Governments seem to care about "self-sufficiency" a lot more these days, especially after what's happening in both China and the US right now.

If the choice is between an architecture owned, patented and managed by a single company domiciled in a foreign country, versus one which is an international standard and has multiple competing vendors, the latter suddenly seems a lot more attractive.

Price and performance don't matter that much. Governments are a lot less price-sensitive than consumers (and even businesses), they're willing to spend money to achieve their goals.

This is exactly what makes this such an interesting development. Standardization is part of the process of the CPU industry becoming a mature industry not dependent on the whims of individual companies. Boring, yes, but also stable.

Yes, and they're both massively debated and criticised, to the point that the industry developed Risk-V in the firstplace. Not to mention the rugpull licensing ARM pulled a few years back.

Yes, but if 30 years ago ARM had an ISO standard they could point to, that would have probably helped with government adoption?

(It's still a trade-off, because standards also cost community time and effort.)

they are de-facto…