OPINION:
As President Trump’s summit with his Chinese counterpart approaches, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has sent a direct and important message to Apple: Do not buy memory chips from China.
Still, the administration’s bigger challenge is that there may not be enough non-Chinese memory chips to buy, especially if production does not accelerate.
As a retired military officer, I see this less as a debate about a single company and more as a warning about what we call “the tyranny of logistics.”
In the military, we learned a simple lesson: You cannot declare something strategically essential and just assume it will be available when you need it. You have to build the capacity, relationships and supply arrangements that enable availability.
The United States has spent years talking about semiconductor resilience. Both the Trump and Biden administrations took steps in the right direction to enable the development of a domestic chip ecosystem. We have invested billions of dollars in domestic manufacturing. We have encouraged and incentivized companies to build manufacturing plants here. We have tightened restrictions on Chinese technology.
However, to tackle the short- and medium-term memory chip supply crunch that is sending companies into the arms of an economically insatiable China, we should stop thinking about this as an American manufacturing problem alone.
Domestic investment is not enough to secure the semiconductor supply chain. Chip manufacturers and other ecosystem players need policy certainty — including clear export-control and licensing guidance — in order to create resilient, allied supply chains that are not reliant on China. The answer is stronger cooperation with two of our closest allies: Japan and South Korea.
The United States, South Korea and Japan agree that semiconductor resilience is a shared economic and national security objective. Now they need to turn that agreement into an operating framework for supply assurance, matching each country’s strengths to market needs. South Korea is a global memory powerhouse; Japan remains indispensable across semiconductor materials, equipment and components; and the United States leads in advanced chip design and is investing heavily in onshoring production.
Washington should build on these complementary strengths and ensure a coordinated approach to export controls and restrictions on Chinese chip suppliers, in close coordination with our allies.
Just as important as policy and export control alignment, the three countries should coordinate where new capacity makes the most strategic sense. We do not need three identical semiconductor ecosystems — we need a single interconnected and resilient powerhouse. America can expand leading-edge logic, memory and advanced packaging. Korea can bring its enormous expertise in memory and manufacturing scale. Japan can provide critical materials, equipment and components while expanding its own production of strategic chips. The objective should be redundancy across the alliance to protect supply even as demand skyrockets.
Most important, it means connecting our industrial policy to the realities of the marketplace.
Korean companies are already signing long-term supply arrangements with major U.S. technology companies and breaking ground in the United States, demonstrating that the commercial foundation for such alliances exists. In the most recent example, SK hynix’s new $4 billion facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, will bring high-bandwidth memory production lines to U.S. soil. The task for governments is to encourage policies that deepen these allied, cross-border relationships, making them more predictable and more resilient — not after the shortage arrives, but before it does.
With both policy and demand certainty, investors are incentivized to dedicate capital to the infrastructure build-out. A semiconductor company is far more likely to accelerate a new fab, expand a production line or make a risky capacity investment if it knows that American and allied customers will actually buy the output — and that the policy environment will not shift too quickly. Customers can provide the certainty that allows producers to invest in future demand. Government can help create that certainty without permanently dictating who buys what.
Recently, our military has discovered that it is severely constrained by the availability of munitions and production capacity. The Pentagon is rapidly attempting to address this issue.
Semiconductors deserve the same treatment, so we never have to choose between national security and economic reality. We can use demand from American companies to pull investment into American, Japanese and South Korean semiconductor capacity faster — and create a policy environment and supply network in which China is no longer the obvious answer when the market gets tight.
Resilience is built not by hoping the supply will be there, but by creating the conditions that make it inevitable.
• U.S. Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Stephen A. Cheney (retired), president emeritus of the American Security Project, served 30 years in uniform, including as commanding general at Parris Island and inspector general of the Marine Corps.
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