WTH Should I Read This Summer? Chip War by Chris Miller

This August, the What the Hell crew brings you a summer reading
series! Our first pick is Chip War, a book the NYT hailed as a
cross between Mission Impossible and the China Syndrome.
Nominally, this is the story of the semiconductor industry, but
it is really a forecast of modern grand strategy, great power
conflict, and the security of the global economy. It is no
mistake that the book’s author, Chris Miller, set out to write a
book about military strategy – and then realized that military
strategy today is defined by applying advanced chips to systems.
Beyond just military however, advanced chips make the world as we
know it work. They are in your iPhone, your dishwasher, your car…
the list goes on. The clincher? Almost all of these highly
technical chips are made in Taiwan – one of the most
geopolitically tense areas in the world.


Chris Miller is an Associate Professor of International History
at Tufts University and a Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at
AEI. He is also the co-director of the Fletcher School’s Russia
and Eurasia program and the director of the Eurasia Program at
the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In addition to Chip War,
Miller’s books include We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to
Asia from Peter the Great to Putin (Harvard University Press,
2021), Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia
(University of North Carolina Press, 2018), and The Struggle to
Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of
the USSR (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Chris is an
alumnus of Harvard College and holds an MA and PhD from Yale.


Download the transcript here.