Designing a secure platform is possible within the EU[1].

[1]They need to use US EDA tools, And manufacture masks but maybe there are tricks they won't need to trust them - like inspecting critical parts of the masks.

It's not just high end CPUs that use the latest processes. Power, Performance and Area is important to all chips, including microcontrollers, FPGA, etc.

Bad take.

Design capacity doesn't imply fabrication capacity, as can be seen with Israel and India's comparative dominance in the chip design industry.

Design capacity (basically programming and logic design) is orthogonal to front-end fabrication (basically material science and chemical engineering) which is orthogonal to back-end/OSAT (basically materials science and metrology).

Only the US and Taiwan have domestic E2E capacity in all 3.