For years, there have been warnings that a new Cold War is coming, this time with China. The first shot of that war may have just been fired.

In this case, that shot didn’t come from the barrel of a gun, but from the point of a commerce department bureaucrat’s pen. Earlier this month, the Biden administration put in place draconian export restrictions on semiconductor chip technology that one industry analyst charged amounted to “a full-scale bilateral economic cold war” against China.

Per the new controls, the United States will no longer permit chipmaking equipment or certain chips, notably those for supercomputing and artificial intelligence, to be exported to Chinese companies. Thirty-one Chinese firms have been added to the Bureau of Industry and Security’s (BIS) Unverified List, which makes it more difficult to send items to the listed entities that are US-made or produced with US supply-chain links, including foreign-made products created using technology that originated in the United States. And it’s not just items that are targeted for restriction, but “US persons,” too. (More on that later).