The political consensus that Taiwan’s concentration of advanced semiconductor production represents a strategic vulnerability has produced a global effort to disperse that production — or at least to replicate enough of it elsewhere that a Taiwan Strait crisis does not produce a complete collapse of advanced chip supply. TSMC is building fabs in Arizona, in Kumamoto and Hokkaido in Japan, and in Dresden, Germany. Intel is building in Ohio and Germany. Samsung is expanding in Texas. The CHIPS Act in the United States, the European Chips Act, and Japan’s semiconductor subsidy programs have collectively directed tens of billions of dollars at this dispersal objective. The effort is serious, expensive, and insufficient on the timescale that matters most.

Stretching from Kyushu southwestward toward Taiwan, the Ryukyu island chain forms a natural barrier between the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea. The chain includes Okinawa — site of the largest American military concentration in the western Pacific — and continues through progressively smaller islands to the Yaeyama group, whose southernmost point lies less than 75 miles from Taiwan’s northeastern tip. This geography is not coincidental to the Taiwan question. It is central to it. Any Chinese military operation in the Taiwan Strait must account for the Ryukyu chain, and any American or Japanese response to such an operation would use the chain as its primary operating framework.