As ballot boxes open in Israel on Tuesday, Israelis hope to break the political deadlock paralysing the country for the past three and a half years.  

The fifth election since 2019 has seen Israel gain the dubious honour of having the highest election frequency of any parliamentary democracy in the world. Yet opinion polls are predicting another tight race. And, once again, elections are set to be dominated by former Prime Minister Netanyahu, now in the running to regain power. 

His main rival is caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid, a centrist currently leading the coalition who ousted Netanyahu in 2021 after 12 years as prime minister.  

More than 12 months later, the prospect of voting for Netanyahu comes with baggage. He is currently embroiled in a corruption trial and is expected to unite with far-right parties in order to attempt to form a coalition government.  

Even so, “Netanyahu still commands a lot of popularity, whether it’s because people still believe in his politics or they just don’t think there’s anyone else,” says Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst for Israel-Palestine at International Crisis Group in Tel Aviv. 

‘Political survival’ 

Netanyahu’s legal troubles have been ongoing since 2019, when he was indicted for breach of trust, accepting bribes and fraud, and legally obliged to give up ministry portfolios except for his position as prime minister.  

Accusations include that Netanyahu accepted expensive gifts from wealthy acquaintances, bribed an official to drop charges against his wife, and discussed legislation to harm certain national newspapers.  

Yet the legal scandal does not seem to have dented public opinion. In 2021 his Likud party received about a quarter of the total vote. 

Among some Israeli Jews, “there’s still the belief that he is the most able and the most competent Prime Ministerial candidate,” says Hugh Lovatt, senior policy officer at the European Council on Foreign Relations based in London. “He may have his personal problems, but he has been, in their view, able to safeguard Israel’s security interests and advance Israeli foreign policy.” 

The assurance of safety is powerful at a moment when recent terror attacks have lowered the numbers of people polled in Israel who feel optimistic about the future of national security from 52% in August to 43% in October.  

It is expected that if Netanyahu returns to power, he will continue to pursue long-held political objectives: fighting  a possible Iranian nuclear deal and the rejection of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. 

Rhetoric around annexing parts of the West Bank and expanding Jewish settlements can also be expected to return, even if major action is less likely. A commitment to remaining in power makes Netanyahu a naturally “cautious and careful” politician, Lovatt says. “His political survival rests on not upending the status quo too much.” 

An attack on the courts? 

Political survival is a running theme in Netanyahu’s policy pronouncements. He has said he would ‘neutralise’ a historic agreement with Lebanon formalising maritime borders between the two countries signed by Israel’s current prime minister – and Netanyahu’s main opposition – in October 2022. Critics say Netanyahu would have made “exactly the same deal” had he been in power. 

Critics are also concerned that a return to power would see Netanyahu weaken state institutions to consolidate his position. 

If Netanyahu’s center-right party, Likud, does not gain the 61 seats required for a parliamentary majority, he is expected to unite with the ultranationalist Religious Zionism bloc. Both parties have an interest in modifying Israel’s judiciary system. 

On the far right, Israel’s highest court is accused of being too liberal, and of not protecting Jewish interests – for example, failing to reject the maritime deal with Lebanon.  

“They feel the Supreme Court has been far too activist, and that the Knesset [Israel’s legislative body] should have a greater say,” says Lovatt.

For Netanyahu, taming national courts is a means to ending his legal problems. The co-leader of the Religious Zionism alliance, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has already pledged to demand legislation that would cancel Netanyahu’s corruption trial if he were made a member of Israel’s next government.

“There’s an assumption that Netanyahu has promised far-right politicians cabinet positions in return for them pushing a law that would make the judicial system less independent,” says Zonszein.  

‘Last chance to win’

There are signs that some in politics are tiring of Netanyahu’s dominance. In 2021, he was ousted by an unlikely coalition that united left-wing, far-right and Arab political parties keen to block him from power.  

Although the group surprised many by staying in power for more than a year, ultimately ideological differences won out. Right-wing Jewish nationalists withdrew support over disagreements on whether to maintain legal protections giving Jewish settlers in the West Bank rights that Palestinians living there do not have, such as access to Israeli health insurance. 

