The mother of Thomas Hobbes gave birth to twins: Hobbes and Fear. He was born prematurely. his mother was frightened when she heard of the Spanish Armada coming to invade England. This event is regarded as the reason behind Thomas Hobbes’s timorous nature. It was his inward timidity that led him to put forth the theory of the social contract. He feared life in a state of nature would be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. A war of all against all would remain prevalent in the state of nature without a sovereign power.

In today’s world, the Hobbesian fear remains at play in different forms. International organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded on Hobbes’s social contract theory. After the formation of the United Nations, the fear did not go away, but it came out in another form: the fear of being ideologically dominated. For almost fifty years, this kept the world under constant fear, creating block upon block. It was only in 1990 that the Soviet Union dissociated, ending the decade-old Cold War, as they named it.

For a while, the fear vanished. But with the rise of China, the United States, again, came under the fear of being economically undermined by the former. Out of this fear, the US tried the decoupling and derisking strategies with China. The US heavily invested in Taiwan to boost its semiconductor manufacturing to contain China’s unremitting growth in the sector. It also banned Chinese technologies in........

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