"Rare earths are crucial for various defense technologies, including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs. The United States is already struggling to keep pace in the production of these systems."
This feels like it can't be true. What % of "rare earths" are going into those military products? I mean those are super low volume manufacturing compared to EVs or anything consumer oriented. I'm sure there are strong magnets somewhere in a submarine but how many?
I thought "rare earths" were not rare at all. A lot of stuff is made in China because it's economical but can be made somewhere else for a bit more money. Do billion dollar fighter jets care if the magnet used in some electric motor costs $0.35 or $0.43 ?
Isn't the manufacturing issue in the US unrelated to any of this? Not enough factories, not enough skilled people, not having ramped up because munitions weren't needed?
RE elemets mining/refining is ~80% China dominated, even US and other producers mined ores go to China for refinement.The concentrations are ridiculous for the process, think several tons to extract some kilos.
Then theres the heavy RE and light , with some being produced as byproducts of other refinement/industrial processes where once again the top producer is China , who due to their scale have essentailly commoditized the production. Thats why magnets at cents instead of several dollars or tens of dollars.
As for all those EV/consumer and Mil products its not raw RE being utilised but speciality alloys that are worked to produce whatever the material science requires , where once again there one industrial producer.
Thats what the whole chain part of supply chain comes in , similar to why its easier and cheaper to manufacture iphones in Schenzen; all the refining/alloys/smelting is in one location with the skilled workforce and advanced methods that have been iterated over the last 30 years.
As to what % go into mil products, several kilos of this several of that forged into speciality alloys at commodity prices vs doing it at artisinal mining prices and those billion dollar weapon systems become tens or hundred billion dollar systems.
> As to what % go into mil products, several kilos of this several of that forged into speciality alloys at commodity prices vs doing it at artisinal mining prices and those billion dollar weapon systems become tens or hundred billion dollar systems.
I am very skeptical. The cost of buying from non-chinese sources is not going to be billions of dollars for some kilos of magnets. There are other options e.g. https://mpmaterials.com/ or https://www.neomaterials.com/ .
Sure. There's magnets everywhere. In speakers, in EVs (motors, actuators), pumps, wind turbines whatnot. Military use has to be a tiny tiny fraction. Like less than 1% or even less than 0.1%. These are not expensive bits- it's just China makes them cheaper.
China seems to own about 90% of the market. So for sure we're not going to be able to replace 90% of the market in a blink. But that 90% isn't going away, China is still selling EVs and other products. The 10% is plenty for military use, even if the prices go up a lot (military bits are usually mil-spec and expensive anyways). There's definitely economic leverage there but I call bs on the military angle.
I'm afraid that for certain special magnets (and not only magnets) China may represent 100% of production capacity, concentrated in a couple of factories. The cost of an alternative would be the cost of building an onshore version of these factories, and maybe a few more up the supply chain.
Think about much bigger chunks of semiconductor industry where TSMC represents 100% of world's capacity for certain most advanced production nodes.
Probably because that alternative was to build next gen programs to be less performant, and can't settle when platform last 30/40/50 years now.
The problem isn't lol US start making fancy magnets. The problem is lol modern US MIC hardware performance/overmatch is built around access to ABUNDANT fancy magnets that can only be built at scale/cost via processes PRC pioneered because they have (relatively unique) access to geologicly bound ionic clay deposits in PRC backyard. That capability doesn't exist in past history. US+co never had it. And if US can't replicate it, the entire current tranch of military hardware based on size, weight, (SWaP) of pushing highend PRC magnetics to their limits (motors of missiles, planes, precision motors, aesa radars, sonars), might not even make operational sense.
Then strategic delimma is budgetting 100s of billions into retrofitting/integrating of alternative components with slightly different (potentially inferior) performance characteristics. Or trillions in new programs based on alternative material assumptions. That's the real killer. Moving away from PRC HREE dependency =/= make more rocks, but if make more rocks no worky, or settle with making slightly different/less performant rocks, then have to redesign/reengineer/requalify the entire force structure over decades.
"…budgetting 100s of billions into retrofitting/integrating of alternative components with slightly different (potentially inferior) performance characteristics."
For strategic reasons the Military budgets enormous funds on items that may or may not pay off, it's a recognized gamble that all militaries engage in out of deemed necessity.
Why "potentially inferior performance", are you suggesting the US doesn't possess mining and chemistry expertise that are up to Chinese standards?
Just because the US hasn't needed to process REs to certain standards or requirements in the past doesn't mean it's not capable of doing so.
It's not just the actual element itself. You need:
- the ore
- the ability to refine it, safely (if not in China) and economically to various extents
- the supply chain to produce the end product (eg a magnet)
Then you need this for all the various REEs for the final goods.
You don't just build a mine and off you go. The US gave up a lot of strategic supply chains a long time ago.
China knew that chips were security and strategic issues maybe 20 years ago if not more, I wonder why they haven't done building equally capable factories on-shore.
Because cutting edge chips are not. They are nice to have and sell for a lot. But for vast majority of things you can absolutely manage with chips they can produce. And in some cases those top end chip technologies are not even useful for those purposes.
We are so deep in AI and super computing or wasteful server side computing that we forget that lower end chips are in absolutely everything. And China can produce those just fine.
Consider: you'd have to build an expensive, dirty factory which would only be able to sell to defense contractors which are legally required to buy local; otherwise it won't be able to compete.
At the scale and specificity , lets take magnets - theres magnets and theres magnets , if youre using them in mil/aero tolerances required are going to be much higher with lower failure rates.
Think the way rad-hardened cpus for satellites are different/costlier from commercial ones , similarly here when your'e in guidance systems and radars the tolerances require much higher specs than headphones.
With the caveat that those already in current products can be recycled so thats one path for simple RE.
For the ones that are combined into alloys though its a bigger ask , this i guess will be the main cost increase , as its like trying to separate out copper from bronze if one wants to try recycling. And in mil there are quite a number of special RE alloy to get specific properties.
Which is why for the volumes required even at low % alternate refiners will take time to ramp up , in the interim prices dictated at market rates will definately spike.
I would guess that the part list of the F-35 isn't publicly available but this sort of implies someone who worked on the design of that airplane chose an alloy or a part knowing that it 100% depends on something that's only available from China. I just find it hard to believe.
What does sound plausible is that some mil-spec actuator (let's say a pneumatic actuator or a motor) happens to have a magnet from China in it. That is not a big deal.
I find it hard to believe that a US mechanical engineer working on the F-35 part would spec an alloy that is only available from China as some fundamental part of the design. E.g. a wing, or body panels, etc. I don't have direct experience but from knowledge working in other manufacturing industries engineers tend to prefer locally available alloys as they're more familiar with their properties and they can easily get them for prototyping purposes Now if the entire wing of the F-35 is subcontracted to China then you'd expect Chinese alloys in that wing. Many products are subcontracted to China and so it's no surprise they'll have Chinese made magnets, alloys etc. But weapons systems are generally not. High end weapons systems like the F-35 may have some secret materials in them that are designed as part of that program and manufactures locally. I guess it's theoretically possible they use some raw materials from China but those being irreplaceable at any cost (when you're talking billion dollar systems and relatively low quantity) also doesn't pass the smell test.
What would settle this question is us getting a BOM of the F-35 with the specific parts/materials that are a concern. We're obviously not gonna get that. Alternatively some sort of reliable source, like head of engineering for one of these companies. I don't think we've seen this either.
The simplest explanation is that saying this impacts something like the F-35 sells more newspapers or advances some agenda. I'd buy the economic leverage argument; just not the national security one. Not without more evidence.
The facetious reply to that is to look at what China has done with its command economy under the direction of its smart degree-engineer Politburo masters (unlike the USSR).
That's not a call for Communism, during WWII the US was essentially under a command economy and manufacturing companies made good profits—some fortunes. Furthermore, the US government was run by very bright people such as Vannevar Bush and Harry Hopkins (they must be rolling in their graves at today's shambles).
The US doesn't have to go to such lengths today but it could partially do so by mandating that certain critical/strategic industries be directed to produce strategic goods and materials.
The real issues are lack of political will and stupid ideological differences.
Gold and platinum group elements are far less abundant than REs and "extraction is costly, capital intensive and environmentally unfriendly", and yet we still engage in mining and refining them.
We've now reached the point where the strategic and economic importance of REs is enough to overcome those impediments/objections. As I mentioned earlier, this was very predictable at least 15 years ago. It's not lack of foresight but rather lack of political will—thus there's been no cogent or effective forward planning policy in place.