Despite his longevity, Netanyahu’s presence in political life may even be a contributing factor to ongoing instability in Israeli politics. “On paper, you have enough votes to form a right-wing coalition,” says Lovatt, “but a lot of right-wing groups won’t sit with Netanyahu. If Netanyahu was no longer on the political scene, the main obstacle to forming a right-wing coalition would disappear.”   

Within his own party, too, some are keen for change. “There are members who are sick of him, but they can’t say it out loud yet because there’s nobody who has risen up to take it over,” says Zonszein. “But they’re saying this is the last election that Netanyahu has a chance to win and if he doesn’t win, his time is up.” 

A deciding factor could be the Arab vote – if voters can be mobilised. “They are the biggest opponent to the right in this election because they make up 20% of the population,” says Zonszein. “If they voted in high numbers, the Arab vote would sway the election.”  

Voting closes on Tuesday at 10pm in Israel, but negotiations between parties to form coalitions and decide on a new prime minister are likely to take weeks. So far opinion polls have predicted a race that is too close to call. 

 

Raihana M* was in her living room in the Afghan capital, Kabul, when she first heard of protests erupting across the border in neighbouring Iran following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for allegedly breaching Iran’s strict dress code. 

The Afghan social worker saw footage of the protests in Iran on Manoto TV, a London-based Persian language TV station, and said she felt an immediate, almost physical, rush of solidarity for her Iranian sisters. 

“I was really shocked and sad. As an Afghan, as a woman, I felt solidarity because we are experiencing the same thing. Only it’s worse for women in Afghanistan,” she explained in a phone interview from Kabul. 

That was in late September, not long after 22-year-old Amini was declared dead by the Iranian authorities. Raihana then took to social media, watching clips of protests across Iranian cities and towns. 

Other Afghan women living under the Taliban regime were also doing the same. Within days, a group of around 30 Afghan women gathered outside the Iranian embassy in Kabul chanting, “Zan, zendagi, azadi!” (Women, life, freedom), echoing the protest cry from Iran. They also held banners proclaiming, “From Kabul to Iran, say no to dictatorship!”.

Taliban officials then moved in to break up the demonstration, firing into the air and threatening to hit the women with their rifle butts.  

Lina Qasimi, an Afghan teenager who has been unable to go to school since the Taliban shut down secondary schools, has also been keenly following the protests in Iran. “I feel very close to this. It’s really terrible. No one should be killed for just showing their hair. But in Afghanistan, it’s not just hair, it’s women. Just being a woman is a problem for the Taliban,” she said. 

With a 921 km border dividing the two countries, Tehran and Kabul have a complicated history of wars, border skirmishes, smuggling networks, migrations, and discrimination in Iran against Afghan refugees. But they also share cultural ties, common linguistic traditions, and centuries of empathy that is probably best described in the lyrics of revered Iranian songwriter, Bijan Taraghi, who famously wrote, “Though your child threw a stone at our window/It did not break our lasting bond”. 

‘Afghan women are really alone’ 

As protests spread across Iran, both Raihana and Qasimi were struck by the extraordinary scenes of Iranian men joining the women in their anti-regime demonstrations. “The difference is, in Iran, all the people are standing up. Iranian women and men are really protesting in unity,” noted Raihana. “In Afghanistan, it’s not like that – people are so afraid. Afghan women are really alone.” 

That’s true, says Tamim Asey, co-founder of the Kabul-based Institute for War and Peace Studies and a former Afghan deputy defence minister. “Iranian women have the support of men in considerable ways. Afghan women don’t have that. Afghan men have suffered 40 years of war, so much violence, so much killing. The Taliban are also putting tremendous pressure on the men. If some women protest, they find their husbands, fathers, brothers and arrest them,” he explained. 

Afghan women began protesting the week after the Taliban seized control of Kabul on August 15, 2021, despite the grave risk of confronting a movement of hardline Islamist male fighters.  

The crackdown has been brutal and extends to male relatives of ‘troublesome’ women, according to rights groups. In a report last week, the New York-based Human Rights Watch detailed the cases of three women, who were arrested with their husbands and children, separated under detention and severely tortured. The detained women included Tamana Paryani, who filmed herself pleading for help as the Taliban broke into her house at night in January after she joined a women’s protest demanding the right to education and work.

