President Donald Trump’s China summit arrives amid heated AI competition with Beijing and a related debate over America’s semiconductor supply chain, often framed as a choice between two unsatisfying alternatives.

On one side is dependence on China: allowing critical technologies and components to flow through Chinese manufacturing networks because they are cheap, available, or convenient. On the other side is an economic nationalism that assumes the only truly secure chip is manufactured entirely in America, by an American company, using an American supply chain.

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That’s a false choice. For our national security and for real leverage at the upcoming Trump-Xi summit, we should stop treating it as anything but a trap.

In the U.S. military, we learned long ago that supply chain resilience is not the same thing as self-sufficiency. Our armed forces do not depend on a single supplier, a single factory, or even a single country. We build redundancy into critical systems because concentrating risk in one place is dangerous.

We should apply the same principle to........

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