It only takes a decade or two if there is zero urgency and you give every rando with an axe to grind, both imaginary and real, veto power over the project.
The other option is to just build things that need to be built.
> It only takes a decade or two if there is zero urgency and you give every rando with an axe to grind, both imaginary and real, veto power over the project.
The issue is the vetoes are layered and entrenched.
Some EPA rules makes it effectively impossible but are to varying extents actually protecting the environment, so you'd want someone who knows what they're doing to rewrite them in a way that can do both things at once. Zoning rules prohibit anyone from operating a mine there or building housing for the workers near the mine and local NIMBYs control the local zoning boards. Various OSHA regulations, state and federal mining rules, transportation rules, etc. are in the same state as the EPA ones.
There isn't any one place you can go to unbotch it all at once but getting them each to do it individually is non-trivial unless your plan is to just vaporize them all simultaneously.
If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.
NASA put a human on the moon in less than 10 years in the 60s, and today it's taken then a little longer than 10 years to get a single unmanned launch up with SLS.
> If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.
That's a big part of the problem. The vetoes have evolved to resist political reformists.
Most of these regulations come from unelected administrative agencies. You can swap out the President of the United States and they're still mostly the same people. The President can issue them general orders but a single elected individual doesn't have the bandwidth to drill down into all the specifics in all the agencies, even though that's what it'd take to fix it.
The nearest you could come to it would be to actually vaporize them -- stop doing these things at the federal level at all. It was never intended to be that way, that's why the federal executive branch has only one elected official. Instead you have the states do it, which a) gives you a house cleaning because they have to start over and b) gives you 50 chances to get it right instead of just one so that one bad regulatory choice can't destroy an industry nationwide.
But that's just a major problem, not the only problem. Zoning is nearly as bad, maybe even worse, but is local. Because that one isn't caused by unaccountability, it's caused by NIMBYs. For that you can't just limit the powers of the federal government, you even need to restrict the local governments from doing that.
That one would be easy to fix, on paper -- require that in any 100 square miles of land area at least 50% of the land can't prohibit anything other than noxious industrial uses, meaning you can build mixed commercial and residential with unlimited density, and in any 10,000 square miles of land area, at least half of that 50% (i.e. 25%) has to be completely unzoned, meaning you can build literally anything. Then the people who want single family homes can have the other 50% of the land area, just not the >90% it currently is in many areas. But now actually do that.
1. US government contracting preferentially selecting over the last 75 years for people who are used to working slow and dotting every i / crossing every t -- i.e. business as usual
2. Regulations during business as usual slowing down the maximum throughput of processes
That isn't to say that other people don't still exist in the US, just that they're not currently at government contractors, because the government hasn't prioritized their core competencies (speed).
It's entirely possible that, similar as was done to military command staff at the outbreak of WWII, the US rewrites its regs, fires people who are incompetent at working at a faster pace, and recognizes and elevates talent.
Unfortunately the current executive branch, while tearing down regulations, then has more interest in profiteering and nepotism than truly pushing exceptional engineers.
Rare earths are not rare on Earth, but production of rare earth metals is rare and difficult and almost exclusively done by China. There are two other factors that make this announcement important though. One is the use of the foreign direct product rule, which means China is requiring all use of rare earths produced by China to be tracked and require approval, and all military applications are not going to be approved (why would China arm it's competitors?) The other factor is that while things like F-35's may only use a few hundred pounds of rare earths each and there are not many of them, things like smart bombs and semiconductors need rare earths and there are a LOT of those. If China can truly cut the US from China's production, it's likely going to greatly reduce the US's current attempts to scale up both weapons production and the more advanced semiconductors (like GPU's for AI) until the US can get alternate sources. It will take 5-10 years to build alternate sources (some small pilot projects are near completion, but scaling up will take a while), so during that time the US could be short on weapons and compute power. The US military has done some stock piling of rare earths, but it's a fairly small stockpile. So worst case is no weapons or AI for the US for some time.
There will also be consumer effects. EV's, drones, phones, TV's, RC cars, and more all use rare earths or rare earth magnets. Because rare earths were cheap before, most quality electric motors now use them. China can now cut off those uses also if they want to.
How effectively China can halt sales to the US is debatable. The CIA could start a toy manufacturer front company and buy rare earth magnets for example. China may eventually find out and cut them off, but then the CIA can just start a new front company. Buying from European or Asian companies as intermediaries may be difficult to enforce. If a war started over Taiwan, China could just cut off all shipments to the world. So there is perhaps a five year window here where China can exercise power via rare earths. Beyond that alternate sources will likely be in place.
So one thing China is "saying" here is that if the US is going to cut China off from advanced computer chips, China is going to make it impossible to make those chips so the US won't have them either. This could be enough to bring a sudden halt to US AI investment. It would definitely introduce a big new uncertainty.
"It will take 5-10 years to build alternate sources (some small pilot projects are near completion, but scaling up will take a while), so during that time the US could be short on weapons"
As I said elsewhere, if the US really wanted to it could solve the shortage in only months. I refer you to the phenomenal retooling exercise and enormous production growth in WWII. I suggest you read those stats.
From about the 1910s to the 1960s, the USA was considered the world's factory. If you wanted the get a product made, you'd go there to set up a production line; if you wanted to make a factory elsewhere, you'd hire American experts to teach you and tool it up for you.
The USA no longer has that role for hardware, although it does for software.
The US had the knowledge in the workforce to do the retooling 80 years ago, why do you think that still exists? You can believe that all you want, it's a comforting thought but I don't see 2025 USA having at all the same capacity.
The US still one of the leading countries in the world for mining and refining by any measure. It has extensive expertise and its mineral wealth is unusually diverse.
All of this is despite the fact the US effectively banned new mining several decades ago. The US is a mineral juggernaut and has the technical knowledge but growth has been severely restricted as a matter of policy for a long time.
By analogy, US oil production was in terminal decline since the 1970s and presumed dead at the end of the 20th century. Now the US is the world’s leading oil producer with no sign of slowing down.
There is every reason to believe the same thing would happen if the US decided to re-open the mountain west to mineral exploration.
> How effectively China can halt sales to the US is debatable.
Every intermediary or degree of separation introduced raises the price as each link in the chain demands their slice of the action. They might not be able to stop sales, but I imagine they might make it quite expensive.
As you said, rare earth elements aren't really rare--they are very abundant. But they are mixed in with themselves (there's 17 of them) and lots of other elements. Think of it like if you had 50 different colored sands and had huge amounts of all of them, then mixed them all up. The rarity is that you're not going to go through that sand and find a big patch of blue sand.
There's plenty of them, and all over the world. It's also important to separate the mining of rare earths from the processing/refining. 60% of REEs come from mines in China. But 90% of the processing is done in China (for some of them, heavy REEs, 100% of it is done there).
It wasn't always this way, but started to change in the 80s and 90s as Chinese firms were able to process rare earths at much lower costs. It was a mix of things--labor rates, lax standards, as well as state subsidies (the latter shouldn't be overlooked).
It's difficult to reopen processors, and starting up new ones requires a lot of time and money. We can do it, we just can't flip a switch and start it up. Also, China has developed a lot of new technology to do it and have export controls on the tech. Also, we have much more severe environmental standards these days that would make it even more difficult to get going.
Yes, though money is still a big part of it. An Australian company (Lynas) developed the capability but was struggling to get investment largely because they couldn't produce them as cheaply as China's scale/subsidies/etc could.
When Japan was temporarily cut off from rare earths they became an investor (willing to pay more to reduce single-vendor risks), but apparently it was hard to get the US at the time to care enough. At least that's the story that was floating around.
From a companion article: "For instance, an F-35 contains more than 900 pounds of REEs, an Arleigh Burke–class DDG-51 destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds, and a Virginia-class submarine uses about 9,200 pounds."
They're not rare but you have to process them and basically only China does. No clue as to the share of the equipment that is rare earths but if you need a component you need it. Doesn't matter if it's small or in theory cheap. If it's unavailable you don't have a substitute.
This has all been known for over a decade but no one invested in an alternate supply chain.
Propaganda. Some strategic rare earth is indeed rare.
As in economically extractable stuff are geologically rare.
The strategic heavy stuff (dysprosium, terbium, yttrium) for high performing magnets are ECONOMICALLY extracted from ionic clay deposits mostly in PRC, myanmar (controlled by PRC), and small pockets else where (Lynas Australia+Malaysia) which is <10% i.e. not enough for world demand but process still depends on PRC tech.