 

‘We are not allowed to do anything’ 

And yet, the women’s protests in Afghanistan have continued. Following an October 1 attack on an education centre in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barachi neighbourhood, which killed more than 50 mostly female students, protests by women and girls erupted in several Afghan cities, including Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat and Bamiyan. 

But they failed to get the sort of media attention and solidarity displays that the Iranian protests have attracted across the world.

On Saturday, around 80,000 people from across Europe demonstrated in Berlin in solidarity with the protest movement in Iran. Global celebrities, including leading French actress Juliette Binoche, have filmed themselves cutting locks of hair in public displays of protest against Amini’s death in custody.

“The international support for Iranian women has been phenomenal. US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, actors, designers, celebrities have all condemned the persecution and expressed support for the Iranian protesters. The same thing does not happen for Afghan women – even though they originally started the protest movement that had a spillover effect in Iran. And they raised their voices against a far more brutal, dogmatic regime,” said Asey. 

The international engagement in Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous fallout of the hasty US withdrawal, could account for the lack of global interest, according to experts. “Over the last 20 years, Western countries have supported Afghan women in various forms and forums. The West feels it’s done so much, now it’s time for Afghan women to take it on. In Iran, that support wasn’t there,” explained Asey. 

But for Afghan women, taking on the Taliban’s restrictive policies is a monumental task. 

The fear of crackdowns and surveillance have forced Qasimi and her friends to take to social media and avoid the streets. But even the online solidarity is restricted to “live stories” – which typically expire after 24 hours – and not “posts” that stay online until they are deleted.

“It’s the only way I can say anything. It’s too dangerous to post anything critical. The Taliban will find you and they can do anything. We are not allowed to do anything. We’re not allowed to go to school, even if we just go outside, we fear we may not come back home,” explained the Afghan teenager. 

At 26, Raihana, on the other hand, completed her education during the US intervention years. She is among the few, lucky women in the country to still have her job, at an international NGO. The Afghan aid worker did not want her real name or that of her employer revealed due to the security risks. And there are many. In the mornings, Raihana dons an abaya, an all-black robe worn in Gulf countries that has made its way to Afghanistan. Their office car, with female and male colleagues, takes different routes each day to avoid Taliban checkpoints as they make their way to work, offering essential humanitarian services that the Taliban fails to provide Afghans. 

The differences between the women-led protest movements in Afghanistan and Iran extend to the scope of their demands, according to Barnett Rubin, a leading Afghanistan expert and former special advisor to the late US Ambassador for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke. “The Iranian demonstrations are centrally against enforcement of hijab and then more broadly “freedom.” Education of girls and women is a non-issue in Iran. In Afghanistan, women are protesting about issues of basic rights and survival and not, so far, about hijab,” explained Rubin in emailed comments to FRANCE 24. 

Spillover effect – or not 

From her home in Kabul, Raihana says she is closely monitoring the situation in Iran. “If the protests work, if the Iranian government makes changes, if the restrictions on hijab change, I think the Taliban will see it. They will learn that if they continue like this, it could happen here,” she said. 

But Asey is not as optimistic. “My assessment and reading of the situation is that the Taliban barely cares about the women’s movement in Iran. They’re not afraid of a spillover,” he maintained. 

As a former deputy defence minister, Asey explained that Kabul’s main concerns with Tehran are focused on border issues, including drug trafficking and migration. 

Protests in Iran have indeed spread to the impoverished province of Sistan-Baluchistan – which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan – including a September 30 “Black Friday” massacre, when Iranian security forces opened fire on protesters, killing at least 66 people.

But the unrest in the remote Iranian border province involves longstanding governance and religious rights issues between the predominantly Sunni Baloch ethnic group and Shiite authorities in Tehran, explained Asey.

Despite the odd border clashes and demonstrations over the mistreatment of Afghans in Iran, the Taliban have managed a working relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran since the August 2021 takeover of Afghanistan.  

