Agreed, though the software part is a bit mystifying to me. It's not like Europe doesn't have good software engineers, so the fact that so many of Europe's carmakers are having so many problems competing on software is jarring. It has to be some kind of institutional/cultural clash within these organizations.
For the vast majority of military applications, including missiles, you do not want to use bleeding edge chip tech. You use 50nm or higher, anything with smaller feature sizes is not robust enough for a military environment.
See, this was always the problem with Chinese efforts to indigenize their semiconductor industry. Each individual Chinese firm had no incentive to use Chinese suppliers, rather than their more established Western competitors. Well, guess what, the US Government has solved that coordination problem for them. Just about every Chinese company, up and down the supply chain, now has an excellent reason to buy Chinese. Sure, they'll take years to work out the kinks, and there will be lots of chances to point and laugh in the meantime. But in the long run, the Sullivan-Blinken strategy of squeezing the Chinese chip industry might end up being one of the most counterproductive geostrategic ideas of all time.
It's not (or at least not just) about subsidies, cheap Chinese labor, etc. It's a fairly classic tech disruption story. Globally, the established carmakers know the future is electric, but they've got existing plants, workers who are trained to build ICEs, long established suppliers who make ICE parts, and so forth. You can argue that executives are being paid big bucks to solve such issues, which is true, but it's truly a hard problem. Especially when these are real factories and workers and industrial equipment you're dealing with.
But why did the disrupters come from China? Everyone is pointing to state support and existing strengths in battery tech, which are supply side factors, but there are also reasons on the demand side. Chinese people have relatively few cars (300 cars per capita, versus 850 per Capita in the US or 603 in the UK). As people get richer and start buying cars, there's a chance for EV makers to get in the door. This, by the way, is why it makes sense that the Chinese EVs are entering on the cheap end of the market, whereas Tesla, which started out selling to western consumers, entered on the premium end.
China has its own ICE carmakers, but they aren't established enough (and politically connected enough) to really push back against the onslaught of EV firms. (China can hardly impose tariffs on itself...) And at this point, the smarter ones like Geely have decided to go with the flow.
The problem is that the main American(*) EV maker, Tesla, is politically toxic to the save-the-planet camp. Whereas the favored US carmakers are incompetent.
(*) Looked at another way, Tesla is part of the Chinese EV wave, not in opposition to it. More than 50 percent of its manufacturing capacity and profits are from its Shanghai plant.
Unfortunately, his opinion on this matter is essentially irrelevant, except possibly as a PR exercise. As things stand, it's up to the US and Russia to hash out a deal, and Ukraine will have to accept whatever terms they come up with. Such is life when your country is a geostrategic playing field.
In practice, authoritarian countries that you're friendly with are treated as honorary democracies, and democracies you have a spat with become honorary dictatorships.
That is just learned helplessness. No matter what development pathway you want to aim for, good ports are almost always one of the most important pieces of infrastructure a country can possess. And South America's weak international and intra-regional connectivity is one of its biggest things holding it back, and has been for decades.
Every major infrastructure project will come with a long list of nimby complaints. Thing is, developing countries actually need these projects to improve people's livelihoods in the long run.
South Korea's conservative ruling party, the People Power Party (PPP), is pushing for legislation that would give the semiconductor industry subsidies and an exemption from a national cap on working hours.
Yes, that's what South Korea needs.... longer working hours...
Ukraine drank the kool-aid, and fooled themselves into thinking that if you slap a "freedom and democracy" sticker on and cozy up to the West, they'll always back you no matter what.
In reality, countries behave as paranoid amoral assholes for a good reason.
An important point that isn't mentioned in this article is that when the US targets third countries in their efforts to kneecap Chinese companies, it is hurting its own geostrategic interests. The US has been working hard to draw countries like Vietnam and Indonesia into its orbit as part of its containment strategy against China, but when it slaps tariffs on exports from these countries, years of diplomatic goodwill get instantly cancelled out. Especially since the US nowadays has no economic carrots to offer suitors, thanks to its bipartisan anti-trade turn. It's all sticks.
Economic development isn't so easy, or more countries would already be rich. Look at peer countries: in 1970, China had around the same GDP per capita as India and lower than Indonesia, now it's about 50% higher than Indonesia and 170% higher than India. If you view this through the institutions lens (which is the whole point of Robinson's work), it's hard to avoid concluding that China's institutions aren't particularly extractive, compared to nominally democratic countries at the same stage of development.
Whether this will continue to be the case is an open question. The doomer case for China is pretty fashionable, but again it's useful to do a comparison. Look at the middle income countries and ask which ones can make it out of the middle income trap, and transition into an advanced economy. China stands a much better chance than almost any other middle income country, just from the fact that it's already at the technology frontier in many industries.
I mean, there's plenty of mediocre/bad IRL engineering too.