Rare earth is not rare for these HeavyREE in the sense that fresh water is not rare for a desert nation next to the ocean, you just have to spend $$$ desalinate. Except this is 2000s, and the technology to do so at scale doesn't exist. US+co would have to plow through order magnitude more rocks to get the small % of HREE, i.e it's much more energy intensive and polluting to the point where it might not even be strategically viable. See how PRC has MORE shale deposits than US on paper but they still have to import fossil because the shale is technically hard to access.
TLDR is PRC controls like ~90% of supply and ~100% of process for some strategic HREEs, i.e. more than US EUV tier control. The only saving grace is HREE doesn't depreciate like semiconductors so if it can be smuggled (like US did with Ti from USSR during coldwar) it would be golden, but you also can't rent HREE from the cloud. So it depends on how strong PRC enforces controls. The other reminder is there is host of other elements that are also strategic (Ga/Ge for radars etc), which PRC also functionally has 100% control over due to having ability to process to sigmas of purity, i.e. imagine if everyone has oil but only one country has refinery technology.
How expensive matters, can stop NK and RU from access/buying in quantities that effects planning. And we're talking about a lot of commodity tier globally diffused/produced components where there are many sources and enforcement is really US weaponing the dollars. Different from PRC having production monopoly over critical input for high temperature magnets that say a F35 or AIM120 component needs but have no alternate supply chains for. It's not COTs stuff like chips from washing machines used for a lowend drone.
Just like EUV block, it's really matter of how much buying such things (in quantities required) gets disrupted, i.e. enough to degrade supply chain enough that force US to make expensive / different choices, waste 100s of billions and decades to retool MIC away PRC HREE. PRC has less highend compute for training than it would otherwise have without EUV block, and US can likely have less high-end hulls, airframes, less performent munitions and sensors etc... amount of access ripples across strategic landscape.
All current US+co HREE for some strategic elements touch PRC supply chains. And TBH PRC can probably execute export controls much more effectively than US, but these are PRC's first legislated, structured global export controls from PRC. So hard to say how effective it will be, but they may very well be able to stop US+co more than US+co can stop NK or RU.
PRC can go full nuclear, functionally 100% some strategic HREE components to be produced in PRC. Like how US wants 50% highend semi produced in CONUS, but with semi, US is only one key chokehold supplier and has to negotiate with multiple parties, PRC can solely control HREE that's concentrated in PRC for short/medium term. Again that translates to US not able to build up platforms&stockpiles in sufficient #s, or spend $100Bs and critically, more time to design around shortage. Next thing you know, short/medium term procurement changes enough entire force / deterence balance breaks.
You can't stop north korea/russia buying from the capitalist west (How do Russia get over a billion dollars worth of serialized/tracked aircraft parts to replenish their fleet this year? How do serialized/batch tracked parts end up underground when you track which airplane every part goes into?). It might be different for China, where instead of politicians/government people overlooking loopholes (because money must flow) China executes people for not following the rules.
The US has an abundance of rare earth and many other metals, substantially more than all but a few other countries. Aggressive and cynical environmental activism that buries mine development in decades of lawsuits has made it financially infeasible to develop domestic resources to the point where even mineral exploration is rarely done in the US anymore. No point in exploring for minerals if you won’t be allowed to mine them.
In principle, metal refineries are not that difficult to build and operate. It isn’t rocket science and could be done relatively quickly if the US really wanted to. In practice, any attempt at doing so will be buried in decades of cynical blocking actions by political activists. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out the parties blocking this are substantially albeit indirectly supported by adversarial countries.
It is no different than why we can’t build housing. Unless the US adopts an attitude of telling the haters to go pound sand because building things is important to the furtherance of civilization, nothing will happen.
We as a culture and society give veto power over damn near everything to far too many people that couldn’t be trusted with authority over a lemonade stand.
The know-how has been lost so those currently looking to build plants have to relearn the processes. At the same time they need to examine new methods using different chemicals depending on the material they are extracting from and the particular impurities that need to be removed.
Ball park for a processing plant is 1.5b and 2-3 years from digging foundations to operations if the funds are there and it's fully approved. A lot of the metallurgical testing can be done in parallel with the build, but getting off-take partners requires being able to prove you can supply, and the off-take partners usually supply a lot of the funding.
Case in point, Lynas' Seadrift project in Texas is stalled and may not proceed due to an waste-water permitting issue and the USG not wanting to provide the additional funding required, or fully commit and guarantee off-take.
How is environmental activism cynical? My understanding is that RE mining is terrible for the environment. If I must cause some level of pollution, I don't think it's cynical to want it to happen far from where I am.
The is an enormous amount of environmental activism that exists to achieve an ideological result, it has nothing to do with science or a reasonable analysis of tradeoffs. They cynically exploit people’s ignorance of the subject to justify their actions.
A well-known example of this were regulations that require super-low arsenic levels in water. The thresholds were set extremely low, far below natural levels in most mining districts. The proposed limits were so low that ironically it would put some populations at risk of arsenic deficiency — arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology, much of which comes from water. The people pushing to set levels so absurdly low were anti-mining activists.
If you operate a mine, that benchmark for water quality is now your problem, even if the natural levels are much higher. This puts the mining operation in the somewhat intractable position of remediating the arsenic levels of ambient nature as a pre-condition of mining. You can’t just ensure the arsenic is at the level it was when you found it, you have to reduce to some idealized standard that can be intractably expensive to meet and has no scientific basis. It is exploitive and ugly by people that don’t care about the long-term implications as long as it serves their short-term ideological purpose. Civilization requires mining, it does little to help the environment by exporting it to other countries.
I’m a major nature lover and conservationist, grew up in remote rural areas, and spend more time in the deep wilderness than most, but I am also a relevant scientist by training. The amount of scientific malpractice that happens under the pretext of “saving the environment” in the US is pretty damn gross. There are good people inside the Department of the Interior that try to mitigate the worst excesses but the onslaught is unrelenting.
On the specific point of rare earth mining, the chemistry of rare earth ores are naturally unpleasant, much like gold and silver ores. For historical reasons, the massive deposits of gold and silver in the US were developed before any real regulations. Some of those made quite a mess (see: silver mines of Idaho). Modern versions run quite clean but the hurdles to opening new mines are so prohibitively expensive that the US mostly only still operates the grandfathered pre-regulation mines.
REE mining has none of these advantages. The demand for REE is almost entirely modern, so none of it was grandfathered in. I’m sure the US could operate them at a level that is adequately clean but there is a huge contingent of activists that are against all mining and refining on principle and use the myriad levers created by policy over the last several decades to make sure that never happens in the US.
That said, a few months ago the US government announced a strategic investment in the largest REE deposit in the world, which happens to be in the US but has spent most of its time in bankruptcy. I have to imagine that the intention is to streamline production under some kind of exemption.
Mountain Pass is not a great deposit. It requires blasting to extract from the bastnasite and is low in heavy rare earths such as Dysprosium and Terbium.
There are many better deposits in Australia with more HRE or Brazil (huge ionic clay deposits). Lynas's Mt Weld is weathered carbonatite so also lot more economical for mining.
Halleck Creek is the one to watch in the US as it looks to have a lot more HRE.
In US history, the pendulum swung hard in favor of mining interests getting whatever they wanted at the expense of workers and the people who lived near mines, and the environment.
But the pendulum swung back just as hard when blowing the tops off of mountains and letting towns of people live surrounded by poisons became unacceptable.
The way to prevent the excesses from pendulum swingbacks isn't to call people cynical or ideological for reacting in a disproportionate way to the very real excesses and psychopathic tendencies of purely profit driven resource exploitation, but to understand those tendencies and to put real guardrails in that will stop the incentives from becoming powerful enough to drive them.
Greenpeace activism against golden rice in the Philippines is the quintessential case study even though it's adjacent to environmentalism. It displays not just cynicism but the abject cruelty - mass death and bodily harm - that these disgusting activists are capable of inflicting on the world's most vulnerable people.
Why is it harder to supply people with vitamins than to supply them with seeds that require advanced engineering? Will the golden rice stay golden without careful breeding? Someone is cynical here.
Because getting special seeds into the hands of a few farmers is feasible, but getting vitamins into the hands of millions of extremely poor people and getting them to change their habits is not feasible. These people already eat rice and the distribution of rice to them is already established. They don't have to change a single thing.
it's cynical because these activists who do it are using it for fame and clout; they still enjoy the benefits of these environmental destruction (which is simply exported else where, or the costs borne by someone else other than them).
