Chris Miller

When Chris Miller’s Chip War was published on 4 October 2022, it had the strange good fortune of becoming a policy document. Three days later, the Biden administration unveiled the most sweeping semiconductor export controls in history — barring China from advanced chips and the tools to make them, and forbidding “US persons” from helping. Miller had not written the controls. But he had written the book that explained their logic to everyone else, and overnight a Tufts historian best known for work on the Soviet economic collapse became the most-cited public translator of the central technological contest of the age.

That trajectory — from the demise of the USSR to the silicon fabs of Taiwan — is the key to understanding him. Miller is not a technologist. He is an economic and diplomatic historian who looked at the chip industry and recognised something familiar: a strategic commodity, concentrated in a few hands, around which great powers organise their rivalries. He did for the microchip what an earlier generation did for oil — turned an input into a story about power.

The Historian Who Wandered Into Silicon¶

Miller is Professor of International History at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, with a BA in history from Harvard and a master’s and doctorate from Yale. His first books were about Russia — the Gorbachev-era economic crisis, Putinomics, Russia’s recurring pivots to Asia. He came to semiconductors, by his own account, through the Cold War arms race, the original subject of his interest in how technology and state power intertwine. He also keeps a foot in the policy-and-money world: a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, a directorship at the geopolitical advisory firm Greenmantle, a role at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

That blend matters, because it shapes the book. Chip War reads like strategic history, not industry analysis — it is interested in personalities, industrial policy, and national rivalry, not in the physics of transistors. It is the work of someone trained to see a supply chain the way Mahan saw sea lanes: as the physical substrate of power, and therefore as a map of where power can be choked.

Chips Are the New Oil¶

The thesis announces itself in the title’s pun. For decades the cliché has been that “data is the new oil.” Miller inverts it: the scarce, strategic resource is not data but the capacity to process it — and that capacity rests on a supply chain of almost absurd fragility. The modern economy, and the modern military, run on computing power, and computing power runs through a handful of chokepoints that no rival can quickly reproduce.

Two of those chokepoints carry the whole argument. The first is TSMC, the Taiwanese company that fabricates roughly nine-tenths of the world’s most advanced chips — a concentration of capability in a single firm, on a single contested island, that has no parallel in any other strategic industry. The second is ASML, the Dutch firm that builds the only machines on earth — extreme-ultraviolet lithography systems, each costing well over $100 million and taking decades to perfect — capable of etching the most advanced chips at all. Control those nodes, Miller argues, and you hold a hand at the world’s throat. It is the logic of the chokepoint, applied to the most sophisticated manufacturing humanity has ever attempted — which is precisely why advanced fabrication is now the central front of semiconductor geopolitics and techno-nationalism.

His history of how this concentration came about is the book’s engine: the American invention of the integrated circuit, the splitting of the industry into chip designers and chip manufacturers, the migration of fabrication to East Asia, the bet by Taiwan’s government on Morris Chang’s radical promise to build a foundry that would only manufacture and never compete with its customers. The Japanese memory-chip assault of the 1980s — the last time a rising Asian power threatened American dominance in semiconductors — serves as the historical rhyme for the China contest today.

The Japanese Rhyme¶

The deepest move in Chip War is its use of history as warning. Miller devotes real attention to the US–Japan chip rivalry of the 1980s, and not for nostalgia: it is the last time a rising Asian manufacturing power threatened to dominate the most strategic industry of its day, and the way that contest resolved shapes how he reads the China contest now.

In the 1980s, Japanese firms — backed by patient capital, industrial coordination, and relentless quality — captured the global market for memory chips and drove American producers to the wall. Washington responded with a mix of trade pressure, managed-trade agreements, and a deliberate push to seed alternative suppliers, including in South Korea and Taiwan. The episode carries two lessons Miller draws out. The first is that dominance in semiconductors is neither permanent nor purely a matter of markets; states intervene, and the map of who makes what is the product of decades of policy choices. The second is more sobering: the American response to Japan helped push fabrication toward East Asia in the first place, concentrating the industry on exactly the geography that now keeps strategists awake at night. The remedy to one chokepoint helped build the next.

