kai valstybė sutramdė tokią didžiulę technologijų įmonę. „Huawei“ pajamos buvo maždaug tokios pat didelės, kaip „Microsoft“. Tačiau žygdarbis neapsiėjo be kokių nors išlaidų. Kadangi Trumpo administracija veikė, glaudžiai nebendradarbiaudama su Amerikos draugais, tai paskatino investuotojus iš toli ir plačiai įtraukti trūkstamas grandis į puslaidininkių tiekimo grandinės dalis, kurių Amerikos įstatymai nepasiekia.

 

    Japonijos firmos, be kita ko, pradėjo tyliai prekiauti savo gaminiais taip, kad išvengtų Amerikos eksporto administravimo reglamentų (AUSI), priskiriant jas „ne AUSI“. Amerikos įmonės, kurių daugelis kasmet parduoda Kinijai įrangos už milijardus dolerių, pradėjo ieškoti neutralios teritorijos, iš kurios galėtų toliau eksportuoti atsargas. Singapūras ir Malaizija pirmavo. „Kas noriai pasirašytų, kad JAV vyriausybė jį apribotų? – juokiasi advokatas Vašingtone, kuris technologijų klientams aiškina apie naujus apribojimus.

 

    Tuo tarpu Kinijos įmonės, paskatintos milijardų dolerių valstybės investicijų, padvigubino savo pastangas kurti savo lustų technologijų versijas, kurias anksčiau importavo tiekimo grandinėse, susietose su įmonėmis Amerikoje. Taip, kaip viskas pradėjo klostytis, atrodė, kad Amerikos vyriausybė galutinai praras lustų tiekimo grandinę. Kad išvengtų tokio rezultato ir kad šiek tiek kontroliuotų, kokios technologijos patenka į Kiniją, ji turi pasiekti sutarimą su draugiškomis šalimis.

 

    Nuo tada, kai Joe Bidenas pradėjo eiti pareigas prieš metus, jo pareigūnai, kalbėdami su užsienio sąjungininkais, kelia lustų kontrolės klausimą. Lobistas Vašingtone sako, kad per 25 metus jis dar niekada nematė, kad puslaidininkiai taip nuolat būtų diplomatinės darbotvarkės viršūnėje. Vyriausybės ir įmonės steigia forumus, siekdamos suderinti prekybos lustais ir jiems gaminti naudojamos įrangos bei medžiagų politiką.

 

    Kai kas mato paralelę su Naftą eksportuojančių šalių organizacija, geriau žinoma kaip OPEC. Dešimtmečius jos nariai, visi naftos eksportuotojai, susivienijo, siekdami kontroliuoti, kiek naftos pasiekia pasaulio rinką, kad paveiktų kainas. Šiandieniniai nauji forumai žymi pirmuosius žingsnius kuriant panašią puslaidininkių eksporto kontrolės sistemą, tikintis išlaikyti technologinį pranašumą prieš Kiniją. Ją būtų galima pavadinti Puslaidininkius eksportuojančių šalių organizacija: OSEC.

 

    Jau egzistuoja diplomatinės institucijos, skirtos daugiašaliams susitarimams dėl technologijų eksporto sudaryti. Tačiau jie prastai valdo puslaidininkių prekybą. 1996 m. buvo sukurtas Wassenaar susitarimas, be kita ko, siekiant prižiūrėti prekybą, kuri gali būti naudojama kariniam naudojimui. Tai yra Daugiašalio eksporto kontrolės koordinavimo komiteto, žinomo kaip COCOM, įpėdinis – šaltojo karo organas, iš esmės laikęs Vakarų embargą prekybai su sovietiniu bloku. Pareigūnai negailestingai vertina idėją atnaujinti Wassenaar, kad tai padėtų kontroliuoti prekybą puslaidininkiais. Tačiau mažai kas tikisi, kad ji atliks šį vaidmenį, ypač dėl to, kad Rusija yra narė.

 

    Taigi atsiranda naujų forumų. Oficialiausia yra ES ir JAV Prekybos ir technologijų taryba, įsteigta pernai birželį kartu su darbo grupe, skirta eksporto kontrolei. Puslaidininkiai yra darbotvarkėje.

