I’m not going to lie, I could not finish this book. After a while, I found the short chapters which would often seem to talk about the “piercing blue eyes” of some person etc, I just could not find it in me to continue. There seems to be simultaneously too much detail and not enough information.
The one key idea which I got from this book (the bits I did read), is that I had not previously considered:
- The provision of some technologies are key to national security
- It can be more important to to keep the knowledge and production of those technologies close to home such that it’s possible to benefit from them in times of conflict (and deny your enemy that benefit)
- That dynamic was important during the build up of the modern silicon era
It makes you wonder how the same applies to the internet era - e.g. social media. It’s arguable that social media has already been used as a geopolitical weapon. Through this lens, the US attempting to ban tiktok certainly is a purely anti-china play, and more a case of keeping “control” of a strategically important set of assets.
I could not reconcile the book I read with the reviews on amazon, so perhaps I’m in the minority here.