Russian industry now faces difficulties in acquiring crucial tools and components. But the long-term consequences of the sanctions are clear and severe. Plenty of questions remain in the short term. sanctions had reduced Russia’s currency to “ rubble.” Yet in the past few weeks, the currency has rebounded, while the country shows no outward signs of crisis. On March 27, President Joe Biden claimed that U.S.

This article is a product of a workshop on “The Global Order after Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House on April 14, 2022. For more information, see Miller is assistant professor at The Fletcher School and Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He received his PhD and MA from Yale University and his BA in history from Harvard University. He has previously served as the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He is the author of three other books on Russia, including Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia We Shall Be Masters: Russia's Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR. He is author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, a geopolitical history of the computer chip. At stake is America's military superiority, economic prosperity, and its technological future.Ĭhris Miller is Associate Professor of International History, where his research focuses on technology, geopolitics, economics, international affairs, and Russia. Today China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US, even as its growing military might makes it conceivable for Chinese leaders to dream of seizing Taiwan.

Now, America's edge is slipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and, above all, China. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the predominant superpower. Virtually everything-from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market-runs on chips. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. In terms of shaping the balance of power, microchips are the new oil-the scarce resource on which the modern world depends.

Putinomics by Chris Miller