Both administrations are wary of the West, particularly the US. When it comes to women’s rights, the situation in Iran may not be as bleak as in Afghanistan, but the two Islamic administrations are joined in their bid to silence female voices – and blame the West’s “corrupting influence” when that fails. 

“I understand that the Taliban and Iran have some connection. There are meetings, discussions between them,” said Raihana. “Also, the Taliban stopped the protest in support of Iranian women outside the Iranian embassy in Kabul. It shows some support for each other.” 

But Afghan women are also drawing moral support from their Iranian sisters across the border and are determined to keep up the pressure for their basic human rights. 

*Name changed to protect identity 

 

Shortly before arriving at the Paris Motor Show on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron told the financial daily Les Echos that his administration wanted to make electric vehicles “accessible to everyone”.

Macron then proceeded to announce a series of measures to enable households to acquire electric vehicles. With the EU seeking to ban the sale of combustion engine vehicles from 2035, France is trying to gradually phase out fossil-fuel cars. While the move is seen as an essential step on the road to energy transition, it also poses a serious problem: it will require massive quantities of metals needed to manufacture batteries, especially lithium.

The figures speak for themselves. Since 2015, production volumes of lithium – also known as “white gold” – have tripled worldwide, reaching 100,000 tonnes per year by 2021, according to the International Energy Agency. The volumes could increase sevenfold by 2030. At the European level, about 35 times more lithium will be needed in 2050 than today, according to an April study by KU Leuven, a Catholic research university in Belgium.

“We are at a stage where all countries are starting their energy transition more or less at the same time and this generates very significant metal needs,” noted Olivier Vidal, a geologist and director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). “This will certainly create tensions in the coming years, with expected increases in costs and, possibly, supply difficulties. So, there is a real strategic and sovereignty issue for states.”

The European Commission is well aware of these concerns and included lithium in the list of critical raw materials with a risk of shortage, back in 2020. Lithium “will soon be even more important than oil and gas”, said European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen in September 2022.

Extraction projects in their infancy

Lithium production today is dominated by just a handful of countries: Australia, which has 20% of the world’s reserves of “white gold”, and Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, which have 60%. China, on the other hand, was an early investor in refining and controls 17% of the world’s lithium production. With just five countries controlling 90% of world production, the International Energy Agency calls it a “quasi-monopoly” situation.

Europe hopes to make the most of the new “white gold” rush by exploiting its own subsoil. The continent’s main reserves are in Portugal, Germany, Austria and Finland. In France, the French Geological and Mining Research Bureau (BRGM) drew up an inventory in 2018 highlighting reserves in Alsace, the Massif Central region, as well as in the Armorican Massif area in Brittany.

Europe’s lithium extraction and production projects have been mostly undertaken by small and medium-scale companies across the continent. “The most successful ones are in Finland. Lithium production could start in 2024 thanks to the exploitation of a small mining site located about 600 km north of Helsinki,” explained Christian Hocquard, a geologist-economist and co-author of a book on lithium energy transition. “In the Czech Republic, an Australian company, European Metals, wants to exploit old tin mines located north of Prague. There are similar projects in Germany and Austria,” he noted.

“These are generally minor projects, carried out by small companies. The big ones prefer to invest in Australia or Latin America,” explained Hocquard. “Few of them will see the light of day, blocked by the difficulties of obtaining permits but above all due to resistance from local communities,” he predicted.

Facing the environmental consequences of our consumption

Mining projects often faced public discontent. In Portugal, an open-pit mine – the largest in Western Europe – was supposed to be built in 2026 in the village of Covas do Barroso. Work has however been currently suspended following numerous protests. In Serbia, the opening of the Jedar mine was cancelled a few months before the January 2022 presidential election. In France, Barbara Pompili, former ecological transition minister, floated the idea of exploiting lithium in the tiny village of Tréguennec, in Brittany’s Finistère region back in February 2021. The area however is classified as a protected zone and sparked a local outcry.

Lithium extraction “produces considerable volumes of waste that must then be stored. The waste can also lead to water or air pollution,” explained Vidal.

