Pretend, if you can, that the last week didn’t happen (a tall order for the Stratechery demographic, I know), and imagine another scenario: China invades Taiwan. What happens then?
假设，如果你能的话，假装过去一周没有发生（我知道这对 Stratechery 的读者来说要求很高），并想象另一种情况：中国入侵台湾。那会发生什么？

I’m not a military expert, but my assumption is that China would be successful; the biggest unknown variable would be time. If the U.S. does not intervene the conflict would be shorter; if the U.S. does the conflict would be longer, and ultimately be decided in the way that wars are always decided: through industrial capacity and logistics. China has a meaningful advantage in both areas given its relative manufacturing might and the fact the conflict would happen off their coast.
我不是军事专家，但我的假设是中国会成功；最大的未知变量是时间。如果美国不干预，冲突会更短；如果美国干预，冲突会更长，最终会以战争一贯的方式决定：通过工业能力和后勤。 考虑到中国相对强大的制造业能力以及冲突发生在其海岸附近的事实，中国在这两个领域都具有显著优势。

There are experts who disagree; the Center for Strategic & International Studies ran a series of wargames in 2023, and concluded that the U.S. and its allies would repel a Chinese invasion, but at a heavy cost to U.S. military forces and Taiwan generally. That, however, raises a more pertinent point: when it comes to the economic impact it hardly matters who wins or loses. In both cases China is effectively removed from global supply chains, and Taiwan’s economic output — including chips from TSMC and others — is destroyed.
一些专家对此持有不同意见；战略与国际研究中心在 2023 年进行了一系列兵棋推演，得出的结论是，美国及其盟友将击退中国的入侵，但美国军队和台湾将付出沉重代价。然而，这引出了一个更相关的问题：就经济影响而言，谁输谁赢几乎无关紧要。在这两种情况下，中国实际上都将从全球供应链中移除，台湾的经济产出——包括台积电（TSMC）和其他公司的芯片——将被摧毁。

It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which every aspect of modern life rests on global supply chains, which are so long and complex that no one can truly understand the effects of messing with them. It has, however, gotten easier to grasp the complexity in recent years: first there was the bungled economic response to COVID, where a temporal interruption in supply chains triggered worldwide supply shortages and contributed to global inflation; then there was last week, when the shock of blanket tariffs from the Trump administration led to a meltdown in worldwide stock markets that seems to still be ongoing. A war over Taiwan, however, would put all of these to shame.
全球供应链对现代生活的方方面面都至关重要，其漫长和复杂程度，以至于没有人能够真正理解破坏它们的后果，这一点怎么强调都不为过。然而，近年来，人们更容易理解其中的复杂性：首先是应对新冠疫情的拙劣经济反应，供应链的暂时中断引发了全球范围内的供应短缺，并加剧了全球通货膨胀；然后是上周，特朗普政府全面征收关税的冲击导致全球股市崩盘，而且似乎仍在持续。然而，一场关于台湾的战争，将使所有这些都相形见绌。

Trade and China

Last November, in the wake of President Trump’s second election, I wrote A Chance to Build: that title referenced the optimistic conclusion to a piece that was, if you read closely, a pretty pessimistic summary of the current trade situation, with a special focus on tech. To summarize:
去年十一月，在特朗普总统第二次当选后，我写了《一个建设的机会》：这个标题指的是一篇乐观的结论，如果你仔细阅读，这篇文章是对当前贸易形势相当悲观的总结，特别关注科技领域。 总结如下：