What would be your definition of meaningful climate activism against rare earth elements?
Or is this one of those "there is no ethical consumption, therefore everyone is a hypocrite and nobody can criticize anyone over anything" type gotchas?
Rare earths are messy to refine on the cheap, and refining them without environmental damage is expensive. One reason China got a leg up on rare earths is they didn’t sweat the environmental damage for a long time (now they are sweating it which is one reason they are holding back exports, but the advantage is too good for the, to completely swear it off).
Yes.. that.. If you are against oil and plastics, walk your talk. If you are against rare earth, walk your talk. If you have a degree in chem-eng, and you're building low plastic solutions, and you're critical, then you're being honest.
Saying "no no no" but doing it on a new cell phone you know was built on rare earth is like a vegan giving a talk while sitting on their new leather couch.
I'm sorry, but how many activists have any fame or clout that they use in any way other than for causes ? I can only think of Greta Thunberg, but can't really remember her ever using her "fame and clout" for anything other than bringing attention to problems. When she signs a sponsorship deal, then we can talk, but until then...
If supply was cut off and critical defense tech was at risk of being crippled I am certain it would be deemed a matter of nation security and things would move very quickly.
China uses slave labor and extremely toxic environmental damage to build this stuff. Western countries banned that sort of thing. We have to relax our laws or increase tariffs to have a domestic industry.
> Some Chinese language source claims that it's a reaction to the Pakistan-US rare earth deal.
Maybe they approached India for a deal that was too lopsided in favour of US for the former to accept so US did the show-and-tell cozying up to Pakistan to get a better while publicly shitting on India? Just follow the money?
Xi is getting China ready to attack Taiwan in 2026 or 2027, and the now mutual unwinding of economic relations between the US and China is underway. Still frenemies at this point, but Trump is aiming for more enemy status sooner because it causes media drama and draws attention to him. The US will be screwed because domestic production takes years to happen and it has lost most of its machine tool suppliers, knowledge, and workers. Manufacturing productivity is essential for any sort of war, as evidenced by the history of the American Civil War and WW II.
If the US doesn't impeach and remove Trump and Vance, and get a real, war-time leader who isn't a celebrity reality star ASAP, it will be doomed as China will rapidly seize Taiwan, disrupt Western chip production and plunge the West into an economic armageddon, and likely widen to a war with Japan who would definitely intervene militarily to defend economic technological resources in Taiwan. No more incompetent, self-destructive, corrupt, ideologue chaos can be tolerated.
I remember talking with someone well over a decade ago who predicted this over Thanksgiving Dinner. The politicians decided to let Magnequench, an Indiana company that made the small, very high torque rare-earth magnet servomotors you need if you want to steer missile fins, etc. get sold to China.
He used to work incorporating those motors into other gear, and predicted this would come back to bite us.
My understanding is the main thing keeping us from ramping up the US domestic rare earth supply chain is the cost of environmental compliance. A long term thinking DOD would have kept this in mind for National Security reasons, and funded things just to keep our supplies viable. As it is, we have vast national security stockpiles of various raw materials, but you know how well central planning worked out for the Soviets.
I’ve never understood the attempt to draw a difference between threat and a vulnerability.
I’ve done offensive security work and worked on defensive security systems professionally. It seems to me like there’s a certain less technical side of computer security that cares a little too much about making definitions and checkboxes - when I get asked in an interview if I think threats or vulnerabilities are a bigger issue I know that job is not a good fit.
They are different things, so it makes sense to have two different terms to describe two different (but related) ideas. Your example interview question doesn't make much sense to me, though.
Either were not actually that bothered by the restriction and are using this to gin up conflict, or we've been this incompetent at responding to existential threats for over a decade and a half, including multiple presidents, both parties holding power, and this current admin's first term.
I think the bigger problem than the military is probably the nascent EV industry here. It must use orders of magnitude more of them than the defense industry, which can surely source them indirectly much the way China is still getting the chips we have export controls on.
I doubt they can kill our missile production no matter what they do but they can probably kill Tesla.
This assumes we’re able to build a rare earth processing infrastructure in a reasonable timeframe, let’s say 10 years. I would not bet on it! America struggles to build anything quickly today except for software and capital.
I dunno they built out fracking pretty quickly to become one of the worlds biggest oil producers, no reason why they couldn’t if willing to destroy the environment like China is.
Same as what we've done to them with the GPU supply.
It's time for us to grow anti-fragility and independence. And we should expect China to do the same.
Sucks for US soybean farmers, but it would have undoubtedly happened in the future regardless.
We need to distribute critical manufacturing far and wide amongst our allies, and onshore some of the most important pieces. (Though I'm not sure the current admin considers our allies as friends, which is not a great idea during this great reshuffling.)
In the last 9 months, we’ve seen the destruction of US international soft power on an unimaginable scale. It’s like watching a family fortune - built up over decades - go up in smoke in the hands of an irresponsible young heir.
It will be impossible or difficult for the US to “leverage” its traditional allies in the way it has in the past. NATO and trade were powerful tools to protect US interests but have been devalued considerably by what has happened this year.
Public sentiment towards the US in these countries is at unprecedented historic lows and given these allies were democracies, this means their political class cannot continue to support the US almost unconditionally like they have in the past. This destruction of goodwill will take a generation to repair.
It's deeper than that, it's about loyalties among you. Trump wants US military to get paid even with the federal government shutdown. [1] Like your executive fearing mercenaries changing their mind, instead of household troops staying in place when the pay chest takes a bit to show up.
PS: Sorry guys, you fucked up. Hard. And by extension fucked everyone else, so expect no sympathies. We will be busy with the new boss, while trying to keep our democracies not going to crap too. New boss, worse boss than old boss.
There are no “allies” only interests. Nobody is an “ally” of the US because they like us. They are “allies” because it’s in their own interest to be one.
When China starts throwing its weight around in the Pacific you’ll pretty quickly see those “allies” cozy back up.
This is bad. This whole debacle has only proven two things: you can't trust China. And you can't trust the USA. Globalisation is slowly going to reverse :(
I mean you should definitely be careful with China, but I don't see how this example is evidence that we shouldn't trust China as it is mainly a response to heavy US tariffs and pulling back from established trade deals. The US seems like the far better "You can't trust them" candidate in this situation.
The vague, general and ill specified argument of "national security" can mean anything, from "we are totally screwed" up to "our fighter's LCD screen has 10% less contrast than it should". Only an insider can provide some context in what RE means currently.
High temperature magnets for motors (controlling flight surfaces), radar, sonar, lasers. TLDR miniturization, increase power draw. Might have to reduce range due to heaver components, or keep range by deliver smaller payloads, all while sensing less because you can't power emitters as hard, i.e. now you're using more ordnance to attack/defend. But main issue is if you can't smuggle, designing around is expensive / long process and all of a sudden your inventory has 2 supply chains for new / legacy fleet.
Isn't it widely accepted that every country is playing the art of the deal with America after having been bullied by this administration so much? I wouldn't be surprised if China ekes out a better negotiation than EU or other countries because of this play - because this is the only language this administration understands.
On a related note, I am not sure the 20% EU deal is that bad for the EU. Any practical ramifications are a few years in the future (building local production) and whenever Trump threatens to rise tariffs by n% because of x they can always counter with n+20% and erase the board.
Hopefully this motivates alternatives to rare earths, China dominates because they can get away with polluting huge areas. For 1 kg of rare earth, you get roughly 200–300 kg of rock tailings, 2–3 kg of chemical/toxic waste.
Wondering if anyone with knowledge can explain a little more.
We know Rare Earth are not rare. But do high concentration of Rare Earth exist? i.e larger total number of Kg per tonne extracted. Or is the number so small it is negligible? How big of a site would be needed if US were to be self sufficient? What is the highest cost of extraction? Electricity? Are extraction automated? Could it be automated? They say environmental issues, what exactly are those issues? Metallic or chemical contamination? How much more expensive would it be in the US if the initial Capex were not needed for ROI?
I mean I could ask those questions for every other industry that has China as supply Chain chock point but most post or articles seems to ignore it.
A better name might be trace metals. They're not actually rare just extremely dilute so you need to create huge chemical leaching ponds (sulfuric or hydrochloric acid) either above or below ground to sufficiently concentrate and collect them.
Of course the ponds create lots of waste gas and water, including radioactive elements and metals since you end up dissolving and concentrating those also. (So both metallic and chemical contamination) The ratio is something like 1 ton of rare earths = 2000 tons of toxic waste.
