Diplomacy & Crisis News

The new push against Russian forces has raised endgame scenarios.

La réforme du baccalauréat et l'instauration de critères de sélection à l'entrée des universités bouleversent l'articulation entre enseignements secondaire et supérieur. Dès la classe de seconde, les élèves sont désormais sommés de se projeter dans l'avenir, au risque de prendre la mauvaise voie. / France, (...) / France, Éducation, Mutation, Société, Travail, Chômage, Néolibéralisme, Université - 2018/04

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In recent months, the flagship Taiwanese tech firm, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), has been a focus of discussions about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. For instance, Nikkei published a piece by Jared M. McKinney, a professor at the U.S. Air Force War College. McKinney argues that Taiwan should destroy TSMC’s world-leading chip foundries to prevent them from falling into PRC hands.

After China gets its hands on the advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, McKinney contends, it could then proceed to develop its own alternative chip-making capacity; “Once it got through short-term disruptions, China could emerge as a semiconductor superpower that is essentially self-reliant.” It follows that threatening to destroy the machines would help deter an invasion, and “It is in Taiwan's interest to make clear that China will not gain access to TSMC's EUV machines and semiconductor foundries if it invades.”

However, the truth is simple: TSMC is irrelevant.

Long before TSMC emerged as a semiconductor colossus, Chinese leaders claimed Taiwan as a sovereign territory of the People’s Republic. The claim exists irrespective of Taiwan’s economic prowess. Although McKinney does not argue the TSMC drives the PRC’s annexation dreams, other commentators like Marc Kennis have argued this explicitly. If TSMC disappeared tomorrow, Beijing would go right on pretending Taiwan has always been part of China.

Prior to 1942, as Alan Wachman observed in Why Taiwan? Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity both the Nationalist (KMT) and Communist (CCP) leaderships were indifferent to Taiwan during the interwar period. Comments from elites, youth publications, and government intelligence reports treated Taiwan as lying outside China’s traditional domain and assumed that the island’s inhabitants would one day form an independent state.

After Japan brought the US into World War II, Chinese elites began considering what territories would be up for grabs following the conflict. The KMT government under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek started to rewrite the history of China to include Taiwan, and the Communists followed suit when they took power in 1949. With a zeal whose strength is as great as its historical foundation is false, the Party leadership has internalized the doctored history behind unification as a key strategic objective. In 2000, long before TSMC had become a household name and the darling of would-be George Kennans on the internet, then Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji snarled on the eve of Taiwan’s presidential election: “no matter who comes to power in Taiwan, Taiwan will never be allowed to be independent.”

TSMC is thus irrelevant to the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. It is just as unrelated to Chinese objectives following a hypothetical war and occupation.

First, the advanced lithography machines at TSMC will quickly become useless in the event of war. Should they go offline for even a few days, they will accumulate dust and other contaminants and require extensive cleaning. But any war in the Straits will likely go on for weeks. Once the machines go offline, as electricity, labor, and water systems collapse, they will quickly become useless. Dormant machines will require disassembly, refurbishing, or reconstruction once. I have heard from experts that it is unclear whether TSMC staff could do that without foreign inputs, even in peacetime. The war itself will destroy them without Taiwanese sabotage.

TSMC is dependent on supply chains that stretch across national boundaries. Numerous Japanese firms, such as Resonac, which supplies a compound used to polish the silicon wafers, and Shin-Etsu Chemical, help keep the assembly lines rolling. This flow of material imports would dry up instantly in the event of invasion.

The same would go for the hundreds of smaller firms that populate the upstream and downstream of TSMC’s logistics stream. The skilled workers may be conscripted into the army or flee the island. An exodus of essential foreign technicians and migrant laborers is also on the cards. How many will return to work under the PRC’s authoritarian rule?

If the PLA captures TSMC, its technological advantages will quickly fade as new chip manufacturers emerge elsewhere to meet global demand. China, for years, has been cut off from cutting-edge chip-making technology, and its own attempts to forge a world-beating chip industry have foundered on its strict information controls. Not by coincidence, the world’s leading chip firms have emerged in societies where skilled labor and information circulate freely. Hence, when TSMC becomes Chinese, it will fall out of the mainstream of global chip production.