• The U.S. leveraged foreign aid, direct investment, and its consumer market to rebuild Europe and Japan after World War 2, and pegged currencies to the U.S. dollar (which was pegged to gold) to do it. This started the cycle of foreign countries exporting to the U.S. and buying U.S. debt with the proceeds, although the U.S.’s relative size to the rest of the world meant that the U.S. still ran a trade surplus (the aid and direct investment were often used to buy U.S.-produced products).
  二战后，美国利用对外援助、直接投资和国内消费市场重建了欧洲和日本，并将各国货币与美元挂钩（美元与黄金挂钩）。这开启了外国向美国出口商品，并用所得购买美国国债的循环。尽管美国相对于世界其他地区的规模而言仍然很大，这意味着美国仍然保持着贸易顺差（援助和直接投资通常被用于购买美国生产的产品）。
• By 1971 this system was about to collapse under its own weight, leading the U.S. to de-peg from gold (i.e. depreciate the U.S. dollar) and dissolve the Bretton Woods system of currency controls. This led to a decade of pain — including the oil shock of the 1970s — but what emerged had a similar structure to the post World War 2 system, just with the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency, untethered from gold. This meant there was inelastic demand for U.S. treasuries, which basically made it impossible for the U.S. to not run a deficit, either in terms of trade or the federal budget. Still, this was maintainable given the relative size of the U.S. economy to its trading partners.
  到 1971 年，这个体系因自身重负而濒临崩溃，导致美国与黄金脱钩（即美元贬值）并解散了布雷顿森林货币控制体系。这导致了长达十年的痛苦——包括 1970 年代的石油危机——但最终形成的体系与二战后的体系结构相似，只是以美元作为储备货币，不再与黄金挂钩。这意味着对美国国债存在无弹性需求，这基本上使得美国不可能不出现赤字，无论是在贸易方面还是联邦预算方面。尽管如此，考虑到美国经济相对于其贸易伙伴的规模，这仍然是可维持的。
• What changed in the last 25 years was the entrance of China into this system. China — clearly in retrospect, although perhaps predictably for those who understood China historically, beyond its backwardness over the previous two centuries — had far more capacity than the system could bear. It’s not an accident that U.S. deficits — both in terms of trade and the federal budget — have exploded in line with Chinese growth.
  过去 25 年发生的变化是中国进入了这个体系。事后来看，中国——显然，对于那些从历史角度了解中国的人来说，这也许是可以预见的，尽管中国在过去两个世纪里一直落后——拥有比该体系所能承受的更大的能力。美国的贸易逆差和联邦预算赤字与中国的增长同步爆炸并非偶然。

China is the skeleton key to understand so many oddities about the U.S.’s fiscal situation over the last fifteen years in particular, especially how it is that the U.S.’s response to the Great Recession didn’t lead to inflation: Chinese production was deflationary, and their ever-expanding trade surpluses created an ever-expanding market for U.S. debt, whether it be held by the Chinese national government, provincial governments, state-owned enterprises, etc. This inelastic demand also served to keep the dollar artificially high, in defiance of the theoretical-expected response to long-running trade deficits.
理解过去十五年里美国财政状况的诸多怪异之处，中国的角色至关重要，尤其是在美国应对大衰退时，为何没有导致通货膨胀：中国的生产具有通缩效应，其不断扩大的贸易顺差为美国债务创造了不断扩大的市场，无论这些债务是由中国国家政府、省级政府、国有企业等持有。这种缺乏弹性的需求也使得美元被人为地维持在高位，这与长期贸易逆差的理论预期反应背道而驰。

This, more than anything else, is what has hollowed out U.S. manufacturing. The cost of cheap consumer goods and a seeming inexhaustible capacity for U.S. debt was the shifting of ever more manufacturing abroad. Yes, things like lower costs and different labor standards played a role, but it’s the structure of the world economy that matters most; indeed, China’s labor costs are significantly higher than they used to be, but China’s manufacturing dominance is actually accelerating.
正是这一点，比其他任何因素都更能掏空美国制造业。廉价消费品和美国看似取之不尽的债务能力，导致越来越多的制造业转移到国外。是的，诸如降低成本和不同的劳动标准等因素也发挥了作用，但最重要的是世界经济的结构；事实上，中国的劳动力成本比过去高得多，但中国制造业的统治地位实际上正在加速。

