a.k.a. The Blame Festival
“Why are we still importing this junk!?”
Suddenly, the dam breaks. Red-faced ministers, CEOs who recently approved these imports, and think tank consultants with freshly printed PDFs all erupt with righteous fury. “This is an outrage!” they scream. “Why can’t we build this ourselves?” The outrage feels organic, almost sincere, until you realize it’s being shouted into microphones made with components from Guangdong, through routers designed in Taipei, assembled in Malaysia, and debugged by someone in Bangalore.
Here we are in Stage II: Anger. The most performative of all the grief stages. Because after decades of building supply chains optimized for “cheap and available by Thursday,” someone dares ask the obvious. Why is our stuff full of parts we can’t pronounce from companies we’ve never heard of? Why do our critical systems, the same ones we use to defend the continent, operate on components sourced from vendors located three customs stamps deep into China?
The real answer? Because it was convenient. Because it worked. Because building your own semiconductor ecosystem is hard, expensive, and not something that wins elections in under 18 months. But that explanation doesn’t fit the new strategic sovereignty cosplay, so the outrage must be repurposed. Redirected. Preferably toward targets that are non-conductive, like civil servants, procurement policies, or that one engineer who “chose the cheaper part.”
Let’s pause and appreciate the cognitive dissonance. These are the same people who spent the last two decades asking, “Can we do it cheaper?” and now can’t believe their laptops are stuffed with bargain-bin logic chips.
And when they say “junk,” they don’t mean it doesn’t work. No, this stuff works perfectly. That’s why we’ve been using it. “Junk” here is a post-failure insult for a product that did exactly what it was supposed to do. It’s just no longer politically useful to admit that your missile guidance system runs on the same general-purpose microcontroller found in a rice cooker.
But now we need scapegoats. The logic flips overnight. Suppliers who’ve delivered for years are suddenly “risky.” Trusted manufacturing partners become “opaque.” Never mind that the exact same contracts, signed with wide eyes and half the paperwork, are still in effect. Sovereignty is now a branding exercise.
And the fury? It’s never aimed at the root cause. It’s too complicated to admit that years of underinvestment, offshoring, and treating supply chain managers like glorified Excel wranglers have consequences. So instead we get headlines. We get committees. We get “strategic reviews” with pie charts, but no new fabs.
Real independence would mean reshaping the entire industry, design tools, foundries, rare earth processing, the whole grimy industrial stack that voters think magically happens inside a cleanroom. But that’s hard. It doesn’t tweet well. So we settle for shouting. We pass symbolic bans. Maybe a tariff or two. Anything to keep the rage machine going until the next scandal rolls in.
Anger is cathartic. It gives the illusion of momentum without any of the cost. We may still be importing the same parts from the same subcontractors, but now we do it while shaking our fists. And that, apparently, is progress.