While Vidal views the outcry as “completely understandable”, he nevertheless supports these projects. “It would be much more ethical. We consume lithium daily, it would be normal for us to suffer the impacts related to our use. Today, this pollution already exists, but in other countries, far from our eyes. This would raise awareness among users, who would be confronted with the impacts of their consumption,” he said.

France looks to ‘green lithium’

France, for its part, is studying an alternative, called the extraction of “green lithium”. Unlike extractions from rocks or salt deserts, which function like traditional mines, “green lithium” is produced from geothermal sources, with an extraction method similar to that of a well. In France’s Alsace region, the European project EuGeLi (for European Geothermal Lithium) is a pioneer in this field. It recently succeeded in extracting its first kilograms of lithium using this technique. “For the time being, however, the technique remains too expensive to be considered on an industrial level,” noted Hocquard.

The other alternative is to focus on refining lithium rather than mining it. A project was announced in Germany in early June and the Strasbourg-based company Viridian Lithium plans to open the first French lithium factory for batteries there by the end of 2025. It will source ores from Latin America and aims to produce 100,000 tons of lithium hydroxide by 2030. “This would not solve the issue of dependence, but it would create know-how and jobs,” said Vidal.

From an ecological perspective, this would also have a major advantage. At present, lithium is almost systematically transited through China to be refined. The EU now plans to open three “gigafactories” for battery production.

Focusing on battery recycling

Vidal warns that even if all these projects come to fruition, they would still not be able to compete with the salt deserts of South America or with Australian production. “On the other hand, where the European Union could really make its mark in the coming years is in battery recycling,” he noted.

“Currently, the quantities of metals to be recycled are still limited since lithium batteries did not exist ten years ago. But by 2035, we will have batteries for electric vehicles at the end of their life and therefore a stock that can be recycled,” he explained. According to the University of Leuven, 40% to 75% of the EU’s metal needs could be met through recycling by 2050. This would guarantee supply security as well as reduce the environmental impact.

“For that to happen, we have to act now,” said Vidal. “We need to design products that will be easily recyclable, at lower cost, to reassure investors.”

But most important, according to Vidal, is our consumption habits. “We need to think about our uses. Lithium is certainly used in car batteries, but also in many everyday gadgets,” he explained. “One of the levers is also to learn to move towards more material sobriety.”

 

Sun Chunlan is a special case in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) galaxy: She is the only woman in the Politburo, the Beijing regime’s powerful executive body. But it’s not for long. Sun is expected to step down from her post during the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress, the weeklong, twice-a-decade meeting, which began on Sunday, October 16. At 72, China’s “Iron Lady” is past the usual retirement age of 68.

The nerve center of Chinese power could therefore be composed solely of men, aggravating a chronic problem of gender underrepresentation in the nation’s halls of power.

Since 2017, Sun has embodied the CCP’s image of a party unafraid to promote women to top positions. She holds the prestigious title of vice premier, one of only four in the 25-member Politburo.

‘Women hold up half the sky’, but men rule

Sun’s “Iron Lady” moniker has been reinforced over the past two years, since President Xi Jinping appointed her as the country’s top official overseeing China’s Covid-19 pandemic response.

She has been the enforcer of Xi’s “zero-Covid” policy – proof, if proof were needed, that the country’s only female vice premier enjoys the president’s complete confidence to manage one of the most serious health crises confronting the Chinese leader since he came to power in 2012.

But managing the controversial public health policy is not exactly a political gift. Some China experts believe Xi found in Sun an easy “zero-Covid” scapegoat to be sacrificed if his management of the pandemic becomes too contentious. The health dossier has also traditionally been entrusted to women in Communist China; one of Sun’s Politburo predecessors was Wu Yi, who had to deal with the 2003 SARS epidemic.

Nevertheless, Sun’s departure will leave a void in the party’s upper echelons. There are other female candidates for the coveted Politburo post, including Shen Yiqin, the only woman to serve as party general secretary of an entire province, Guizhou, in southern China. Shen also hails from the Bai ethnic minority, “which – cynically speaking – means she simultaneously checks the woman box and the ethnic minority box”, noted the China Project website.