Moreover, practical issues abound. McKinney and others imagine a world where events will quickly return to normal once the war ends. That is not our world. In recent years Taiwan has suffered from chronic drought. In response, TSMC has acquired a fleet of trucks to supply it with over 150,000 tons of water daily. Though generally ignored in invasion hypotheticals, Taiwan's creaky water system is vulnerable to missile attacks or sabotage on dams, pipes, and reservoirs.

Not only is the water supply to TSMC likely to fail and not be easily restored, but its fleet of trucks will be critical war equipment subject to requisition by the government. “In war,” a local city planner once told me, “there will be no private property.” Nor is China, learning from Ukraine, going to leave Taiwan’s electricity systems in operation. The PLA’s artillery, drones, and missiles would target prime movers of every kind, along with buses, public transport systems, trains, roads, bridges, and tunnels (where Taiwan will likely stash its mobile weapons systems). In occupied Taiwan, transportation infrastructure will be scarred for years.

Beijing is well aware of all this. The truth is that TSMC is leverage, but only for China. As long as Taiwan’s fabs are intact and functioning, the PRC gains from threatening to destroy them (“surrender, or we’ll devastate your economy!”), while Taiwan gains nothing from destroying them. Beijing will simply shrug. Indeed, that their destruction might demoralize Taiwan’s population and hurt its export economy is a good reason Beijing might just go ahead and destroy them. The symbolic meaning of Taiwan’s tech industry as the basis of its free existence makes the island’s chip factories targets as tempting as the former mosques in Xinjiang.

Recall that Beijing does not merely want to annex Taiwan: it wants to annihilate the whole idea of an independent, democratic, high-functioning, free Taiwan. Its democracy is a daily refutation of the CCP’s claim that only the party can rule the people it deems “Chinese.” Behavior ranging from the occupation of Hong Kong to the CCP’s strict controls on Chinese firms—and mandatory party appointees in foreign ones—all show that economic gains are less important to the Party than political dominance.

Want to help the US defend Taiwan? Stop talking about TSMC, and start talking about rebuilding the US defense industrial base, cultivating alliances with Japan and other Asian nations, and, most urgently, putting more vertical launching systems on the water to counter the PRC’s massive navy.

After all, those fabs are hothouse flowers that, one way or another, will die the moment the heat of war scorches Taiwan.

Michael Turton is a columnist for the Taipei Times.

Image: Shutterstock.

On June 14, the U.S. Air Force deployed fifth-generation F-22 Raptors to Syria to deter what U.S. Central Command described as “increasingly unsafe and unprofessional behavior by Russian aircraft in the region.” The Raptor, an advanced air-superiority fighter that is renowned for its stealth capabilities, is intended to increase the U.S. military’s ability to defend the 900 U.S. servicemembers that remain deployed in the war-torn country.

The last time the United States sent F-22 fighters to the Middle East was last year, when the combat jets flew to the United Arab Emirates in a show of force following drone and missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthis. However, it is not the aircraft’s first stint in Syria. In the spring of 2018, the F-22 provided “defensive counterair” capabilities by holding Syrian air defense assets at risk during the U.S.-led, multinational strikes against Syrian military targets in response to Damascus’ suspected chemical weapons attacks. Then, in the fall, the F-22 completed its first “combat surge” in Syria, in which U.S. Raptor pilots flew “deep into Syrian territory, facing both enemy fighters and surface-to-air missile systems” and deterred nearly 600 Syrian, Iranian, and Russian combat aircraft from threatening U.S. military personnel.

The F-22 has its work cut out for it in Syria, whether in deterring the Russian military or aiding the broader U.S. military mission. Indeed, despite these deployments in defense of the years-long U.S. military presence on the ground, the Air Force reports that Russia has stopped adhering to agreed-upon deconfliction agreements in Syria’s busy skies and that Russian aircraft are harassing U.S. personnel with increasing frequency. The United States has long been concerned about Russian harassment of U.S. forces but has recently observed a “significant spike” in Russian aerial aggression in Syria. On the ground, too, U.S. servicemembers face a variety of threats from Russian forces, which have physically harassed and threatened Americans across the country.

Russia maintains over 2,500 military personnel in Syria in support of its ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, which for all intents and purposes has won his country’s civil war after more than a decade of conflict. Russia and Syria have long disparaged U.S. troops as “occupiers” and insisted that they leave the country. The U.S. refusal has put Americans in harm’s way, and not just from Moscow and Damascus. Iran, another Syrian and Russian ally, has regularly targeted the U.S. military as well. As recently as last March, for instance, a drone attack of “Iranian origin” killed one U.S. contractor and wounded six others in Syria, raising questions about the logic and sustainability of a U.S. presence that has persisted in Syria since 2015.