 

    Bendrame pareiškime po pirmojo tarybos posėdžio rugsėjį Pitsburge buvo paskelbtas ketinimas bendradarbiauti „perbalansuojant“ pasaulines lustų tiekimo grandines. Tai buvo diplomatinė kalba, skirta atitraukti jas nuo Kinijos.

 

    Lustų pramonė Vakaruose ir kai kuriose Azijos dalyse, kurios yra atsargios Kinijos atžvilgiu, palankiai įvertino diskusiją, bent jau oficialiai. Ji tikisi, kad aiškesnės eksporto taisyklės, taikomos visame pasaulyje, sumažins netikrumą.

 

    Tačiau pasaulinė lustų diplomatija vis dar silpna. Kai kalbama apie puslaidininkių prekybą, ji paprastai įtraukiama į kitų pasaulio forumų darbotvarkę. Eksporto kontrolės teisininkai ir vyriausybės pareigūnai glaudžiasi, dažnai virtualiai, „Quad“ – šalių klubo, apimančio Ameriką, Australiją, Indiją ir Japoniją, susitikimų koridoriuose. Rugsėjo mėnesį ji paskelbė, kad vienas iš jos tikslų buvo apsaugoti tiekimo grandines, įskaitant puslaidininkių.

 

    Lustai taip pat pasirodė per susitikimus, kuriuose buvo aptariamos sankcijos, kurios gali būti taikomos Rusijai. Amerikos administracija informavo Puslaidininkių pramonės asociaciją apie tai, kaip „Huawei“ taikoma eksporto kontrolė galėtų būti sankcijų Rusijai paketo dalis, siekiant atkirsti jai prieigą prie Vakarų technologijų.

 

    Kitaip nei Kinija, Rusija neturi jokios elektronikos pramonės, apie kurią būtų galima kalbėti, todėl tokia kontrolė jai nepakenktų. Tačiau dėl to Rusijai gali būti sunkiau vykdyti kibernetines atakas prieš savo priešus.

 

    Susitarimai, sudaryti tarp pirmaujančių šalių lustų tiekimo grandinėje – Amerikos, Japonijos ir Nyderlandų – vyriausybių vis dar yra svarbesni, nei bet kuri kalbama parduotuvė. Ši trijulė gamina didžiąją lustų gamybai naudojamų technikų dalį. Jų sutarimas dėl prekybos lustais buvo pirmasis žingsnis siekiant suvaržyti Kiniją iki D. Trumpo prezidentavimo pabaigos. Didelė Nyderlandų įmonė ASML (iš pradžių reiškė pažangią puslaidininkių medžiagų litografiją) buvo pasirengusi parduoti savo sudėtingiausius įrankius SMIC, didžiausiai ir galingiausiam Kinijos lustų gamintojui. Japonijos ir Amerikos pareigūnai kreipėsi į Nyderlandų vyriausybę, kuri tinkamai atsisakė suteikti ASML licenciją eksportuoti savo pažangiausias mašinas į SMIC.

 

    Amerikos pareigūnai, kurių pozicija Kinijos atžvilgiu yra griežtesnė, norintys visiškai nutraukti tiekimo grandines, pritaria šiam siauresniam norinčiųjų koalicijos požiūriui į diplomatiją. Dėl nedidelio narių skaičiaus, diskretiškai planuojant, lengviau greitai kovoti su numanomomis grėsmėmis. Tai taip pat suteikia pagrindinį žodį Amerikai, pakartodamas D. Trumpo vienišių požiūrį į Kiniją, o ne skiriant laiko vilioti partnerius ir rasti būdų, kaip parašyti aiškių prekybos lustais taisyklių knygą. Europiečiai ir japonai nori formalesnio daugiašalio požiūrio. Tačiau Amerika mano, kad jos gebėjimas greitai reaguoti į Kinijos grėsmę būtų neišvengiamai pažabotas.

 

    Jokio statymo, be žetonų

 

    Kaip teigia buvęs Baracko Obamos eksporto komandos pareigūnas, kliūtis yra ta, kad kuo tvirčiau Amerika nori reaguoti į Kiniją, tuo sunkiau pritraukti Amerikos sąjungininkus iš Vakarų ir Azijos. Be Amerikos draugų, griežta Amerikos linija eksporto atžvilgiu gali susilpninti jos pačios įmones. Taip yra todėl, kad tai galėtų nukreipti investicijas į vietas, kurios nepasiekiamos Amerikai, tačiau kurios vis tiek tinka Kinijos lustų gamintojams.

