Chapter 5: An Empire’s Overt Strategy—Ukraine’s Rare Earths and Taiwan’s Chips
A resource’s strategic value depends not only on its deposits, but on how technology, markets and powerful states define it. — The argument of this essay
The early twenty-first-century world reveals a harsh truth: resources confer power, and control over their allocation depends less on geology than on geopolitical strength.
Ukraine’s rare earths and Taiwan’s chips appear geographically unrelated. Yet both are being drawn into strategic frameworks that classify them as critical assets. I see a common logic of structured dispossession, pursued openly rather than secretly.
Ukraine has become a site of devastating geopolitical conflict. Could Taiwan become another version of that story? This chapter explores the question.
1. Ukraine: the strategic resource inventory behind a war
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, analysis often focused on NATO expansion, security anxieties and national identity. Less attention was paid to Ukraine’s underlying inventory of strategic resources:
• Titanium: titanium and its alloys matter to aerospace and parts of defense manufacturing. Assessments of Ukraine must distinguish deposits, recoverable reserves and processing capacity instead of relying on claims that they are the “largest.”
• Lithium: battery applications attract attention to lithium deposits, but the presence of ore is not the same as an established supply. Recoverability, infrastructure and shifting front lines can change a mining project’s value.
• Rare earths: potential resources are not verified, economically recoverable reserves. Strategic value depends on geological surveys, extraction conditions, processing capacity and war risks—not simply resource rankings.
• Black-earth farmland: a significant resource for global food security and agricultural investment.
Ukraine’s resources now feature in international negotiations and reconstruction arrangements. They may shape interests, but cannot alone explain the war’s outbreak or persistence. Understanding exchanges involving aid and negotiation requires specific agreements, decision processes and implementation evidence.
My argument is that Ukraine’s predicament involves more than invasion alone: its designation within global industrial strategy has also constrained its agency.
2. Taiwan: a strategic asset defined by the digital economy
Compared with Ukraine’s underground wealth, Taiwan’s semiconductor capabilities are less tangible—and potentially more geopolitically precarious.
Taiwan hosts critical advanced manufacturing capacity. TSMC supplies many high-end computing products, but not all military systems use leading-edge nodes. Neither 3 nm nor 2 nm can be described as indispensable to every military chip. Dependence can be examined through customer–manufacturer relationships, but Taiwan’s territorial share of capacity is not the same as TSMC’s corporate market share. Process definitions, year, and whether the denominator is capacity or revenue all change the conclusion:
• Companies including Apple, NVIDIA, AMD and Qualcomm depend on TSMC for flagship products.
• Advanced chips also underpin US military AI weapons systems and multidimensional battlefield data-processing platforms.
If Ukraine is a land of titanium, Taiwan is an island of wafers. The metaphor emphasizes both the strength and vulnerability of industrial concentration. What control the United States actually seeks must be established through specific policies, funding arrangements and outcomes.
Taiwan’s chip capabilities therefore extend beyond an economic activity: they form part of the U.S. national-security framework. My concern is that, once defined this way, Taiwan’s status becomes less a matter for autonomous negotiation and more a prerequisite resource to be incorporated into American institutional influence.
3. Chip appropriation through legislation rather than gunboats
Unlike colonial practices a century ago, the transfer of Taiwan’s semiconductor capabilities can be framed as industrial displacement wrapped in the language of democracy.
• The CHIPS and Science Act provides roughly US$52 billion in semiconductor support, encouraging investment in U.S. manufacturing by companies including TSMC, Samsung and Intel.
• Supply-chain policy seeks expanded domestic manufacturing and reduced concentration risk. But subsidy conditions, investment review and procurement requirements are distinct instruments, not a single grant of comprehensive government control.
• Subsidy oversight brings project reviews, disclosures and compliance obligations. Their precise scope must be checked individually; they do not automatically give Washington full oversight of every overseas factory, customer and core process.
These conditions may contribute to a reduced local anchoring of industry without explicitly demanding technology transfer. TSMC must comply with applicable arrangements for its U.S. factories. Whether subsidies transfer control over core processes requires evidence from agreements and implementation; regulation alone does not prove technological autonomy has been hollowed out.
I see this as an overt strategy: using rules as instruments, allies as intermediaries and security as the justification for incorporating critical assets beyond America’s borders into its institutions.
4. A geopolitical cross-section: Ukraine’s devastation and Taiwan’s exposure
Consider the following parallel:
Category Ukraine Taiwan
Strategic resources Titanium, lithium, rare earths and agriculture Advanced-node chips (3 nm/2 nm)
Geographical role Eastern European buffer; interface of U.S.–Russia conflict First island chain; pressure point in U.S.–China military rivalry
Political orientation Seeking closer Western integration; strengthening opposition to Russia Moving closer to the United States; deemphasizing unification
Response to great-power rivalry Greater military investment and intelligence support Inadequate institutional defenses for industrial sovereignty
Neither is formally part of an empire, yet my concern is that each is being incorporated through functional, institutional and industrial dependence.
Ukraine sought closer Western security ties, while Russia’s invasion brought war, refugees and profound destruction. Being invaded cannot be reduced to an inevitable consequence of seeking NATO membership. Taiwan, meanwhile, opens its technology sector to the United States in hope of diplomatic space and security commitments, while key capabilities move abroad without a corresponding change in its diplomatic status.
5. Taiwan’s government: participant, failed guardian or silent bystander?
Taiwan is not incapable. It created exceptionally effective industrial supply chains and once led East Asia in aspects of education and cultural policy. Yet in this semiconductor contest, I see insufficient institutional limits, strategic defenses and a persuasive language for negotiating sovereignty.
Existing national-security laws, trade-secret protections and controls on core technologies already address relevant risks. My criticism is whether these tools adequately cover overseas investment, talent allocation and long-term industrial planning—not that no mechanisms exist. In my view, the reluctance to insist on retaining advanced capabilities reflects political weakness rather than flexibility.
The Alstom controversy reminds us that cross-border industrial restructuring deserves more than a narrow transaction-level discussion. Taiwan must connect existing review procedures and public debate to long-term industrial goals, rather than considering the public interest only after deals are complete. Failure to do so signals an abandonment of collective imagination.
Conclusion: a new colony built through chips rather than cannon
Empires increasingly send agreements instead of troops and compete over governing logic rather than territory alone.
Ukraine has already traded land and lives for the embrace of the “free world.” Taiwan may exchange chips and technology for an illusion of security. As factories open in Arizona, overseas production becomes subject to subsidy and compliance conditions, and leading engineers accept long assignments abroad, the process I describe is already unfolding.
This would be a sinking without a battle, rather than a military defeat.
Can Taiwan see a possible future in Ukraine’s mirror? Does it still have the courage to insist that it is a participant in civilization, not merely a supplier of resources?
As the world’s mines, factories and raw materials are reassigned new strategic meanings, Taiwan must decide whether to become an island of wafers to be extracted—or an island that defends its own place in civilization.