Every Country Is on Its Own on AI | China’s Indo-Pacific Folly | Helping Tunisians Stem Migrant Flow, and more

Semiconductors Are Taiwan’s Best Bargaining Chip Against China  (Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times)
Viewed from above, from the point of view of a missile descending to earth, the “fabs”— the semiconductor fabrication plants of Taiwan — are as helpless and undefended as greenhouses. The factories, or foundries, pump out the computer chips that make the modern world go round. Nowhere creates more of them than Taiwan.
About 60 per cent of the world’s semiconductors are made on the island, including 93 per cent of the most advanced chips. Everything that relies on a computer, from pacemakers to smartphones to artificial intelligence, depends on these wafers of metal and silicon. But in the past few years the fountainhead of the world’s semiconductors has found itself in a situation of dire jeopardy.

Samsung Boss ‘Stole Microchip Blueprints for China’  (Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times)
A South Korean business leader has been charged with jeopardizing national security by stealing blueprints for a microchip factory so that he could build a copy of the facility in China.
The 65-year-old former executive of Samsung Electronics, who has not been named, has been charged under laws that outlaw unfair competition and protect industrial technology and trade secrets. Six of his employees have also been charged with taking part in the plot to steal Samsung’s factory designs in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recreate them in the Chinese city of Xian.
The plot provides further drama to the way that semiconductors, the tiny chips that are used in everything from mobile phones to missile systems, have become a battleground between China and the United States and its allies.

China’s Indo-Pacific Folly  (Andrew D. Taffer and David Wallsh, Foreign Affairs)
In December 2022, Japan released its first national security strategy in nearly ten years. The document committed Tokyo to strengthening the U.S.-Japanese alliance “in all areas.” And Japan is not alone. Over the last half decade, almost all U.S. allies across the Indo-Pacific have deepened their partnerships with Washington and formed new networks with one another.

U.S.-China Competition Poses New Test for 70 Years of Shifting Korea-U.S. Economic Ties  (Hankyoreh)
In the 70 years since the Korean War, the volume of trade and capital investment between South Korea and the US multiplied by the hundreds and the thousands, respectively. In other words, relations between the two countries have grown more intimate and deepened at an extremely fast pace, at least in the economic realm.
But even within such a framework, a closer look shows a whirlwind of drama unfolding between the two as they waver between cooperation and conflict.
As the South Korean economy grew at a speed almost unprecedented in the 20th century, warranting the expression, “Miracle on the Han River,” and as the US modified its foreign policy and the international situation changed, a tug-of-war between the two countries ensued. The system of economic cooperation between South Korea and the US is entering another turning point in the face of strategic competition between the US and China and the age of supply chain fragmentation.

The United States Is Creating a Kosovo Crisis  (Edward P. Joseph, Foreign Policy)
If anyone can understand the ugly, unnecessary standoff between the United States and Kosovo, it is Volodymyr Zelensky. Ask the Ukrainian president to grant ethnic Russians autonomy, and Zelensky will immediately ask three questions: Will the Russian speakers accept that they live in Ukraine, not Russia? Will Russia recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity? And will the grant of autonomy finally allow us to join NATO?
The inability of the United States and European Union to answer these same questions, as applied to Kosovo and Serbia, is at the root of the self-destructive Western power struggle with Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti. Instead of looking at autonomy strategically—as Zelensky would, and as Russian President Vladimir Putin does—Biden administration officials are as dogmatic as the Kosovo prime minister who has attracted Western ire.

Countering Online Extremism Online: Can New Zealand’s Ardern Make the Christchurch Call Live Up to Its Potential?  (David Ibsen and  Lucinda Creighton, NE Global)
Research from the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) has identified significant cases in which extremist content has been uploaded and re-uploaded. For example, as recently as April 2023, CEP investigators unearthed Twitter accounts that not only glorified the very horrendous attack that led to the founding of the Christchurch Call Community but also posted clips from the attack video itself. Less than three weeks prior, a separate CEP investigation exposed extremist accounts on Telegram and Instagram that were celebrating the fourth anniversary of the attack. Researchers also located the full version of the live-streamed attack video on a library download site.