Part of this is due to China’s decision over the last few years to respond to the puncturing of its housing bubble by pushing resources into export-oriented industries; another part is the unfortunate reality — under-appreciated by apostles of comparative advantage — that capabilities compound. I wrote in that Article:
部分原因是由于中国在过去几年决定通过将资源投入到出口导向型产业来应对其房地产泡沫的破裂；另一部分是不幸的现实——被比较优势的信徒们低估了——能力会累积。我在那篇文章中写道：

The story to me seems straightforward: the big loser in the post World War 2 reconfiguration I described above was the American worker; yes, we have all of those service jobs, but what we have much less of are traditional manufacturing jobs. What happened to chips in the 1960s happened to manufacturing of all kinds over the ensuing decades. Countries like China started with labor cost advantages, and, over time, moved up learning curves that the U.S. dismantled; that is how you end up with this from Walter Isaacson in his Steve Jobs biography about a dinner with then-President Obama:
对我来说，这个故事似乎很简单：我上面描述的二战后重组的最大输家是美国工人；是的，我们有很多服务业工作，但我们拥有的传统制造业工作要少得多。20 世纪 60 年代芯片发生的事情在随后的几十年里发生在各种制造业上。像中国这样的国家最初具有劳动力成本优势，并且随着时间的推移，沿着美国拆除的学习曲线向上发展；这就是为什么你会从沃尔特·艾萨克森的史蒂夫·乔布斯传记中看到这样一段关于与时任总统奥巴马共进晚餐的内容：

When Jobs’s turn came, he stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the United States should be given a visa to stay in the country. Obama said that could be done only in the context of the “Dream Act,” which would allow illegal aliens who arrived as minors and finished high school to become legal residents — something that the Republicans had blocked. Jobs found this an annoying example of how politics can lead to paralysis. “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done,” he recalled. “It infuriates me.”
轮到乔布斯发言时，他强调需要更多训练有素的工程师，并建议任何在美国获得工程学位的外国学生都应该获得签证留在美国。奥巴马说，这只能在“梦想法案”的背景下才能实现，该法案将允许未成年时抵达美国并完成高中学业的非法移民成为合法居民——共和党人阻止了这一法案。乔布斯觉得这是一个令人恼火的例子，说明政治如何导致瘫痪。“总统非常聪明，但他一直在向我们解释事情为什么不能完成的原因，”他回忆道。“这让我很恼火。”

Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. “You can’t find that many in America to hire,” he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could train them. “If you could educate these engineers,” he said, “we could move more manufacturing plants here.” The argument made a strong impression on the president. Two or three times over the next month he told his aides, “We’ve got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us about.”
乔布斯接着敦促找到一种方法来培养更多的美国工程师。他说，苹果在中国雇用了 70 万名工厂工人，那是因为它需要 3 万名工程师在现场支持这些工人。“你在美国找不到那么多可以雇佣的人，”他说。这些工厂工程师不必是博士或天才；他们只需要具备制造业的基本工程技能。技术学校、社区学院或职业学校可以培训他们。“如果你们能培养这些工程师，”他说，“我们可以把更多的制造工厂搬到这里。”这个论点给总统留下了深刻的印象。在接下来的一个月里，他两三次地告诉他的助手们，“我们必须找到方法来培养乔布斯告诉我们的那 3 万名制造工程师。”

I think that Jobs had cause-and-effect backwards: there are not 30,000 manufacturing engineers in the U.S. because there are not 30,000 manufacturing engineering jobs to be filled. That is because the structure of the world economy — choices made starting with Bretton Woods in particular, and cemented by the removal of tariffs over time — made them nonviable. Say what you will about the viability or wisdom of Trump’s tariffs, the motivation — to undo eighty years of structural changes — is pretty straightforward!
我认为乔布斯把因果关系搞反了：美国没有 3 万名制造工程师，是因为没有 3 万个制造工程职位可以填补。这是因为世界经济的结构——特别是从布雷顿森林体系开始做出的选择，以及随着时间的推移取消关税而巩固的选择——使得它们无法生存。不管你怎么评价特朗普关税的可行性或明智性，其动机——撤销八十年的结构性变化——是非常直接的！