 

    Amerika pasirenka švelnesnį valdiklių rinkinį, kuris ilgainiui gali veikti geriau, arba griežtesnį rinkinį, kuris trumpuoju laikotarpiu gali labiau pakenkti Kinijos technologijoms, bet gali pakenkti Amerikos pramonei. Dar blogiau, tai gali sužlugdyti Amerikos ir Kinijos prekybos perspektyvą, jei vieną dieną atsinaujins geresni santykiai.

 

    Šiuo metu administracija siekia kompromiso, užkirsdama Kinijos prieigą prie lustų ir lustų gamybos įrankių, viršijančių tam tikrą sudėtingumo lygį. Pavyzdžiui, ji visiškai užkerta kelią „Huawei“ gauti lustų, kuriuose veikia 5 G tinklo įranga, tačiau leidžia naudoti senesnes technologijas. Taip pat SMIC gali gauti senesnius lustų kūrimo įrankius, bet ne naujausias versijas, kurios gali būti naudojamos lustams, kurie patenka į „iPhone“ ir savarankiškai važiuojančius automobilius. Tačiau Amerikos draugai dar turi sutikti su šiuo kompromisu, kuris vis dar yra vienašališkai primestas pagal Amerikos vyriausybės eksporto kontrolės taisykles.

 

    Bideno administraciją bet kokiu atveju stabdo politika namuose, kad ir kokį naują kursą Amerika bandytų nustatyti su Kinija. „Daugelis žiūri skeptiškai, nes nėra tikri, ar Bidenas bus valdžioje, ar ne“, – sako Richardas Thurstonas, kadaise buvęs vyriausias Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), didžiausios pasaulyje lustų gamintojos, teisininkas. Jis sako, kad administracija gali prarasti apetitą energingai lustų diplomatijai, nes baiminasi, kad bet koks jos sudarytas susitarimas gali būti panaikintas vėliau šiais metais, jei Kongresas taps respublikonišku.

 

    G. Thurstonas mano, kad konkrečių mašinų ir komponentų eksporto kontrolė bet kokiu atveju yra neprotinga, nes joks kontrolės tinklas negali būti pakankamai griežtas, kad ryžtinga, galinga šalis kažkaip negautų įrankių. Tačiau Kinijai bus sudėtinga įgyti žinių, kaip naudoti šiuos įrankius komerciškai perspektyvių lustų gamybai. G. Thurstonas siūlo, kad vyriausybės, užuot ribojusios puslaidininkių tiekimo grandines, turėtų sutelkti dėmesį į komercinių paslapčių apsaugą. Amerikos puslaidininkių kompanijos ir draugiškų šalių įmonės galėtų parduoti savo pažangiausias lustų gamybos paslaugas Kinijos rinkai, tačiau vis tiek galėtų neleisti Kinijos įmonėms pačioms sukurti sudėtingiausių gamybos pajėgumų.

 

    Tai nėra populiarus požiūris Vašingtone, kur Bidenas yra pernelyg lengvai sumuštas antraštėse, kuriose skundžiamasi dėl lustų ir įrankių srauto į Kiniją. Tačiau nepatogus faktas yra tai, kad Amerikos puslaidininkių įrankių gamintojai vis dar laiko Kiniją viena didžiausių savo rinkų. „Applied Materials“, Kalifornijos įmonė, gaminanti mašinas, skirtas mažoms grandinėms išgraviruoti ant silicio 2020 m. Kinijai pardavė įrankių už 5 mlrd. dolerių daugiau, nei bet kuriai kitai rinkai.

 

     Tuo tarpu Kinija daro pažangą. Pasaulyje Kinijos parduodamų lustų dalis auga. Tai netinka jokiai kitai stambiai lustą gaminančiajai šaliai, nepaisant D. Trumpo kampanijos, kuria siekiama sunaikinti vietines Kinijos pramonės šakas, ir Bideno daugiau daugiašalių bandymų pasiekti tą patį tikslą. Amerika ir jos sąjungininkai dar gali susitarti, kaip suvaldyti Kinijos puslaidininkių ambicijas. Tačiau vienai valstybei gali pasirodyti neįmanoma kontroliuoti tokios sudėtingos pramonės. Jei taip, Amerika gali gailėtis, kad bandė įsikišti.“ [1]

 

1.  "Game of chiplomacy; A global contest over semiconductors." The Economist, 29 Jan. 2022, p. 48(US).