But “nothing obliges the CCP to replace Sun Chunlan with another woman”, explained Valarie Tan from the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics). The likely absence of women in the next Politburo, to be unveiled during the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress, would not be surprising since Sun’s position represents the exception to the rule.

In theory, Communist China claims to be one of the most egalitarian regimes in the world. Schoolchildren across the country are familiar with founding father Mao Zedong’s famous “women hold up half the sky” quote reinforcing constitutional equal rights. “From the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the CCP has placed equality between women and men as one of the characteristics that distinguish the Communist state from the ‘old China’,” explained Cheng Li, from the Washington-based Brookings Institution, in a report on female representation in Chinese politics.

A very patriarchal party

But the reality is quite different for a country with around 703 million women, constituting 48.7 percent of the total population.

Since 1949, there have been only six women in the CCP Politburo. Three of them were the wives of the founders of Communist China. Among the more than 300 members of the Central Committee – who elect Politburo members and endorse their decisions – there are barely 30 women. In short, only “eight percent of the party’s leadership positions have been given to women”, noted Tan.

The Politburo – of which Sun is a member – in turn selects the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. The current Standing Committee has seven members, none of them women.

This underrepresentation is not due to a lack of Chinese women choosing political careers. Between January 2020 and June 2021, for instance, nearly half of new party members were women.

The 20th Congress could have been the occasion to spearhead the fight against the political glass ceiling since the meeting provides an occasion for a major renewal of the party’s upper echelons. But the chances of significant change in female representation are slim.

For starters, the reasons for male domination in top political positions have not been questioned. The party’s executive positions are often reserved for “leaders who had held managerial roles at state-owned enterprises, ministries and regional governments, positions for which women were often bypassed”, noted Minglu Chen, from the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre, in the South China Morning Post.

Secondly, promotion within the CCP is “entirely based on factional ties rather than individual merits”, Bo Zhiyue, an expert in Chinese elite politics based in New Zealand, told the South China Morning Post. “This has created a very helpless situation because it’s a selection, not an election,” he added.

To rise to the top of the political ladder, aspirants need the right support, and women often have less direct access to those few party figures who can promote their protégés.

Xi is also no champion of women in politics. He embodies “the CCP’s very patriarchal approach to society”, argues Tan. The end of the one-child policy in 2021 was an opportunity for the Chinese president to insist on the importance of “traditional family values”. He has even initiated a campaign to exalt “the unique physical and mental traits [of women] for giving birth and caring for newborns”. In other words, the Chinese leader would rather see women at home than in the office.

A demographic crisis, but women don’t have a say

This lack of women in leadership has important economic and social consequences, noted Tan. “One of the root causes of the current demographic crisis in China is the underrepresentation of women in important positions,” she explained. “The problems of almost half the population are not, or barely, represented in the CCP.”

And so, the incentive to have children is essentially “money distributed to families, without taking into account the deeper reasons why Chinese women do not want to have more children”, explained Tan.

Chinese authorities are also not severe enough when it comes to tackling domestic abuse and violence against women in general, noted Tan. The impunity that some powerful men involved in sexual assault scandals seem to enjoy – such as former vice premier Zhang Gaoli, who is accused of rape by tennis player Peng Shuai – reinforces a “climate that does not make women want to have children”, said Tan.

Communist party honchos who have been setting priorities in recent years to encourage people to have more children “could have benefitted from conversations with women on the Standing Committee”, noted the China Project, referring to the tiny group of Politburo Standing Committee members selected by the 25-member Politburo. “Too bad there weren’t any.”

This article is a translation from the original in French.

 

The Chinese Communist Party Congress opens in Beijing on October 16, a week after Washington imposed tight restrictions on exports of invaluable semiconductor technology to China in a bid to stop it from surpassing the US economically and militarily. As semiconductors emerge as a key battleground, FRANCE 24 spoke to the author of a new bestseller on these all-important pieces of silicon.

For years, semiconductors have been crucial to everything from refrigerators to ballistic missiles. But only recently have they captured public attention.

Washington demonstrated the US semiconductor industry’s almighty power in 2018 when Donald Trump’s Commerce Department banned Chinese telecoms firm ZTE from buying chips designed in the US. These measures nearly drove the company to collapse before the erratic then-president reversed the measure.