The other thing about Jobs’ answer is how ultimately self-serving it was. This is not to say it was wrong: Apple could not only not manufacture an iPhone in the U.S. because of cost, it also can’t do so because of capability; that capability is downstream of an ecosystem that has developed in Asia and a long learning curve that China has traveled and that the U.S. has abandoned. Ultimately, though, the benefit to Apple has been profound: the company has the best supply chain in the world, centered in China, that gives it the capability to build computers on an unimaginable scale with maximum quality for not that much money at all.
关于乔布斯回答的另一件事是它最终是多么的自私自利。这并不是说它是错误的：苹果不仅因为成本原因无法在美国制造 iPhone，而且也因为能力不足而无法做到；这种能力是亚洲发展起来的生态系统的下游，也是中国走过的一条漫长的学习曲线，而美国已经放弃了。但最终，苹果从中获得的益处是巨大的：该公司拥有世界上最好的供应链，以中国为中心，这使其能够以难以想象的规模、最高的质量，并且花费不多的钱来制造电脑。

That line about Trump’s motivation looms large after the last week; the observation about Apple’s benefits looks much more precarious.
关于特朗普动机的那句话在上周之后显得尤为重要；关于苹果公司收益的观察看起来更加岌岌可危。

The Nixon Shock

There is a fascinating history of the Nixon administration’s deliberations over closing the gold window, instituting price controls, and imposing a 10% import tax — the actions that effectively ended Bretton Woods — in this 2011 Article in Bloomberg Businessweek. What is interesting is that the decision was made under intense economic pressure, but the presentation was a PR masterpiece:
在彭博商业周刊 2011 年的这篇文章中，详细描述了尼克松政府在关闭黄金窗口、实行价格管制和征收 10% 进口税（这些行动实际上结束了布雷顿森林体系）问题上的决策过程，这段历史引人入胜。有趣的是，这项决定是在巨大的经济压力下做出的，但其对外宣传却堪称公关杰作：

[Treasury Secretary John] Connally brilliantly packaged the program not as America abandoning its commitment to the gold standard but as America taking charge. He turned the dollar’s collapse, which could have appeared shameful, into a moment of hubris. The emphasis would be on righting America’s trade balance, as well as minor points such as a 5 percent cut in foreign aid. An aide to William P. Rogers, the Secretary of State, called and interjected, “You can’t cut foreign aid.” Connally said, “Tell him if he doesn’t shut up we’ll make the cuts 15 percent.” Shultz muzzled his disquiet over price controls; even Burns joined ranks. The group feverishly debated whether Nixon should address the country on Sunday night, which would mean preempting the popular Gunsmoke. The public relations aspect was paramount. Stein wrote later that the discussion at Camp David assumed “the attitude of scriptwriters preparing a TV special.” No one pretended to know how controls would work; the question was scarcely debated.
[财政部长约翰]·康纳利巧妙地将该计划包装成美国掌控局面，而不是放弃对金本位的承诺。他将美元的崩溃——原本可能显得可耻——变成了一个傲慢的时刻。重点将放在纠正美国的贸易平衡上，以及诸如削减 5%的对外援助等小问题上。国务卿威廉·P·罗杰斯的一位助手打电话插话说：“你不能削减对外援助。”康纳利说：“告诉他，如果他不闭嘴，我们就削减 15%。”舒尔茨压制了他对价格管制的不安；甚至伯恩斯也加入了行列。该小组热烈地讨论了尼克松是否应该在周日晚上向全国发表讲话，这将意味着抢在受欢迎的《枪焰》之前。公共关系方面至关重要。斯坦因后来写道，戴维营的讨论呈现出“编剧们准备电视特别节目的姿态”。没有人假装知道管制会如何运作；这个问题几乎没有被讨论。

