Dave Smith: commitment

Transcript context

…I think what you said applies to a lot of the wars we’ve been involved in, but China and Taiwan is a little bit different because of TSMC, right? Because there’s an economic dependence. If that was the concern, then the response would be, “We need some type of Manhattan Project.” And I’m not supporting a government project here, but there would be, “We need some type of Manhattan Project to say, ‘We are going to make these things here. '” And look, I was running that experiment before saying, ” What if we all pinky promise not to use nuclear weapons or something like that?” But that’s not the reality of the situation. Look, even in Ukraine, everybody, the biggest hawks, the biggest pushers of this policy, and Joe Biden’s policy to fund Ukraine, no one’s suggesting we send in the 82nd airborne, which is really the only thing that could repel the Russians right now and restore the original sovereignty of the Ukrainian borders. But no one’s suggesting we send in the 82nd airborne because we all know, well, we can’t have a direct war with Russia. That’s the end of the world. And same thing with China. So I’m not saying microchips or whatever aren’t important, but we can find other ways to… Taiwan is not magical. We can produce these things in other places now. So you have the humility to say that you don’t really know much about the situation. It sounds ridiculous to say, but there’s something magical about not Taiwan, but TSMC. Is incredibly difficult to manage the supply chain and manufacture at such a low cost that they are. And to add to that, China has been signaling about the one China policy, but you’re absolutely right that you shouldn’t be doing the Washington thing of beating the drums of war. It’s like completely the counterproductive thing. You should actually try to find partnerships with China, build friendships and cooperation. India’s doing a good job of this, build friendships. This is the 21st century. Conflict, this Cold War thinking is going to be destructive to the economy, destructive to humanity, to the flourishing of the individual nations of the world. There’s just nothing positive except making money for the military industry [inaudible 00:29:41]…

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