The United States government consistently points to the threats posed by the remnants of the Islamic State when it justifies the U.S. presence in Syria. To be sure, even after losing its territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria, the terrorist group’s resiliency continues to pose a complex challenge for the U.S.-led multinational coalition, which carried out 313 anti-ISIS operations in 2022. Yet the United States faces more and direr threats from Russia, Iran, and the Syrian government than ISIS itself, which has lost its once-formidable capability to carry out coordinated offensive operations in the Middle East or farther abroad.

In fact, ISIS cannot be defeated by military action alone: tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners, including many foreign fighters and their families, are languishing in Iraqi and Syrian detention centers and prisons. Until these people are repatriated to their countries of origin, they will be at risk of radicalization and recruitment by jihadists, and ISIS will continue to target the prisons in its efforts to free its comrades. As U.S. policymakers should have learned from the U.S. war efforts against Al Qaeda or the Taliban, ISIS is not a problem that the United States can kill its way out of.

However, much like the Taliban has proven its commitment to fighting ISIS even after the United States left Afghanistan, there is reason to believe that Syria, Iran, and Russia will not tolerate ISIS in the Middle East either. Americans should recall that Iran was instrumental in the U.S.-supported fight against ISIS in Iraq and opposed the same terrorist presence in Afghanistan, while Russia has fought ISIS in its efforts to secure Assad’s rule.

It is additionally worth remembering that when President Donald Trump ordered a snap withdrawal from Syria in 2019, it was Russia who moved its troops into the abandoned U.S. outposts and called for de-escalation between the Kurds and Turkey in the northeast. Moscow’s subsequent, fruitful negotiations with Turkey then led to an agreement that prevented a Turkish military operation against the Kurds in exchange for the latter retreating from the Syrian-Turkish border. Turkey, which was responsible for killing ISIS’s latest leader last month, is committed to combatting the same Syrian Kurds that the United States has been supporting since 2014—greatly straining the U.S.-Turkish relationship. This is just one more Gordian knot that the United States has been trying to untie in Syria—without much success.

The fact of the matter is that the United States is an outsider with few friends in Syria. As an uninvited guest in the country, it remains a target of Syrian, Russian, and Iranian military pressure. Its own allies and partners, from the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia and the broader Arab League, have begun welcoming Damascus back into the regional fold with open arms. Its policy of regime change, which began under the Obama administration but has continued in different forms, has long failed. Far from Russia being isolated—even after its invasion of Ukraine—Moscow continues to be an indispensable player in Syria, for Damascus and Tehran as much as Jerusalem and Ankara. The countries of the Middle East understand that the United States will not stay in Syria indefinitely, and they are hedging their bets accordingly. But America has not adapted in kind; instead, it has stayed the course, enduring casualties while vainly searching for a way out. But after nine years of war, only one thing is clear: no amount of F-22s can help America defeat the consequences of its own policy failings.

Adam Lammon is a former executive editor at The National Interest and an analyst of Middle Eastern affairs based in Washington, DC. The opinions expressed in this article are his own. Follow him on Twitter @AdamLammon.

Image: Image courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.

After the initial near-euphoria about Large Language Models, or LLMs, that power generative artificial intelligence (AI), the mood has gone sour. The spotlight shines now on doomsday scenarios where LLMs become self-aware, go out of control, and extinguish humanity.

Fear of sentient robots is hardly new. In an 1899 short story, Ambrose Bierce conjured a robot created by an inventor named Moxon. It looked like a person, if a dour one, but it wasn’t smart enough even to beat Moxon at chess. And when it lost, the robot revealed deep wells of uncontrolled emotion: it murdered Moxon.

This fear has maintained its popularity ever since in books, plays, and movies. Some bad robots appeared simply as machine systems, like homicidal HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some robots look human, like the Terminators. And beyond the murderous robots, there are sometimes big networks of robotic systems, such as in The Matrix, whose aim is to enslave humanity. Even Isaac Asimov, who tried to rein in robots with three laws that forbade doing harm to humans, worried that robots could circumvent such strictures.