Seems to me like the issue is not so much the capex cost, but the regulatory and environmental cost. Doing it at scale in a way that doesn't harm the environment (and proving that) is likely prohibitably expensive in the US.
An issue that might not be obvious is that most of the metals in question are mined exclusively as secondary and tertiary ores. It is rarely profitable to mine them as primary ores and in some cases, like gallium, they don’t exist as primary ores. Consequently, there is a long list of metals that are mined almost entirely from the waste streams of primary metal ores with chemical processes that coincidentally have these other metals or which coincidentally partially refine other metals in the waste stream. This allows you to get a lot of work for free as a side-effect of processing the primary ore.
A canonical example of this is gallium, which famously doesn’t concentrate or form ores. However, the process of refining aluminum coincidentally partially refines gallium as a byproduct. So almost all gallium is produced by continued processing of the aluminum refinery waste stream even though aluminum ore contains no more gallium than a random rock.
China produces almost all of their REE from secondary and tertiary ores. The prerequisite to having these secondary and tertiary ore process is having a primary ore. If you are not processing primary ores, none of the secondary and tertiary ores will be available to you as an option. If you want to have a supply chain for diverse metals, you need to be processing diverse primary ores with an eye toward reprocessing the waste stream when it is chemically efficient.
The US has outsourced much of the primary ore processing that can produce a lot of metals that can only be economically produced as secondary ore products.
Just to ask the obvious question - if China has the ability to threaten the US War [0] supply chain, would it make sense for the US to adopt a more peaceful strategy? The Chinese seem to be slowly building up a dominant position without their army really leaving the Chinese borders. And their trade policy seems to mostly leverage producing high quality goods cheaply. Maybe the US could emulate that.
[0] That rename was the best gift Trump has given the international community so far.
My assumption is that the military supply chain in any country is a tiny percentage of rare earth supply, compared to the huge fraction that’s used in commercial applications. And since the military is prioritized and a perfect embargo doesn’t exist, “choking off the supply to crush the military” is almost impossible.
>would it make sense for the US to adopt a more peaceful strategy?
"Just be nicer when someone threatens to punch you in the mouth"
The structure of the Chinese economy is very different from ours. It's not that their trade policy "leverages producing high quality goods cheaply", as if there's something magic about the dirt in Shenzhen. More that they were able to play a very long game, and take advantage of continual missteps in industrial policy that started somewhere back in the 1990s. They have not won this game yet.
You’re right I forgot that PRC has no agency in their long term geopolitical activities, is always responsible and honest about what they’re doing, and anything bad happening is simply a result of the United States’ jingoism. “China good, America bad evil empire”. We get it man.
Without US military intervention and support, Taiwan and Ukraine would fall. Then dozens of other islands in the Pacific as well as Eastern Europe. The U.S. economy and technological growth would be devastated if Taiwan (and TSMC) falls to the Chinese. This is a WW3 scenario.
My understanding based on the reports out of the military-industrial complex is that the decision over whether Taiwan falls sits pretty much entirely with the decision makers in Beijing. There isn't much the US can do about it. If they can't coerce Russia in Ukraine then they definitely can't coerce Chinese decision making about the security situation off the coast of China.
It is a bit late to use Taiwan and Ukraine as justifications for the US using a military solution. It isn't winning these fights.
The decision to invade sits with the leaders in Beijing. "The enemy gets a say", as the saying goes, and whether they would be successful is not obvious. It would be arguably the most complex amphibious invasion in history, definitely rivaling Normandy. The US has a lot of tools, both software and hardware, to bring to the fight in this scenario. Perhaps the question is on acceptable cost. There's also really only two times in the year when the weather in the Straight is calm enough to support that kind of invasion, and the sheer volume of hardware and systems they would have to move makes this kind of operation almost impossible to hide, though there are limited and imperfect ways to mask the preparation.
>It isn't winning these fights.
It absolutely is, right now, in Ukraine. The US has been able to use the Ukraine war as a massive real-time R&D laboratory for our weapons systems. The result is that Russia can no longer project naval power, their strategic air force is completely neutered, and they have tipped their hand for much of their signals and EW systems. The war is stalemated ... without the direct involvement of NATO (the wisdom of direct involvement is not relevant here).
This is to say that I disagree, there is a military solution to this problem.
I dunno, my read on Ukraine is it looks like the Ukranians are feeling their way toward some sort of a collapse. They haven't been able to stabilise the frontline, there was that discussion of lowering the mobilisation age earlier this year and the Russian negotiators don't seem to be in any hurry to make concessions. No certainty in a war but those aren't rosy signals.
Regardless, say China decides to take Taiwan. They set up a blockade with drones and missiles. If there is a counter the US has for that I haven't seen it, Taiwan pretty much disappears off the economic map. There is an interesting series of wargames [0] recently where CSIS looked at what might happen over the first 20 weeks of a blockade and it isn't pretty (let alone what presumably happens if China turns out to be willing to wage war for 12 months or more). My read on the "summery of game outcomes" section is that the US generally takes higher casualties than the Chinese, which is a not a position anyone wants to be in. Then the war drags out and we find out if the US has any idea how to manufacture ... I don't know what they'd need to maintain an attrition war like that. It looks quite hard and consequently the idea of material US support is probably a bluff. They've shown no willingness to bleed on behalf of other people.
Maybe if some sort of grand coalition of Asians comes together to fight and die protecting US hegemony in the Pacific it could work out well for the US. Crazier things have happened.
Australia, The Philippines, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and possibly France would join American military intervention. Not to mention Taiwan itself. Probably get logistical support from other places like Singapore, Thailand, etc.
American sentiment would change if mass casualties were inflicted on US troops.
This war scenario is different for Americans than Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. There is direct threat to the American homeland if Taiwan falls. Not to mention destroying our technology infrastructure and industry.
The US is not defending Taiwan for the sake of "supporting its people" it or because of TSMC. It's actually because Taiwan is part of the "First island chain", and it's crucial in keeping China away from taking the Pacific Ocean and threatening the US west coast. The US will throw everything it has to defend it. It is absolutely vital to US territorial security. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain
China wants Taiwan. Ideally not through bloodshed, but economically and strategically force them to reunite. Given the amount of trade and relationship between PRC and Taiwan, I would write off that possibility in the future.
Also regarding Taiwan, the situation is actually very simple. Imagine one(or many) US State becoming independent just to keep relying on slavery to prop up its economy. Don't you think the rest of the US shouldn't have to step up and put an end to this depravity? Now, if you agree with me, then you should also agree with me on Taiwan. Taiwan is a backward capitalist dictatorship. Why shouldn't the rest of the democratic Chinese homeland take over this island to install a legitimate socialist democracy?
I was gonna commend you for the perfect sarcasm of your comment, but your comment history suggests you actually mean it... if words have so little meaning to you that you can call China (and Venezuela) democracies, then I highly doubt we're talking about the same reality.
I mean, I'm a communist so I perceive these countries to be the leading forces of democracy worldwide. When a State serves the general welfare of its citizens, I hold it to be a democratic State. On the other hang, western oligarchies with their pedo-presidents, where citizens are very unsatisfied of their leadership and who get imprisoned for speaking out against genocide, are dictatorships in my opinion.
I’m very unsympathetic to making China some boogeyman intent on world domination, but I have to say that speaking out against the government isn’t exactly welcomed with open arms there.
I mean, open criticism of the govt is super okay. Peeps do this all the time. Protests are part of daily life. But openly calling for an armed rebellion will get you arrested for sure, like in many other countries.
So you’re saying I could post a picture of Xi Jinping and say our country is broken because we’re lead by an idiot who looks like Winnie the Pooh while posting some ai mash up of the two and it would be fine? Even if it gained traction and was widely shared?
I honestly don’t believe that, but readily admit I could be in a propaganda bubble. Anything you can point to as examples of large scale mocking of powerful people being acceptable in China?
How about "our country should have a free market economy because I think that is morally correct"?
How about "our country should not be led by the Communist Party because Communism is a mistaken, harmful idea?" (or if you prefer, "because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't reflect the correct version of communism"?)
How about "our country should have a multiparty competitive electoral democracy with direct elections for the central government"?
How about "we should be allowed to directly access all foreign Internet content"? [I know a very large number of countries are having trouble with this concept lately, but here the question is about the right to say this rather than whether it happens.]
How about "there should not be a state, because state systems are not the ideal way to run a society" (or "because there is no way for states to acquire legitimate authority to rule populations")?