For Miller this is why the China contest cannot be read as a simple morality play of free markets versus state planning. The American chip industry was itself a creature of military procurement and public research; the question was never whether to use the state, but how. That historian’s refusal to pretend the United States ever practised laissez-faire in semiconductors is what gives his analysis its credibility — and what makes the ideological critique of the book, that it launders American industrial policy as nature, worth taking seriously.

Taiwan as the Single Point of Failure¶

The strategic payload of Chip War is its argument about Taiwan. Because TSMC makes the overwhelming majority of leading-edge chips on an island that Beijing claims and Washington implicitly defends, the global economy has a single point of failure sitting directly on the most dangerous fault line in great-power politics. A war over Taiwan would not merely be a regional crisis; it would sever the supply of the components on which phones, data centres, cars, and weapons depend, with cascading costs measured in the hundreds of billions. The chip supply chain has made Taiwan’s security an economic interest of the entire developed world — a fact that complicates every calculation about deterrence in the strait.

This is where Miller’s work feeds directly into great-power competition: the “silicon shield” cuts both ways, deterring an invasion that would destroy the prize while making the whole world hostage to a single act of force.

The Architect of the Chokepoint Strategy — or Its Translator?¶

It is tempting to credit Miller with the export-control regime that followed his book, and the timing invites it. The honest version is more modest and more interesting: the machinery of the chokepoint strategy — the Bureau of Industry and Security, the “small yard, high fence” doctrine of restricting a few critical technologies behind a high barrier — was already in motion. Chip War became its reference text and its public explanation, and Miller its most fluent advocate. The paperback added a chapter on the American “chip comeback,” covering the CHIPS Act and the new controls.

His own position has sharpened since. He supports restricting leading-edge fabrication but is sceptical of extending controls to mature, legacy chips, where China may already possess the necessary tools. And his framing has evolved in a way worth tracking: where the early export-control logic aimed to keep China “a generation behind,” Miller now argues the real contest is over aggregate computing power — keeping America’s total compute, across itself and its allies, ahead of China’s. The rise of artificial intelligence has made that the live question, and the 2023 appearance of a credible Chinese-made advanced chip in Huawei’s flagship phone was its first real test. His read: China can produce limited quantities of chips several years behind the cutting edge, but yield, reliability, and scale remain the wall — and Western toolmakers keep moving the cutting edge further away.

The Critics¶

The dominant reception of Chip War has been admiring — the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, a clutch of other prizes, a permanent place on policymakers’ shelves. The sharpest criticism is ideological rather than factual. Writers on the left argue that Miller celebrates American free markets while underplaying how thoroughly the US chip industry was itself built on state support — military procurement, public research, industrial policy — and that he treats Asian industrial policy as distortion while treating the American version as nature. It is a fair challenge to the book’s framing, less so to its facts.

A second critique is structural: the book is better at narrating concentration than explaining it, and better at personalities than at the deep economics of why fabrication ended up in Taiwan rather than anywhere else. But these are quarrels about emphasis. On the central claim — that the chip supply chain is now the commanding height of geopolitics — even the critics have largely conceded the ground.

Why He Matters¶

Miller’s achievement is conceptual: he gave policymakers and the public a vocabulary for seeing the semiconductor the way they already saw oil and sea lanes — as the physical foundation of power, and therefore as a weapon. In doing so he helped turn an obscure debate about lithography into the organising frame of US–China rivalry. Whether the chokepoint strategy he illuminated proves wise or self-defeating — whether it slows China or merely convinces Beijing to build its own ecosystem faster — is the question his work has left for the rest of the decade to answer.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology” (2022) — the book itself; the indispensable history of how semiconductors became the strategic commodity of the age. (See Recommended Reading below.)

• Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy and Putinomics — his earlier work as a Russia historian, which explains the strategic-history instinct he later brought to chips.

• Chris Miller’s Newsletter (Substack) — his current, frequently updated thinking on AI-chip export controls, China’s progress, and the shift from a “quality gap” to a “compute scale” contest.

• “Small Yard, High Fence” — the US export-control doctrine Chip War helped popularise; read alongside the October 2022 Bureau of Industry and Security controls for the policy Miller’s framework explains.

• The 2024 paperback chapter, “America’s Chip Comeback” — Miller’s own assessment of the CHIPS Act, the China controls, and allied coordination.