Look at what the current semiconductor shortage is doing to our internal manufacturing industry. I don’t think many Americans would be OK with a genocidal dictatorship holding a switch that could literally turn our economy off and on at will.
This is a bad reason to go to war. It would be cheaper, to say nothing of cost fewer lives, to spend the tens of billions of dollar it would cost to replicate that capacity in America.
This seems to be a popular talking point but also completely wrong.
It's the least critical bits of the east asian semi supply chain, i.e. not essential to military and majority of established industries. Leading edge TSMC fabs gets destroyed, we lose a few nodes and some industries / gamers get set back 10 years. Start a broader war with PRC over TW, PRC will start hitting semi supply chains in Korean / Japan where US assets are and basically global semi infra get set back decades. The difference is a few high tech US industries collapsing versus essentially all of US high tech manufacturing / way of life collapsing for decades. Semi capability is so rare and concentrated in east Asia that PRC has the button on silicon mutually assured distruction. At the end of the day, US/west who has broad leadin IC loses much more than PRC in a semi MAD scenario.