But semiconductors only came to dominate the headlines in early 2021. A constellation of factors – notably Covid lockdowns warping consumer demand – sparked a chip shortage crisis, which pushed up inflation and caused shortages of goods from cars to mobile phones.

Now the spotlight is on semiconductors once more ahead of the Chinese Communist Party Congress, after President Joe Biden’s Commerce Department unveiled on October 7 sweeping new measures curtailing US exports of semiconductor technology to China. This was part of Biden’s response to President Xi Jinping’s plans to wean China off US-designed chips and make it a world leader in the sector.

To look more closely at how semiconductors rose to the forefront of international economics and politics, FRANCE 24 spoke to Chris Miller, author of the recently published bestseller “Chip War” and associate professor of international history at Tufts University, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Eurasia Director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

What are semiconductor chips and how did they become so central to the world economy and daily life?

Semiconductors are small pieces of silicon with millions and billions of tiny circuits carved into them. These circuits provide the computing power inside almost any device with an on-off switch: smartphones, computers, datacentres, automobiles and dishwashers.

The typical person will interact with dozens if not hundreds of semiconductors each day, though we almost never see them.

How important was the US’s advantage in semiconductors to its victory in the Cold War?

The US advantage in computing was crucial. From the earliest days of the missile race, the Pentagon was fixated on applying computing power to defence systems. The first major application of chips was in missile guidance systems, but today they are used in everything from communications to sensors to electronic warfare.

Just as the typical person will interact with dozens of chips each day, militaries are crucially reliant on chips’ processing power and signals processing capability. What’s more, as militaries begin to experiment with increasingly autonomous systems, they’ll be even more reliant on advanced chips.

How did Taiwan – specifically the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – come to nearly dominate chip manufacturing? And what would happen to the world economy if TSMC’s facilities in Taiwan are damaged in war?

TSMC is the world’s most advanced maker of processor chips, thanks to its enormous scale and extraordinary manufacturing precision. Today, TSMC produces 90 percent of the most advanced processor chips, which go into everything from smartphones to PCs to datacentres.

If a war were to knock their production offline, the cost to the global economy would be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

In Europe there’s this perception that we are behind when it comes to high-tech industries, but Dutch company ASML is the big exception to this. How did it come to play an invaluable role in chip manufacturing?

ASML produces the machines without which advanced chips can’t be made.

ASML’s specialisation is in lithography, and it has 100 percent market share in the production of the most advanced lithography machines. It has honed these capabilities over many years and today is a critical supplier to companies like Samsung, TSMC and Intel.

For several years now, Washington has been worried about the national security implications of China catching up in the semiconductor business, especially in light of Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 initiative making chips a top priority.

Do you think China has what it takes to match or supersede the US when it comes to semiconductors?

China has been investing many tens of billions of dollars into government chip-development programs. These programmes have delivered substantial progress in some spheres, notably chip design.

However, across the board, China remains far behind capabilities in the US, South Korea or Taiwan in terms of fabricating chips. In addition, all chip fabrication in China today relies on machine tools imported from abroad, largely from the US, the Netherlands and Japan.

Do you think President Joe Biden’s plans to bring more chip production back to the US are a good idea, given the security implications of the overwhelming majority of manufacturing of advanced processor chips being based in Taiwan?

Today 90 percent of the world’s most advanced processor chips are produced in Taiwan. Given China’s growing military might and Xi Jinping’s aggressive nationalism, this is a risk to the global economy that has grown too large.

Efforts to diversify the geography of advanced chipmaking are a smart move from this perspective. This explains why the US, Japan and Europe are all trying to bolster their countries’ position in the semiconductor supply chain.

 

US President Joe Biden warned last week that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is now the highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis as Russia and North Korea engage in sabre-rattling on the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons. Such weapons are less destructive than “strategic” weapons designed to wipe out entire cities. But analysts worry that this talk of tactical weapons risks normalising weapons of mass destruction.

