The Complexities Are Always Greater Than They Initially Seem

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In my latest column for AIER, I use two recent events in trade policy – one involving the sale of advanced microchips to China, the other involving “rare-earth minerals” – to highlight the surprising complexity of applying, in the real world, the national-security exception to a policy of free trade. Two slices:

The Trump administration lifted controls that restricted Nvidia’s exports of its H200 chips to China. (The administration made this move in exchange for the US government getting 25 percent of Nvidia’s revenues from these sales — an unjustifiable condition, but also a topic for another time.) The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal worries that China’s access to these chips will boost that country’s prospects of surpassing the US in AI technology. The reason, as described by the Journal’s Editors, is that advanced chips such as the H200s “are needed to train advanced AI models.” Unable so far to develop their own advanced chips, the Chinese will now use Nvidia’s chips to further “Beijing’s ambitions to dominate biotech, quantum computing and military power.”

Quite possibly, the Trump administration’s lifting of these controls will indeed undermine US national security. But also, quite possibly not. By supplying the bigger market opened to it by access to China, Nvidia can perhaps take advantage of larger economies of scale that will further improve its chip-making efficiency. And more-efficient advanced microchip production by a company such as Nvidia will, in turn, strengthen US national security.

In addition, Nvidia officials and the White House argue that Chinese dependence on non-Chinese advanced chips diminishes China’s prospects of developing its own advanced chips — an effect that also plausibly promotes US national security by retarding Chinese chip technology. Although acknowledging that this argument has some merit, the Journal believes that it doesn’t carry the day. The Journal worries that the improved computing power that China gains as a result of its access to the H200 chips will further, rather than frustrate, Beijing’s quest for AI dominance.

I have no idea which of these two arguments — to not restrict Nvidia’s sales of H200 chips to China or to restrict these sales — is correct. Not only do both have merit, neither argument seems strong enough to clearly defeat the other. And that’s the point.

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The above observations are offered not to render the national-security exception to the case for free trade null, but to caution against its overuse. The Trump administration’s recent treatment of the exportation of American-made advanced microchips, along with its actions regarding rare-earth minerals, each in its own way demonstrates (if unintentionally) the shallowness of the conventional advice to protect any and all industries that produce outputs judged to be important for national security.