Addressing the nation on Sunday, Nixon blamed currency speculators and “unfair” exchange rates rather than U.S. monetary policy. Politically, he hit the jackpot. Monday’s nearly 33-point rise in the Dow was the biggest ever to that point. Nixon’s “New Economic Policy” drew raves from the press. “We unhesitatingly applaud the boldness with which the President has moved,” read the New York Times editorial. In the present era, America’s inability to repair its fiscal problems has tarnished its credibility and hampered its currency negotiations with China. The Nixon Shock showed the U.S. taking action.
尼克松在周日向全国发表讲话时，将矛头指向货币投机者和“不公平”的汇率，而不是美国的货币政策。在政治上，他大获全胜。周一道琼斯指数上涨近 33 点，是当时有史以来最大的涨幅。尼克松的“新经济政策”受到了媒体的好评。《纽约时报》的社论写道：“我们毫不犹豫地赞扬总统采取行动的魄力。” 在当今时代，美国无法解决其财政问题损害了其信誉，并阻碍了与中国的货币谈判。“尼克松冲击”表明美国正在采取行动。

The end of Bretton Woods was probably inescapable, but it’s worth pointing out that the Nixon Shock was an economic disaster: the country endured a decade of drastic inflation that was only cured with sky-high interest rates and a massive recession (the architect of that cure, Paul Volcker, was a part of the team that instituted the Nixon Shock in the first place; Volcker came to regret it). In other words, the reaction of the market and the press was totally wrong.
布雷顿森林体系的终结可能是不可避免的，但值得指出的是，尼克松冲击是一场经济灾难：美国经历了长达十年的恶性通货膨胀，而这种通货膨胀只有通过极高的利率和大规模的经济衰退才能治愈（而这种疗法的策划者保罗·沃尔克最初也是尼克松冲击的团队成员之一；沃尔克后来对此感到后悔）。换句话说，市场和媒体的反应完全是错误的。

The question is if what happened this last week ought to be compared to the Nixon Shock, or contrasted? Certainly the reaction is a contrast: everyone hates the “Liberation Day” tariffs, including the market. Moreover, the Trump administration’s rollout has been the very opposite of a PR masterpiece: no one in the administration can seem to agree about what exactly the goal is, or what success looks like. I’m certainly not going to attempt to speak for an administration that can’t speak for itself, particularly given Trump’s on-again-off-again approach to tariffs over the last few months.
问题在于，上周发生的事情应该与尼克松冲击相提并论，还是应该形成对比？当然，反应是一种对比：每个人都讨厌“解放日”关税，包括市场。此外，特朗普政府的推出与公关杰作截然相反：政府中似乎没有人能够就目标到底是什么，或者成功是什么样子达成一致。我当然不会试图为一个无法为自己说话的政府代言，特别是考虑到特朗普在过去几个月里对关税时而支持时而反对的态度。

What I do come back to, however, is what I opened with: there is a scenario within the realm of possibilities that is far more painful than anything Trump proposed; is it better to try and force into place a new economic system that, at least in theory, reduces dependency on China and resuscitates U.S. manufacturing now, instead of waiting for the current system to collapse by literal force? This does seem to be the administration’s goal: simply tariffing China is deadweight loss, leading to rerouting and the fundamental problem of the dollar as reserve currency unaddressed; blanket tariffs, on the other hand, are a valid, if extremely blunt and inefficient, way to meaningfully restructure incentives.
然而，我最终还是回到了我一开始提出的问题：在各种可能性中，存在一种比特朗普提出的任何方案都更痛苦的情景；现在就尝试强行建立一种新的经济体系，至少在理论上可以减少对中国的依赖并重振美国制造业，是否比等待现有体系因实际力量而崩溃更好？这似乎是本届政府的目标：仅仅对中国征收关税是无谓的损失，导致重新调整路线，而美元作为储备货币的根本问题仍未解决；另一方面，全面关税是一种有效的方式，即使它非常粗暴和低效，也能有意义地重塑激励机制。 ¹

