I am firmly in favour of the West reducing its dependence on China – quickly, seriously, and yesterday. And the honest answer is that this works best under US leadership. Nobody else has the market weight, the tech chokepoints or the alliance architecture to make de-risking bite. Pax Silica is the proof of concept: a US-anchored supply-chain compact that Japan, European countries, Australia etc. have joined. But here is the problem. The same Washington that asks allies to align on China treats those allies as a second tier – to be tariffed, questioned, and disciplined – while Trump reserves its deference for Beijing and Moscow. Leadership that is contradictory in aim, bilateral in method and transactional in loyalty is hard to follow and harder to trust. Europe (and other allies) therefore faces an awkward situation: align with the US on China while hedging against the US on many other fronts simultaneously. De-risking from China remains right. But the US must decide whether it wants followers or clients. Only one of those builds a coalition.

The US forcing its partners to choose means that the ambiguity space is now closing. 📌 European capitals have built China policy on “de-risking, not decoupling”. This doctrine works if the US tolerates a middle position, which it doesn't. Pax Silica membership “cannot be held alongside membership in duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own”. 📌 Europe should read this as a precedent, as it pairs with the Bloomberg-reported questionnaire assessing NATO allies’ political alignment ahead of the December troop review. Access to American security guarantees, frontier models, and chip supply is transactional (audited and revocable). 📌 This tiered-sovereignty logic interestingly mirrors Beijing’s. Access-conditionality is exactly the geoeconomic coercion playbook Europe has spent five years learning to resist from China, not exactly with great success. Europe now faces symmetric pressure from both. 📌 The asymmetry runs one way: Europe cannot substitute for US frontier models or the US-centric chip stack; China cannot offer them either, since Beijing’s most advanced chip manufacturing still trails that of Pax Silica partners, and export controls constrain what it can share. Europe will choose the US as it has through Pax Silica. But economic security will now cut the supply chains as well. 📌 The Kazakhstan case tells more than immediately meets the eye. Astana joined Pax Silica as a key potential source of critical minerals, then signed on to China’s coalition. Europe’s own raw-materials diversification runs through the Middle Corridor. If Washington forces Central Asian states into binary choices, Europe’s minerals strategy inherits the consequences. Worth watching whether Astana’s hedge holds. Interesting times.

Donald Trump admired the use of force by the Chinese Communist Party during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Reading “Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump”, below are some direct quotes from him regarding the Tiananmen Square massacre:

Taiwan didn't steal your chip industry. The modern chip industry became globally distributed primarily because of US business decisions (they chose to outsource manufacturing), government policy, and Taiwanese technological specialisation — not because Taiwan “stole” it.