Nuclear-armed authoritarian states are increasingly invoking the spectre of using “tactical” nuclear weapons. North Korea said on Monday that it had simulated a “tactical” nuclear attack on South Korea. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly hinted at using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine as Moscow suffers heavy losses on the battlefield.

“Until this summer, people talked about nuclear weapons without really specifying what type they were – but then people started using this word ‘tactical’ increasingly often,” said Jean-Marie Collin, spokesman for the French branch of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Battlefield Weapons

Tactical nuclear weapons differ from the more commonly known “strategic” weapons principally due to the “technicalities” of physics, noted Alexandre Vautravers, a defence analyst and editor of specialist publication the Swiss Military Review.

Whereas a nuclear ballistic missile hits hard on all front –including the force of the blast, thermal impact, radiation and electromagnetic disturbances – a tactical nuclear weapon seeks to “maximise the shock wave while minimising other undesirable effects”, Vautravers said, noting that such a weapon might be preferable if the country deploying it later “needs to get its troops across the affected area”.

Tactical nuclear weapons are also easier to transport on the battlefield than strategic missiles, which are stored in silos or specially designed submarines or planes.

Another key difference between tactical and strategic nuclear devices is the military objective of using the weapon, said Fabian Rene Hoffman, a research fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project at the University of Oslo.

In theory, the purpose of strategic weapons is to “directly target other countries to prevent them attacking, while tactical warheads are supposed to be used to aid specific battlefield objectives”, said Jana Baldus, a nuclear arms control specialist at the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt.

Tactical nuclear weapons are seen as more precise and more limited in their effects: “The explosion takes place on the ground or at a very low altitude; the objective is to destroy infrastructure or a precise target – and the effects can be limited to a radius of a few hundred metres to a few kilometres,” Vautravers explained.

But tactical weapons are still seen as a last resort on the battlefield – for a military facing a threat conventional weapons cannot neutralise, or a target too big for conventional missiles to hit. As such, they could be used to destroy a large military base or a column of tanks advancing towards the front.

Trivialising Nukes?

Nuclear weapons have not been used on the battlefield outside of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and there has since been something of an international taboo against their use.

“There’s a significant chance that people today would think of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as tactical nuclear weapons,” Baldus said.

But the “line between the tactical and strategic is really artificial”, she said. “The US and Russia have had plenty of debates about what’s ‘tactical’ and what’s ‘strategic’ – but they’ve never been able to agree.”

This ambiguity is reflected in NATO’s own definitions of nuclear forces, which vary widely by country. For France, NATO’s definition of a “strategic” nuclear weapon is linked to intention, to the “doctrine of deterrence rather than to technical characteristics”. For Russia, a strategic nuclear weapon is defined by reach – notably, weapons “designed to engage objects in geographically remote strategic regions (over 5500 km)”.   

Some analysts warn that thinking of some nuclear weapons as less catastrophic than others minimises the risks to make the prospect of a “limited” nuclear deployment more tolerable.  

According to Hoffman, the increasing public use of the word “tactical” has a “highly political motive, which is to legitimise the use of nuclear weapons in a conflict”.

The term produces an “unconscious bias by making people think there is a type of nuclear weapon that is more acceptable than others because its use would be limited to military objectives”, Baldus said.  

This is a particularly dangerous argument because it tends to lull people into forgetting that all nuclear weapons – whether tactical or strategic – are “weapons of mass destruction”, said Collin.

And the relative power of nuclear weapons should not be underestimated, he said.

“It’s worth noting that the biggest conventional weapon in the US arsenal, known as MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb), has a destructive power equivalent to 11 tonnes of TNT whereas the least powerful of the supposedly ‘tactical’ Russian nuclear weapons has the destructive power of 300 tonnes of TNT,” Collin said.

Moreover, Russia’s fixation on tactical nuclear weapons risks setting off a new arms race. France currently has only strategic nuclear weapons. The US, meanwhile, has decommissioned its tactical arsenal in favour of conventional weapons.

But if Moscow continues invoking the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Europe, that could well push other nuclear powers to bolster their own “tactical” stockpiles. And the more weapons of mass destruction are in circulation, the greater the risk that they will eventually be used.

This article was translated from the original in French.