Moreover, even if an invasion never happens, is the current system sustainable, fiscally or societally? Trump’s political success is, in many respects, the clearest manifestation of what happens in a system that pushes the gains to the globalized top while buying off the localized masses with cheap trinkets.
此外，即使入侵从未发生，目前的体系在财政上或社会上是否可持续？在许多方面，特朗普的政治成功最清楚地表明，在一个将收益推向全球化顶端，同时用廉价小玩意收买本地民众的体系中会发生什么。

The Question of Kicking the Can

Ultimately, I actually think there is an important distinction between these downside scenarios, and it explains why I think that Trump’s approach, while more theoretically valid than it is being given credit for, is the wrong one.
最终，我实际上认为这些不利情景之间存在重要的区别，这也解释了为什么我认为特朗普的做法虽然在理论上比人们认为的更有效，但却是错误的。

First, I’m skeptical that we have the stomach for what would be necessary to remake the global economic order. I might have had to spend a few paragraphs explaining this point previously, but I think a stock market chart speaks for itself:
首先，我怀疑我们是否有决心去做重塑全球经济秩序所必需的事情。我以前可能需要花几段文字来解释这一点，但我认为股市图表本身就说明了问题：

I will note, by the way, that these losses aren’t entirely irrational or panic-driven: reduced trade absolutely hurts U.S. multinationals; one point that is being missed — at least until what happened in foreign stock markets this morning — is that it hurts foreign companies even more. No one wins in a trade war.
顺便提一句，我要指出的是，这些损失并非完全是非理性的或恐慌驱动的：贸易减少绝对会损害美国跨国公司；一个被忽略的点——至少在今天早上外国股市发生的事情之前——是它对外国公司的损害更大。贸易战中没有赢家。

Second, the current economic system, flawed though we may now recognize it to be, is a complex system, built up over decades; one ought to be very wary in remaking complex systems in a top-down manner. It’s one thing to diagnose problems; it’s a very different thing to solve them. There’s a reason that new economic systems usually arise after major wars; it’s easier to build something new after the old thing has been destroyed (and there is the stomach for it, because there is no other choice).
其次，当前的经济体系，尽管我们现在可能认识到它存在缺陷，但它是一个复杂的体系，经过了几十年的建设；人们应该非常谨慎地以自上而下的方式改造复杂的体系。诊断问题是一回事；解决问题是完全不同的另一回事。新的经济体系通常在重大战争后出现是有原因的；在旧的东西被摧毁后，建立新的东西更容易（而且人们也有这种意愿，因为别无选择）。

Third, there are a lot of other things the Trump administration could be doing, particularly in terms of relieving regulation, ensuring equal opportunity throughout the economy, etc. It seems like a missed opportunity to be burning political capital on deficit reduction and trade rebalancing when there are major pro-growth opportunities still available. This seems particularly pertinent given the rise of AI, which has very high variance in terms of potential outcomes.
第三，特朗普政府还可以做很多其他的事情，尤其是在放松监管、确保整个经济领域的平等机会等方面。把政治资本浪费在减少赤字和贸易再平衡上，似乎错失了一个机会，因为仍然存在重大的促进增长的机会。考虑到人工智能的兴起，这似乎尤其重要，因为人工智能在潜在结果方面具有很高的差异性。

Make no mistake, the structural problems facing U.S. manufacturing in particular are very real, and the China-Taiwan systemic risk is only going to increase. Instead of changing the system to ameliorate the risk, however you could simply address the risk directly; I think the best way to do that is to undo the chip controls and tie China even more tightly into the current system generally, and to Taiwan specifically. Yes, this is kicking the can down the road, but path dependency is a far more powerful force than we often realize.
毫无疑问，美国制造业面临的结构性问题非常真实，而中国台湾的系统性风险只会增加。与其改变系统来缓解风险，不如直接解决风险；我认为最好的方法是取消芯片管制，让中国更紧密地融入当前的整个系统，特别是台湾。是的，这只是把问题推迟，但路径依赖的力量比我们通常意识到的要强大得多。