ChatGPT and Bard are two prominent examples of LLMs that amaze with sophisticated answers to questions. These systems have sparked a huge wave of investment in new services powered by LLMs. And they have unleashed a torrent of anxiety about how their proneness to “hallucinate” (make stuff up) might create havoc with fake news, stolen elections, massive job losses, undermined trust in business, or even destabilization of national security. The worst fears concern the potential for the machines to become sentient and subjugate or exterminate us. A chorus of leading voices from the worlds of high tech and politics has made a case, best summed up by Henry Kissinger, that current advances in AI have put the world in a “mad race for some catastrophe.”

Our assessment is that the furor over the extinction prophecy has gotten the better of us and is distracting from the important work of learning how to use an extremely valuable but inherently error-prone technology safely.

The core of ChatGPT is a huge artificial neural network of 96 layers and 175 billion parameters, trained on hundreds of gigabytes of text from the Internet. When presented with a query (prompt), it responds with a list of the most probable next words. A post-processor chooses one of the words according to their listed probabilities. That word is appended to the prompt and the cycle repeated. What emerges is a fluent string of words that are statistically associated with the prompt.

These strings of words are drawn from multiple text documents in the training set, but the strings do not appear in any single document. ChatGPT is incapable of verifying whether a response is truthful. Its responses that make no sense are called “hallucinations” when all they are is statistical inference from the training data.

Despite their unreliability, LLMs can be useful for amusement and for initial drafts of documents, speeches, research projects, and code. The smart thing is to use them for these purposes but not in any application where harm can result from invalid answers. In fact, it is not hard to imagine harnessing the machine impartiality of ChatGPT to solve contentious problems. For example, we think a robotic approach to gerrymandering would be a great way to build confidence in AI. Task competing LLMs with designing congressional districts that look like simple geometric forms rather than exotic reptiles. The main guidance would be that the districts would have to be as balanced as possible between the registered voters of the two major parties. Our bet is that bots will succeed wildly where humans have failed.

What about the fears of sentience? Can LLMs eventually absorb so much text that they possess all human knowledge and are smarter than any of us? Are they the end of history? The answer is a clear no. The claim that all human knowledge can eventually be captured into machines makes no sense. We can only put into machines knowledge that can be represented by strings of bits. Performance skills like sports, music, master carpentry, or creative writing are prime examples of knowledge that cannot be precisely described and recorded; descriptions of skill do not confer a capability to perform. Even if it could be represented, performance skill is in forms that are inaccessible for recording—our thoughts and reflections, our neuronal memory states, and our neuro-muscular chemical patterns. The sheer volume of all such nonrecorded—and unrecordable—information goes well beyond what might be possible to store in a machine database. Whatever functions can be performed by LLMs are small compared to human capabilities.

In addition to this, statistical inference is surely not the whole story of human cooperation, creativity, coordination, and competition. Have we become so mesmerized by Large Language Models that we do not see the rest of what we do in language? We build relationships. We take care of each other. We recognize and navigate our moods. We build and exercise power. We make commitments and follow through with them. We build organizations and societies. We create traditions and histories. We take responsibility for actions. We build trust. We cultivate wisdom. We love. We imagine what has never been imagined before. We smell the flowers and celebrate with our loved ones. None of these is statistical. There is a great chasm between the capabilities of LLMs and those of human beings.

And beyond LLMs, there is no sign on the horizon of a more advanced, close to intelligent, technology.

So, let’s take a sober attitude toward LLMs, starting by curbing the sensational talk. What if we use the phrase “statistical model of language” instead of “Large Language Model”? Notice how much less threatening, even silly, the extinction prophecy sounds when expressed as, “Humanity goes extinct because of its inability to control statistical models of language.”

Tamping down unreasonable fears will allow us to attend to the serious matters of the economic and social impacts of the latest advances in artificial intelligence, and of LLMs’ penchant for inaccuracy and unreliability. Let us also address the geopolitical stresses between the United States, China, and Russia, which could be exacerbated by an unbridled military arms race in AI that might make going to war seem more thinkable—and which would actually heighten the risks of nuclear escalation by the side losing a machine-based conflict. In this respect, we concur with Kissinger that advanced AI could catalyze a human catastrophe.

Above all, as with previous periods that featured major technological advances, the challenge now is to chart a wise path around fear and hype.

John Arquilla and Peter Denning are distinguished professors at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. John Arquilla’s latest book is Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare (Polity, 2021). Peter Denning most recently co-authored Computational Thinking (MIT Press, 2019).

The views expressed in this article are solely theirs.

Image: Shutterstock.

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Washington must take difficult steps to prevent catastrophe.