Game of chiplomacy; A global contest over semiconductors.

"The West and its allies are trying to set rules for the world's most complex supply chains--without China dominating the show. It isn't easy

DURING DONALD TRUMP'S presidency many people looked afresh at China's technological prowess. Some concluded that it posed a threat to Western economies, and perhaps even to global security. In news headlines Huawei, a brilliantly successful manufacturer of telecoms equipment, became the face of that threat. America accused the firm of acting as a conduit for Chinese government surveillance and control. In 2018 America clobbered Huawei. It banned the export to the Chinese firm of American microchips essential for its products. This seems to have had the desired effect. Last year Huawei's revenues shrank for the first time in a decade, by almost a third.

It was unprecedented for a state to stymie so huge a tech company. Huawei's revenues were about as big as Microsoft's. But the feat was not without costs. Because the Trump administration acted without co-operating closely with America's friends, it prompted investors from far and wide to add missing links to parts of the semiconductor supply chain that are beyond the reach of American law.

Japanese firms, among others, have started quietly marketing their products in such a way as to evade America's Export Administration Regulations, qualifying them as " EAR-free". American firms, many of which sell billions of dollars of equipment to China every year, began looking for neutral territory from which they might continue to export supplies. Singapore and Malaysia led the way. "Who would willingly sign up to be restricted by the US government?" chuckles a lawyer in Washington, who has been navigating tech clients around the new restrictions.

Meanwhile, Chinese firms, spurred on by billions of dollars of investment by the state, have redoubled their efforts to develop their own versions of chip technologies they had previously imported along supply chains linked to firms in America. The way things began to go, it looked as if the American government would steadily lose its grip over the chip supply chain. To avoid that outcome, and to keep a modicum of control over what technology flows into China, it must build a consensus with friendly countries.

Since Joe Biden took office a year ago, his officials have been raising the issue of chip controls whenever they talk to foreign allies. A lobbyist in Washington says that in 25 years he has never seen semiconductors so consistently top the diplomatic agenda. Governments and companies have been setting up forums to align policy over the trade in chips and the equipment and material used to make them.

Some see a parallel with the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as OPEC. For decades its members, all oil exporters, have clubbed together to try to control how much oil reaches the world market, in order to influence prices. Today's new forums mark the first steps towards creating a similar set-up to control the export of semiconductors, in the hope of retaining a technological edge over China. It could be called the Organisation of the Semiconductor Exporting Countries: OSEC.

Diplomatic bodies dedicated to forging multilateral agreements over the export of technology already exist. But they are poor at governing the trade in semiconductors. In 1996 the Wassenaar Arrangement was created, among other things to oversee trade that may have a military use. It is the successor to the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, known as COCOM, the cold-war body that in effect kept a Western embargo on trade with the Soviet bloc. Officials pay lip service to the idea of updating Wassenaar so that it might help control the trade in semiconductors. But few expect it to play that role, not least because Russia is a member.

So newer forums are springing up. The most formal is the EU- US Trade and Technology Council, set up last June with a working group dedicated to export controls. Semiconductors are on the agenda.

A joint statement after the council's first meeting in Pittsburgh in September declared its intention to co-operate in "rebalancing" global chip supply chains. That was diplomatic language for keeping them away from China.

The chip industry in the West and parts of Asia that are wary of China has welcomed the discussion, at least officially. It hopes that clearer export rules, applied globally, will reduce uncertainty.

But global chip diplomacy is still weak. When semiconductor trade is discussed, it tends to be tacked onto the agenda of other world forums. Export-control lawyers and government officials huddle, often virtually, in the corridors of meetings of the Quad, a club of countries that embraces America, Australia, India and Japan. In September it announced that one of its goals was to secure the supply chains in semiconductors.