How about "as citizens, we should be able to directly recall individual members of the central government by secret ballot"?
How about "our political system should not formally favor any party and should not give any form of special status or position to any party; no political party should be identified by name in the constitution or any legislation"?
How about "some territorial units of our country should be able to have a process by which they could choose whether to continue to be part of our country"? [This is another one that many countries have been having trouble with, so again the question is whether people can advocate this.]
How about "we should have rule of law, with a legal system that binds the government as well as private parties, and that is applied by a completely independent judiciary, giving a fair and objective hearing to all sides in every matter, and is not required or expected to favor the state, government, or any party in interpreting or applying the law, and decides all cases openly and publicly on the basis of written, public legal principles and instruments"?
How about "high-profile court case __________ was wrongly decided, resulting in an unjust outcome, and we should try to figure out how to keep that from happening again"?
How about "our country was in the wrong in its conflict with ____________ on the occasion of ___________"?
How about "we should immediately begin a process to draft a new constitution for our country, with no political or ideological preconditions of any kind"?
Edit: I am thinking of all of these things as things that are either completely politically normal elsewhere or that are advocated by a noticeable segment of the population elsewhere. It's clear that people don't necessarily prevail when they advocate these things, like no state has dissolved itself because of advocacy by anarchists, and some states that don't have a process for secession or constituent assemblies or whatever haven't ended up creating those things just because people asked for them. (E.g. Canada and the UK created a process for a province to have a referendum on secession, but Spain didn't, and the U.S. only allows this for some kinds of political units and has never agreed to make the referendum results automatically binding. Or, in Germany, it might arguably be considered illegal to hold a constituent assembly to create a new constitution without a requirement to maintain some existing entrenched clauses from the existing constitution in the new text.) So again, I am not focusing on whether people can achieve each of these political goals in modern China through advocacy (some of them directly contradict each other), but whether they can advocate these things in a nonviolent fashion and avoid any form of punishment by the government.
I'm not sure what your point is. Whilst a lot of the opinions you shared here are legal in CN, they are considered frowned up (communism being harmful), edgy (free marketism), or backward(direct recall of the executive), thats why they are uncommon. The proof is that China's top legislature has many political parties besides the communist party (which keeps 2/3 of all seats by constitutional guarantee). Some political activities and ideologies are proscribed, but imo that's healthy. A bit like how Germany officially prohibits nazi parties.
If I were you, I'd simply get in touch with chinese or vietnamese peeps and ask their own opinion of their respective country. You will see that it's normal folks - just like you -, and that they aspire to similar things. You may get surprised that many will say that, yes, their country is democratic. These countries are more than the propaganda you hear on the TV, and they are a lot more accessible than you might think :)
I've personally met Chinese people who were stopped by force or threat of force from saying what they wanted to say about domestic politics.
There are many selection biases in how I came to know the people that I do, and it's entirely possible that there are many, many more people who are quite happy with the government and/or its restrictions on speech. However, I can confirm that the Chinese government is, in fact, oppressing a non-zero number of political dissidents.
If these people you know were publicly calling for the socialist system to be overthrown and replaced by a bourgeois liberal democracy, then I'm afraid to say I don't see anything wrong with this kind of oppression.
For example, I wish my country (Switzerland) were actively cracking down on Nazis, so oppression is okay for me. It really depends who's the target. Censorship is just a tool. One can yield it for good, or for bad purposes.
Can you see how this makes it look like the "socialist system" only survives by force, by physically preventing people from thinking and talking about its flaws? That it can't actually withstand criticism at all?
(That's exactly what I've personally believed for a long time, and your position tends to confirm that impression for me.)
Is it possible that you're not concerned about this issue because you follow a school of Marxist thought in which it's considered literally impossible for people to persuade each other about important political questions, because all people are constrained to believe particular things based on their situations?
maybe we just need a big rock half the size of Earth made entirely of rare earths from the cosmos to strike the planet. this would solve all of our rare earths problems. we would never need rare earths again.
China has also suspended purchasing of BHP iron ore as a negotiating tactic to lower prices. They banned Australian barley, wine and coal when the previous government upset them.
Honestly, everyone should put tarrifs on china. Bringing them into the WTO was the biggest mistake made. People thought it would drive them to democracy. Instead the opposite has happened. The sooner, Chinese companies are forced to compete fairly the better. When western countries can sell cars in China as easy as BYD can ship shit boxes to the west, the better. Until then, fuck them.
Raise tariffs, restrict trade, disincentivise investment in China. Build out manufacturing capabilities in western countries
That's the White House's cover story, not the actual reason. China is in the WTO because the Fortune 500 needed a stable tariff regime to streamline production offshoring to a country with weak labor and environmental protections, but without the political instability of actual democracies.
The problem is if the US thinks they’ll be weaker in the future then it would be in their interest start the war sooner instead of waiting. I think it’s China who is taking the long term approach.
the US being weak is why new wars start. Like it or hate it, the reason there was many decades of (relative) peace after the fall of the USSR is due to the US being the only superpower. Obviously, china doesnt like that.
Decades of peace? The US were bystanders in the wars in Rwanda, Bosnia and East Timor in the 90s, and invaded Iraq and Afghanistan within 12 years of the fall of the USSR.
Our government really fought a trade war with China (the last mini trade war were Trump got concessions) and then started another trade war expecting to fight the exact same war again and not evolving/preparing knowing you can never fight the same war twice? We have the worst political class ever.
I believe the tariff fiasco has crossed a line that marks the beginning of the end of American Empire and there's really no going back.
America is a one-party state. That party is neoliberalism. On economics and foreign policy there's almost no daylight between the major parties in the US and really foreign policy is economics. Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism.
Political discourse is dominated by culture war issues not economics. Race, gender, sexual oreintation, immigration status, etc are intentional distractions designed to divide the working class while the government steals from you to give it to the wealthy. As LBJ put it:
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Southern states were so deeply concerned that poor white people would unit with freed slaves they went out of their way to sow these kinds of racial divisions.
Why tariffs have crossed a line is because the Republicans seem to have forgotten that protecting the economic order is the point of culture war issues. You're not meant to actually start messing twith the economic order. Trade is so intertwined on the global stage that no country stands self-sufficient. China can wield an extremely large stick here. Rare earths are just the tip of the iceberg.
The US produces very little now and that's mostly weapons (and some commercial airplanes). You might say tech products but they're almost all produced in China. We have a dysfunctional economy that teeters on the brink of collapse where basics like food, water and shelter are getting out of reach for many people. Take out data centers being built and our economy is in decline and that's another theft from the public too as we're all paying for the electricity. Now that might be fine if those AI data centers actually produced something but... they don't.
The capitalist dream here seems to be to produce AI to displace workers but where does it end? Who buys your stuff if nobody has a job and those who do have no disposable income?
AI data centers, weapons and private equity firms. That's the modern US economy.
Compare that to China where the government is building infrastructure at an incredible rate and is investing in public services.
I feel like the epitaph for the United States of America will be something like "For a brief time we created a lot of shareholder value."
It is true that the US manufacturing supply chain relies heavily on imports. It's also true that manufacturing works best when you've not caused every other nation to put blanket tariffs on your goods.
> On economics and foreign policy there's almost no daylight between the major parties in the US
This is, and the rudeness is warranted here, a breathtakingly stupid thing to claim. Are you just not looking at what the Republican party has become, or do you think the full-throated support of Trump's policies by the Republican party doesn't imply the Republican party's policies are Trump's policies?
The idea that the Democratic Party and Trump Party's economic and foreign policies have no daylight between them is laughable.
From the 100% tariffs, the plans to pave over Gaza and build hotels, slashing and burning social safety nets, threatening to annex Canada and Greenland, canceling chip fab plans in the US, the list goes on forever.
To add, the idea that there tariffs in any way reflect neoliberal orthodoxy is bizarre as well. They are the antithesis for neoliberal free trade economics.
> America is a one-party state. That party is neoliberalism. On economics and foreign policy there's almost no daylight between the major parties in the US and really foreign policy is economics.
> Why tariffs have crossed a line is because the Republicans seem to have forgotten that protecting the economic order is the point of culture war issues.
It does not say it is not neoliberalism. Just that it is tactical mistake related to culture war.
Explain to me how there's any substantive difference between either party on:
- Israel
- The rest of the Middle East
- Ukraine
- NATO
- China (tariffs notwithstanding)
- Russia
Even on something like immigration, the ICE Gestapo are only really an escalation of what both parties have been doing. Kamala's immigration plan in the last election cycle was esentially identical to Trump's 2020 platform. Obama was called, among other things, the deporter-in-chief (eg [1]). Biden blocked more asylum seekers under Title 42 than Trump did in his first term.