To go back to the Nixon Shock, I think one reason why it was a PR success is because the crisis was inescapable; I wonder if one reason why “liberation day” is a PR disaster is because there is still more road to kick the can down.
要回到尼克松冲击，我认为它在公关上取得成功的一个原因是危机是不可避免的；我想知道“解放日”成为公关灾难的一个原因是否是因为还有更多的路可以踢皮球。

Tech and Tariffs

So what of tech companies, and the benefits that companies like Apple have gotten from Asia generally and China specifically?
那么科技公司呢？像苹果这样的公司从亚洲，特别是中国获得的利益又是什么呢？

First, it is worth articulating this benefit in full. Steve Jobs, in his first tenure at Apple, was deeply committed to manufacturing, including building a futuristic factory in Fremont for the Mac; that merely cost the company millions — his attempt to do the same for NeXT all but drove the company out of business. What Apple needed — and eventually found in China, under Tim Cook — was scalability: Apple would focus its integration chops on getting the product right, and trust contract manufacturers to achieve the flexibility of meeting demand. This, more broadly, is an important addition to the capability discussion above: manufacturing has changed from being a point of integration with a product to being a horizontal scalable services offering; developing the customer service chops necessary for such a business would be a significant cultural challenge for a new U.S. manufacturing base, a la Intel’s struggles to become a foundry.
首先，充分阐述这一优势是值得的。史蒂夫·乔布斯在苹果公司的第一个任期内，全身心投入制造业，包括在弗里蒙特为 Mac 建造一座未来工厂；这仅仅花费了公司数百万美元——他试图为 NeXT 做同样的事情，几乎使公司破产。苹果公司所需要的——最终在蒂姆·库克领导下的中国找到的——是可扩展性：苹果公司将专注于整合能力，以使产品正确，并信任合同制造商来实现满足需求的灵活性。更广泛地说，这是对上述能力讨论的一个重要补充：制造业已经从与产品整合的一个点转变为一个横向可扩展的服务产品；为这样的业务发展必要的客户服务能力，对于一个新的美国制造业基地来说，将是一个重大的文化挑战，就像英特尔努力成为一家代工厂一样。

To that end, one benefit of a war over Taiwan is that it would be so terrible for tech companies that there really isn’t much benefit in planning for it; the hedging cost — which would entail building out these scalable horizontal service providers, which for economic reasons must serve more than one company or product — would be so astronomical that it probably wouldn’t be economical to do anything other than deepen the status quo, particularly given that the status quo contains strong incentives for all parties, including China, to avoid disaster.
从这个角度来看，因台湾问题引发战争的一个好处是，这对科技公司来说将是如此可怕，以至于为之进行规划实际上没有什么好处；对冲成本——这将需要建立这些可扩展的横向服务提供商，而由于经济原因，这些服务提供商必须服务于一家以上的公司或产品——将是如此之高，以至于除了深化现状之外，做任何事情可能都不经济，特别是考虑到现状包含着所有各方（包括中国）避免灾难的强烈动机。

These tariffs, however, are much more complicated, because they exist (for now anyways), while a war does not. Apple, which has so adroitly balanced the relationship with both the U.S. and Chinese governments, is obviously the most impacted: you can quibble with the Wall Street Journal’s estimates on the tariff impact on an iPhone, but it certainly is directionally correct that Apple will probably face little choice but to substantially raise prices. That has the direct problem of leading to fewer sales (even if iPhone demand is probably fairly inelastic), and the secondary problem of decreasing the market for Apple’s services business, its primary source of growth.
然而，这些关税要复杂得多，因为它们（至少目前）确实存在，而战争并没有发生。苹果公司巧妙地平衡了与美国和中国政府的关系，显然是受影响最大的：你可以对《华尔街日报》关于关税对 iPhone 影响的估计提出异议，但苹果公司很可能面临不得不大幅提高价格的选择，这在方向上肯定是正确的。这直接导致销量下降（即使 iPhone 的需求可能相当缺乏弹性），并带来次要问题，即苹果服务业务的市场萎缩，而服务业务是苹果的主要增长来源。

