Last Friday, the Biden administration issued a bombshell, in the dry bureaucratic language of export control regulation. In an interim final rule filed by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, a set of rules called the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) were amended “to implement necessary controls on advanced computing integrated circuits (ICs), computer commodities that contain such ICs, and certain semiconductor manufacturing items.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-10-14/biden-s-chip-restrictions-on-china-show-shift-in-us-views-on-technology
In plain English, it was a kneecapping of the Chinese tech industry, depriving it of the advanced chips—and the means of making them—vital for everything from smartphones to self-driving cars.
Wow, folks. Of course, we have to thank Trump for starting the trend and normalizing nation-state protectionism but this is taking it so much further (and yay to that):
The Trump administration, for its part, targeted Huawei Technologies Co. and its fellow Chinese telecom ZTE Corp. with what were at the time unprecedented sanctions. The Biden administration has essentially expanded those measures to the entire Chinese tech sector,
There are very clear continuities between the Trump and the Biden administrations. Both are radically different from the Bush and Obama administrations. Both are enormously more pro-nation-state than Bush and Obama. They are still not even remotely as pro-nation-state as I’d like them to be but the shift is stunning.
There’s so much screeching and propaganda on social media that you’d think Trump and Biden were from different planets. People buy into the hype, get emotionally invested, and don’t see what’s under their noses. Remember COVID? How did their policies differ? They didn’t. Leave it all to the states, don’t do any federal mandates, and wrap things up whenever possible without intruding on the states’ decisions in any way. The Trump policy flowed so smoothly into Biden’s, nobody noticed a change.
Unfortunately, both are intensely bad on immigration but that seems unavoidable at this moment.
I’m observing this with great interest because if the US sticks with the nation, that’s a mega important development.
Clarissa's Blog 
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