Ukraine - Trump all but openly supports Russia. Democrats dont.
NATO - Trump and republicans are intentionally trying to dismantle it. Democrats dont.
Russia - Republicans admire what Russia stands for. Democrats dont.
And the claim that parties are the same on immigration is beyond absurd too. Yes they are fully easily distinguishable. It does not mean that Democrats are like the caricature conservatives make with "anything goes" policies. Just because they are not in complete extreme does not mean they are the same. And they were definitely not creating the "you can arrest people on their skin color alone" philosophy conservatives use.
> Ukraine - Trump all but openly supports Russia. Democrats dont.
What is different in Ukraine now vs under Biden? The war hasn't ended. We haven't stopped supplying Ukraine.
The US was always going to support Ukraine no matter who was in office at the time the war started. The only reason you heard noise from the Republicans against it was because Russia invaded when Biden was in office. That's literally it.
> NATO - Trump and republicans are intentionally trying to dismantle it. Democrats dont.
How exactly? Trump has forced NATO members to spend more on their military (~2% GDP, as per the NATO charter). NATO expansion into the former Warsaw bloc countries began under Clinton, continued under Bush and kept going under Obama. There's no difference here.
> Russia - Republicans admire what Russia stands for. Democrats dont.
I don't really care about rhetoric. People say things. It doesn't mean a lot. Not compared to what they do anyway. It's a bit like Erdogan in Turkey waving his fist in the air saying "I'm so mad at you, Israel". Is he actually? No. Turkey could collapse Israel's economy overnight if they really wanted to.
> Just because they are not in complete extreme does not mean they are the same. And they were definitely not creating the "you can arrest people on their skin color alone" philosophy conservatives use.
Assuming we have elections again and assuming Democrats try to win a presidential election (they did not try to win 2024) and assuming we get another Democratic administration, watch what they roll back of Republican policy. Historically, it's been very little.
Remember Trump's 2017 tax cuts? What of that got rolled back? The Democrats held the House, Senate and the White House for Biden's first 2 years. They could've claimed they needed to to pay for COVID economic relief.
Bush created ICE in 2003. Remember how Obama disbanded ICE? Oh wait, Biden disbanded ICE? Oh wait... And it's not like disbanding ICE is a new idea. It's not.
The job of the Democrats is to use the idea of defending institutions as an excuse to do nothing.
> What is different in Ukraine now vs under Biden? The war hasn't ended. We haven't stopped supplying Ukraine.
What is different is that USA did actually stopped supporting Ukraine entirely for months. What also happened is that USA negotiated with Putin only, consistently putting Ukraine at disadvantage in those pretend peace deals. What also happened was that USA was giving Putin everything he wanted both in appearance and reality. What was also different was naked attempt to extort Ukraine and give them noting while giving their territory to Russia while demanding they give minerals to USA in exchange of "protection".
The approach and support in this completely is completely different from before. Biden mistake was to disallow attacks on Russian territory before Trump could take over and turn toward Russia he and his people admire so much.
> Trump has forced NATO members to spend more on their military
Trump made NATO members not believe USA will hold their part of the agreement. Trump lied about NATO and NATO members. I mean, others already helped America in their war and Trump clearly said he wont reciprocate.
> NATO expansion into the former Warsaw bloc countries began under Clinton, continued under Bush and kept going under Obama. There's no difference here.
Yes, eastern countries wanted to go to NATO, lobbed a lot and gained the security they craved.
> People say things. It doesn't mean a lot.
It does mean a lot, actually.
Funny, ICE was not doing pure racial profiling it is doing now. Pretending things are the same under both administration is just pure lie.
We all were screaming that Trump was going to start a trade war and how that was going to be bad for everyone. Even the most cynical of us didn't think he'd lose.
> Even the most cynical of us didn't think he'd lose.
Excuse me? As a sentence it's a fine sentence. It's not anchored in reality. Paul Krugman amongst others has been constantly reminding his subscriber list (448,000) that this is a trade war which only has losers. There is no factual basis to the assertion either only the most cynical of us, or didn't think.
30 years ago I might be surprised by us losing a trade war, I am not surprised whatsoever now. On paper the US still has high manufacturing production, but it is high production in a limited number of products and industries that
Uhm, a lot of us knew America didn’t have very good cards in this fight, definitely not the great cards Trump thought we had. It’s clear to me now that China will be the next world power now that Trump has disassembled the only real advantages we had (high tech innovator, attractor of world talent, world trust).
I simply believe he'd be too stupid to execute any sort of Manchurian candidate plot. Letting him follow his capricious, ruinous whims is more advantageous for adversaries anyway.
> Even the most cynical of us didn't think he'd lose.
Perhaps a few within the US bubble thought that.
From the outside the asymmetry was pretty clear, the bulk of global manufacturing takes place within China, the bulk of mining and processing of technological vital inputs was under a Chinese umbrella, and the time to rebuild manufacturing and supply pipelines was on the order of a decade plus.
The US is a customer in a world full of customers and potential trade partners, China has found other customers, trade partners have been forced to develop trade outside of former US trade agreements.
It would have taken a long term careful plan to bring back manufacturing, trade dominance and critical supply chains to the US, doable but not exactly Trump's forte.
America needed to innovate its way out of the problem, maybe also focused on creating supply chains and alliances that weren’t purely based on cheapest prices. But they never bothered, they still aren’t bothering. It’s like our leadership thinks the world will just give us free stuff because we are somehow exceptional.
how can we not be exceptional when all we hear from the day we are born till we are six feet under is that we are exceptional. god bless america and all that…
Define lose. China is in far more pain, and they are doing the world a favor in sending the signals on what needs to be done elsewhere to reduce the risk of over reliance on a mercantilist state.
We knew about these dependencies since around 2014, definitely it was known during Trump 1, that America still hasn’t bothered getting its own rare earth refining up (the elements themselves aren’t that rare) is just bizarre, but private enterprise has continuously scoffed at doing it given the cheap prices the Chinese offered us.
Yes. There was a rare earth glut in 2015, when the China price went way down. Mountain Pass CA mine shut down. Molycorp went bankrupt. MP Minerals now owns that mine, and claims to have ore to magnet capability, although not at full capacity. They've been sending ore to China for refining. Now that has to stop.
There are four steps:
- Mining.
- Beneficiation - raw dirt goes in, most of the uninteresting dirt is removed, low grade ore comes out.
Mostly a mechanical process. Done at the mining site. Biggest problem is getting rid of the waste. Mountain Pass pipes it to Nevada. Really.
- Separation - low-grade ore goes in, and the various elements are separated out.
Usually separate from the mine site. Currently China has over 80% of the capacity for this step.
US capability in this area is weak. MP Minerals has a pilot plant. So does a startup, Ucore.[1]
They claim to be scaling up. Total investment in Ucore seems to be about $55 million, which is small for the importance of this business.
- Smelting and magnet making - MP Minerals has a modest plant in an industrial park in Texas.
The US military demand for rare earths probably isn't that high compared to consumer demand.
Nobody wants to overspend, because the last two times rare earth producers overspent, the price crashed and many players went bust. The problem with this industry is price volatility vs large fixed capital expenditures.
Now pricing, subsidies, and export controls are so political that volatility is worse.
> Humanities majors running America couldn’t grok the risk they were taking by incentivizing the outsourcing of these mining and refining processes.
Outsourcing of everything wasn't incentivized, it was forced on the US industry by Wall Street and their Republican friends. Around 2005-2006 there were 2 Congress bills about balancing the US current trade account, both were written and sponsored by Democrats but neither could get enough sponsors for a vote.
At that time, the GOP was full speed "outsource baby, outsource" and Wall Street analysts would bury any company refusing to follow the party line.
This hits the nail correctly. It's really funny to see people act like it was different heads running the economy back then, you've got the same big businesses and same big names now directly running the US government. The ones that outsourced everything and stripped away America's ability to be self-reliant are the same ones now stripping away America's ability to trade with even its closest allies.
People mistake their actions now as protectionism when it's about looting and pillaging what little is left so that they can keep their death grip on capital.
