Sanctions come with a cost. When the US, in Trump’s first term, put chip sanctions on China and particularly sanctioned Huawei (the leader in 5g networks), it galvanized China. They pivoted hard to supporting internal chip companies, and over time moved their government computers off US software. Huawei survived, prospered and created its own operating system. In the past couple years China has actually forbid import of US chips, though some still come in thru the gray market.
This isn’t an isolated issue. One of the reasons, ironically, that Iran is so strong in many ways is because of sanctions: they were forced to create their own industrial base, not just in weapons, but in things like railroads, engines, boilers, etc, etc… When Iranian infrastructure was destroyed by the US earlier this year much of it was very quickly repaired: to the extent they have dependencies, they are on China and to a lesser extent Russia.
The US can’t stop itself: as their military and industrial might has declined they have relied more and more on sanctions. Not only has this lead to other countries (particularly Russia and China) creating their own payment systems and offering those payment systems to their trading partners, but it has vastly decreased the market for US tech.
In order to protect Israel and Netanyahu from sanctions, it hit one of its allies:
The Netherlands is following China, France, and Russia in moving to break the global stranglehold of US tech dominance, it was revealed this week.
The Dutch government was shocked into action after the US remotely disabled the computers of judges in the Hague who criticized Israel leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The sudden loss of ICC staff’s Outlook email accounts caused significant problems.
The US reserves the right to unilaterally sanction anyone, anywhere in the world–all your Google accounts could disappear in an instant. Bye-bye, gmail. “The Dutch government is creating its own digital work environment based on the Dutch Linux distribution NixOS,” said Jasper Bakker of news website Tweakers.
Once lost these markets won’t come back. Countries which create their own tech, will use it. Getting civilians to transfer over is harder, most non-government, non corporate computers in China still run Windows, but Huawei created HarmonyOS, and it’s getting traction. I would expect that in a few years China will cease the sale of Windows in China, and new computers will have to come with non US operating systems.
Every source of American power, for about 35 years, has been subject to systematic dismantling. Industry was offshored, they stopped refining and mining many key resources, sanctions were abused, dollar privilege was abused, and so on. Generally the external actions didn’t hit allies/vassals–until recently, but Trump has been on a tear: forcing the Netherlands to stop selling China chip making machines, for example, which the CEO of ASML predicted would lead to China developing its own advanced chip making machines. (They’re still behind, but they’ve progressed far faster than most people predicted.)
The thing about crippling sanctions is that they don’t work on real countries in the medium term. China and Russia are real countries, with their own industrial bases, plenty of scientists and engineers and access to resources the US can’t sanction. Cutting them off just speeds up internal development or shifts to other suppliers. If you’re going to exploit a critical vulnerability, you should do so only against those who can’t substitute or as prelude to a war: and that war needs to be soon, before they adapt.
Anyway, this continued nonsense is pushing even vassals to reduce their vulnerability, and while Europe is still prostate, these sorts of actions build the basis for a break from US hegemony–and cost American companies billions. Likewise, as people move off US tech, as it loses its ubiquity, a lot of power is lost: people use many techs because “everyone uses them”. Network effects are huge, but each of these hits reduces those network effects.
It’s extraordinarily foolish (and Nvidia’s CEO pointed this out) but it’s US policy. America thinks its indispensable, and once it was, but it’s doing everything possible to make it so that other countries will do whatever is necessary to make it dispensable.
Truly, American elites, while vicious and cunning are some of the worst long term strategists I’ve ever seen.
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