Chips have also come up in the sidelines of meetings to discuss sanctions that might be put on Russia. The American administration has briefed the Semiconductor Industry Association on how the sort of export controls used against Huawei could be part of a sanctions package against Russia, to cut off its access to Western technology.

Unlike China, Russia has no electronics industry to speak of, so such controls would not hurt it as badly. But it might make it harder for Russia to carry out cyber-attacks on its enemies.

Agreements forged between the governments of the leading countries in the chip supply chain--America, Japan and the Netherlands--still matter more than any talking shop. That trio produces the lion's share of the machinery used to make chips. A consensus between them over trade in chips marked the first step towards constraining China towards the end of Mr Trump's presidency. A big Dutch company, ASML (originally standing for Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography), had been poised to sell its most sophisticated tools to SMIC, China's biggest and beefiest chipmaker. Japanese and American officials rounded on the Dutch government, which duly refused to give ASML a licence to export its cutting-edge machines to SMIC.

American officials with a more hawkish stance on China who want a clean break in the supply chains favour this narrower coalition-of-the-willing approach to diplomacy. Its small number of members planning discreetly makes it easier to move quickly against perceived threats. It also gives America the main say, echoing Mr Trump's go-it-alone attitude to China, rather than taking the time to cajole partners and find ways to write a book of clear rules for trading in chips. The Europeans and the Japanese both want a more formal multilateral approach. But America reckons its ability to react fast to a Chinese threat would inevitably be curbed.

No stake, no chips

The snag, as a former official in Barack Obama's export team argues, is that the more robustly America wants to respond to China, the harder it is to get America's Western and Asian allies to come along. Without America's friends on board America's hard line on exports threatens to weaken its own companies. That is because it could steer investment to places outside America's reach but which still suit Chinese chipmakers.

America is caught between choosing a softer set of controls which may work better in the long run, or a harsher set that could hurt Chinese technology more in the short run but might harm American industry overall. Worse, it might ruin the prospect of American-Chinese trade ever reviving in the event that better relations one day resume.

For the moment the administration is seeking a compromise by cutting off Chinese access to chips and chipmaking tools above a certain level of sophistication. For example, it completely blocks Huawei from getting chips that run whizzy 5 G networking equipment but lets it have older technologies. Likewise SMIC can get older chipmaking tools but not the latest versions that can be used for chips that go into iPhones and self-driving cars. America's friends, however, have yet to agree to this compromise, which is still being imposed unilaterally through the American government's export-control rules.

Mr Biden's administration is anyway hamstrung by politics at home, whatever new course America might try to chart with China. "Many are sceptical because they're not sure whether or not Biden will be around," says Richard Thurston, once the top lawyer at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest chipmaker. He says the administration may be losing its appetite for energetic chiplomacy for fear that any agreement it makes may be swept away later this year if Congress turns Republican.

Mr Thurston reckons that controlling exports of specific machines and components is unwise anyway, because no net of controls can be drawn tightly enough to stop a determined, powerful country from somehow getting the tools. But it will nonetheless be tricky for China to acquire the knowledge for using those tools to make chips in commercially viable volumes. Mr Thurston suggests that governments, instead of constraining semiconductor supply chains, should focus on protecting trade secrets. American semiconductor companies and those in friendly countries could sell their most advanced chipmaking services to the Chinese market, yet still be able to prevent Chinese firms from developing the most sophisticated manufacturing capacity themselves.

This is not a popular view in Washington, where Mr Biden is all too easily battered by headlines bemoaning the flow of chips and tools to China. Yet an awkward fact is that America's own semiconductor toolmakers still count China as one of their biggest markets. Applied Materials, a Californian firm that makes machines used to etch minute circuits on silicon wafers, sold tools worth $5bn to China in 2020, more than to any other market.

Meanwhile China keeps making progress. The proportion of global chips sold by China is rising. That is not true for any other major chipmaking country, despite Mr Trump's campaign to snuff out China's indigenous industries and Mr Biden's more multilateral attempts to achieve the same end. America and its allies may yet agree on how to contain China's semiconductor ambitions. But it may prove impossible for one state to control such a complex industry. If so, America may come to regret trying to intervene." [1]

·  ·  · 1.  "Game of chiplomacy; A global contest over semiconductors." The Economist, 29 Jan. 2022, p. 48(US).