This opinion was expressed by Robert O’Brien, who served as a national security adviser in the Trump administration. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSCM for short) is currently the world’s largest manufacturer of chips, including those used in highly advanced technologies such as machine learning and military equipment. That’s why Robert O’Brien warned: if China controls these factories, it will be able to control the entire world economy.

Apple is currently TSMC’s biggest customer, which manufactures most of the nearly 1.5 billion processors installed in smartphones. The same goes for the microcontrollers that all automakers buy from TSCM. Interestingly, O’Brien was not the first to come up with the idea of ​​destroying Taiwan’s semiconductor factories if China attacked the country. Previously, a similar opinion was expressed by several influential people from the world of politics and science.

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The director general of Taiwan’s National Security Bureau criticized this idea. He said that in the event of an invasion, the US would not need to destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor factories for a simple reason, he said. Taiwanese chip manufacturers are so integrated into global supply chains that their supply can be easily and peacefully blocked by the US government. In such a situation, physical destruction of the plant is unnecessary. TSMC would not be able to manufacture some of the chips without the components it buys from European and American suppliers.

As tensions between the mainland and Taiwan escalate, analysts predict that China will indeed invade. If that happened, it would be the collapse of the entire world economy, something we have never experienced before.