There’s an even more disappointing knock-on effect: Apple’s services business is not subject to tariffs, which is to say it will become even more important to Apple’s bottom line; that decreases the likelihood that Apple transforms its relationship with developers, which I think is its most promising opportunity with AI.
还有一个更令人失望的连锁反应：苹果的服务业务不受关税影响，也就是说，它对苹果的利润将变得更加重要；这降低了苹果改变其与开发者关系的可能性，我认为这是它在人工智能方面最有希望的机会。

All of the advertising-based businesses — Meta, Google, and Amazon — will also be negatively impacted. Lots of cheap products means lots of advertising (and lots of products on Amazon specifically), much of which could disappear; could this mean a return of app install advertising, if e-commerce advertising decreases, lowering prices overall? All three companies also source hardware from China, both for sale to consumers and for their data centers. It’s Microsoft and its old formula of software and distribution that may be the most shielded. Of course it needs data center hardware as well, and more expensive PCs means less Windows revenue, but the world of bits has never seemed more attractive relative to atoms.
所有基于广告的业务——Meta、Google 和 Amazon——也将受到负面影响。大量廉价商品意味着大量广告（以及亚马逊上的大量商品），其中大部分可能会消失；如果电子商务广告减少，整体价格下降，这是否意味着应用安装广告的回归？这三家公司还从中国采购硬件，用于销售给消费者和用于其数据中心。可能是微软及其软件和分销的旧模式受到的保护最多。当然，它也需要数据中心硬件，而且更昂贵的 PC 意味着更少的 Windows 收入，但相对于原子而言，比特世界似乎从未如此有吸引力。

The problem for all of them, however, is the same problem faced by the economy generally: more grist in the wheels of the economy means lower velocity, and lower velocity is bad for tech companies in particular. These are entities who are predicated on Aggregating unfathomable levels of demand in order to gain leverage on massive up-front costs; now demand will slow even as the costs rise. Moreover, their regulatory risk will likely increase: one way for entities like European countries to retaliate will be to simply ramp up the fines, or figure out a way to tax software services, further slowing velocity; the worst case scenario would be a dedicated effort to break away from U.S. tech completely. I think this is unlikely, but more likely than it was a week ago.
然而，对他们所有人来说，问题与整体经济面临的问题相同：经济车轮中的磨料越多，速度就越慢，而速度降低对科技公司尤其不利。这些实体的前提是聚集难以理解的需求水平，以便利用大规模的前期成本；现在，即使成本上升，需求也会放缓。此外，他们的监管风险可能会增加：像欧洲国家这样的实体进行报复的一种方式是简单地提高罚款，或者想办法对软件服务征税，从而进一步降低速度；最糟糕的情况是，专门努力完全摆脱美国科技。我认为这种情况不太可能发生，但比一周前更有可能发生。

So what of my optimistic spin last November, when I called my tariff preview A Chance to Build? Well, my skepticism is keeping with the pessimism embedded in that piece: it’s a lot easier to build from scratch than to retrofit something that exists; that applies to companies just as much as countries and economic orders. I’ll be cheering for the startups that seize this opportunity; I’m sympathetic to the incumbents looking at guaranteed costs with very uncertain rewards.
那么，我去年 11 月的乐观论调，当时我称我的关税预览为“一个建设的机会”，又该怎么说呢？好吧，我的怀疑态度与那篇文章中固有的悲观情绪是一致的：从头开始建设比改造现有的东西容易得多；这适用于公司，也适用于国家和经济秩序。我会为抓住这个机会的初创公司欢呼；我同情那些看到有保证的成本和非常不确定的回报的在位者。

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1. I’m setting aside the specific details for now, including the problems Trump’s tariffs pose for manufacturers as laid out in this X post by Molson Hart. ↩