I’m going to get to tariffs in a roundabout way. What’s new, you may say.

I was reading an interview with the CEO of Intel (INTC), Pat Gelsinger, the other day. What I interpret him as saying is that one of the worst things previous management had done was to decide to give profits a short-term boost by no longer using cutting-edge ASML tools to built its newest chips and to remain with older, less sophisticated tools instead. The idea, I guess, was that no one would notice the resulting drop in quality, and that profits (therefore bonuses for top management) would be larger by the amount “saved” by using older manufacturing equipment. A win-win.

As usual, though, customers figured out pretty quickly what was going on–INTC’s chips went from being Super-fast but clunky to just the latter–and started looking for other suppliers. TSMC, which had always been a year or two behind INTC, established a technological lead that it has yet to give up.

In other words, a disaster.

This is a familiar pattern in corporate life. A newly-minted CEO has spent, say, 30 years in corporate infighting in order to get to the top–and has maybe five years to cash in big after all that work. So it’s hard, in terms of personal wealth, for the CEO to say, “We’ve coasted too long. We need a thorough product overhaul. This will mean losses for the next few years. But we’ll have reset ourselves to achieve industry dominance after that.” At worst, the CEO gets fired. At best, there are no bonuses for much of the CEO’s time at the top and the next in line gets to look like a genius and reap the rewards of restructuring.

(I should mention that I’ve been buying INTC as a value stock, on the idea that a turnaround is underway. Not my normal thing, but I think Gelsinger is on the right track and the company is getting enormous subsidies from Washington.)

The reason for my sketch of the “bad” INTC is that I see this kind of dysfunction as the story of the domestic auto companies over the past half-century.

As to the new tariff, it’s being portrayed in the press as a naked attempt by Washington to cultivate the auto worker vote in advance of the November election. While this may be true, I don’t think this is the major reason.

I think it’s because, despite 50 years of protection (or because of this), Ford and GM are still hot messes. According to Businessweek, for example, Detroit’s idea has been that a large part of its EV profits will come from subscription to manufacturer-offered services like mapping, music… But GM and Ford can’t get their own systems to work. Worse than that, Apple has given up the idea of making its own EV and is doubling down on getting its ecosystem into Detroit’s cars.

Why the tariff? I think it’s to force Chinese EV companies to make the EVs they sell in the US in the US. In other words, the same strategy Washington has used in dealing with Japanese and EU competition. Underlying it is the assumption that as companies GM and F are lost causes–but it’s political poison to say this out loud.