I wouldn't hasten to blame outsourcing on one political party or the other. Those of us old enough to remember Ross Perot and his "giant sucking sound" (his projection that free trade agreements under consideration in the early 1990s would lead to outsourcing and negative outcomes for the American economy) also remember that he was a third-party candidate. Both of the big parties and their candidates (Bush and Clinton back then) supported philosophies of trade that would (and in retrospect did) lead to outsourcing. Until Trump, neither party was willing to commit political capital towards questioning the free trade orthodoxy in any meaningful way, and it was free trade that lowered barriers to outsourcing.
> I wouldn't hasten to blame outsourcing on one political party or the other.
I don't blame it on one political party, I'm setting the blame record straight. The current admin blames the Democrats for everything including outsourcing, when in fact only some Democrats tried to prevent it from going too far.
> Ross Perot and his "giant sucking sound"
The guy damaged the independent candidate idea more than anyone because he was politically illiterate - a common occurrence among big ego business owners.
> Until Trump, neither party was willing to commit political capital towards questioning the free trade orthodoxy.
On the contrary, The GOP and the Trump admin are trying to make political capital by hyping ridiculously implemented tariffs which fuel inflation, kill the dollar and put a lot of small businesses in danger. Trump doesn't even rise to the level of Perot, rumors are already floating around about who's actually running the show.
"Questioning the free trade orthodoxy" isn't the same as doing the right thing at the right time and place. We get tariffs at arbitrary levels, on a haywire timetable and that cannot be good for anything besides speculation, which the people pay for via inflation.
Hey, leave us humanities majors out of it. Most of us have studied critical thinking skills and ethics, which could have easily been used to avoid the various geopolitical messes we’re in right now.
What a hilarious world view that humanity majors are running the U.S.
The U.S. is ran by wealthy elites, who run the U.S. in such a way to make themselves more wealthy.
Of course they would outsource every job and business related resource mining operations if that meant more profit in the short term. It’s just good business!
It seems to me the people running America are Trump (business), Bezos (engineering), Musk (Physics), Pichai (engineering), Zuckerberg (CS), Mike Johnson (business), John Thune (business), etc
but yeah the Vice President has a humanities degree
"Rare earths are crucial for various defense technologies, including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs. The United States is already struggling to keep pace in the production of these systems."
This feels like it can't be true. What % of "rare earths" are going into those military products? I mean those are super low volume manufacturing compared to EVs or anything consumer oriented. I'm sure there are strong magnets somewhere in a submarine but how many?
I thought "rare earths" were not rare at all. A lot of stuff is made in China because it's economical but can be made somewhere else for a bit more money. Do billion dollar fighter jets care if the magnet used in some electric motor costs $0.35 or $0.43 ?
Isn't the manufacturing issue in the US unrelated to any of this? Not enough factories, not enough skilled people, not having ramped up because munitions weren't needed?
RE elemets mining/refining is ~80% China dominated, even US and other producers mined ores go to China for refinement.The concentrations are ridiculous for the process, think several tons to extract some kilos. Then theres the heavy RE and light , with some being produced as byproducts of other refinement/industrial processes where once again the top producer is China , who due to their scale have essentailly commoditized the production. Thats why magnets at cents instead of several dollars or tens of dollars.
As for all those EV/consumer and Mil products its not raw RE being utilised but speciality alloys that are worked to produce whatever the material science requires , where once again there one industrial producer.
Thats what the whole chain part of supply chain comes in , similar to why its easier and cheaper to manufacture iphones in Schenzen; all the refining/alloys/smelting is in one location with the skilled workforce and advanced methods that have been iterated over the last 30 years.
As to what % go into mil products, several kilos of this several of that forged into speciality alloys at commodity prices vs doing it at artisinal mining prices and those billion dollar weapon systems become tens or hundred billion dollar systems.
> As to what % go into mil products, several kilos of this several of that forged into speciality alloys at commodity prices vs doing it at artisinal mining prices and those billion dollar weapon systems become tens or hundred billion dollar systems.
I am very skeptical. The cost of buying from non-chinese sources is not going to be billions of dollars for some kilos of magnets. There are other options e.g. https://mpmaterials.com/ or https://www.neomaterials.com/ .
Sure. There's magnets everywhere. In speakers, in EVs (motors, actuators), pumps, wind turbines whatnot. Military use has to be a tiny tiny fraction. Like less than 1% or even less than 0.1%. These are not expensive bits- it's just China makes them cheaper.
China seems to own about 90% of the market. So for sure we're not going to be able to replace 90% of the market in a blink. But that 90% isn't going away, China is still selling EVs and other products. The 10% is plenty for military use, even if the prices go up a lot (military bits are usually mil-spec and expensive anyways). There's definitely economic leverage there but I call bs on the military angle.
I'm afraid that for certain special magnets (and not only magnets) China may represent 100% of production capacity, concentrated in a couple of factories. The cost of an alternative would be the cost of building an onshore version of these factories, and maybe a few more up the supply chain.
Think about much bigger chunks of semiconductor industry where TSMC represents 100% of world's capacity for certain most advanced production nodes.
"The cost of an alternative would be the cost of building an onshore version of these factories, and maybe a few more up the supply chain."
Why hasn't this been done? We first knew China/rare earths was a security and strategic issue at least 15 years ago.
One has little sympathy for the US when it's been sitting idle on its hands doing SFA for all that time.
>Why hasn't this been done
Probably because that alternative was to build next gen programs to be less performant, and can't settle when platform last 30/40/50 years now.
The problem isn't lol US start making fancy magnets. The problem is lol modern US MIC hardware performance/overmatch is built around access to ABUNDANT fancy magnets that can only be built at scale/cost via processes PRC pioneered because they have (relatively unique) access to geologicly bound ionic clay deposits in PRC backyard. That capability doesn't exist in past history. US+co never had it. And if US can't replicate it, the entire current tranch of military hardware based on size, weight, (SWaP) of pushing highend PRC magnetics to their limits (motors of missiles, planes, precision motors, aesa radars, sonars), might not even make operational sense.
Then strategic delimma is budgetting 100s of billions into retrofitting/integrating of alternative components with slightly different (potentially inferior) performance characteristics. Or trillions in new programs based on alternative material assumptions. That's the real killer. Moving away from PRC HREE dependency =/= make more rocks, but if make more rocks no worky, or settle with making slightly different/less performant rocks, then have to redesign/reengineer/requalify the entire force structure over decades.
"…budgetting 100s of billions into retrofitting/integrating of alternative components with slightly different (potentially inferior) performance characteristics."
For strategic reasons the Military budgets enormous funds on items that may or may not pay off, it's a recognized gamble that all militaries engage in out of deemed necessity.
Why "potentially inferior performance", are you suggesting the US doesn't possess mining and chemistry expertise that are up to Chinese standards?
Just because the US hasn't needed to process REs to certain standards or requirements in the past doesn't mean it's not capable of doing so.
Engineering hard
It's not just the actual element itself. You need: - the ore - the ability to refine it, safely (if not in China) and economically to various extents - the supply chain to produce the end product (eg a magnet)
Then you need this for all the various REEs for the final goods.
You don't just build a mine and off you go. The US gave up a lot of strategic supply chains a long time ago.
China knew that chips were security and strategic issues maybe 20 years ago if not more, I wonder why they haven't done building equally capable factories on-shore.
Because cutting edge chips are not. They are nice to have and sell for a lot. But for vast majority of things you can absolutely manage with chips they can produce. And in some cases those top end chip technologies are not even useful for those purposes.
We are so deep in AI and super computing or wasteful server side computing that we forget that lower end chips are in absolutely everything. And China can produce those just fine.
Consider: you'd have to build an expensive, dirty factory which would only be able to sell to defense contractors which are legally required to buy local; otherwise it won't be able to compete.
It has been done. It’s typical media fear mongering.
This was identified as a threat back in 2015. The DoD has been buying big stakes in non-Chinese mines, and ramping up the MP mine in Nevada.
Could it be disruptive if China chokes off supply? Sure. Is it an existential threat? No
Or you redesign the part without use of neodymium magnets.
At the scale and specificity , lets take magnets - theres magnets and theres magnets , if youre using them in mil/aero tolerances required are going to be much higher with lower failure rates. Think the way rad-hardened cpus for satellites are different/costlier from commercial ones , similarly here when your'e in guidance systems and radars the tolerances require much higher specs than headphones. With the caveat that those already in current products can be recycled so thats one path for simple RE. For the ones that are combined into alloys though its a bigger ask , this i guess will be the main cost increase , as its like trying to separate out copper from bronze if one wants to try recycling. And in mil there are quite a number of special RE alloy to get specific properties. Which is why for the volumes required even at low % alternate refiners will take time to ramp up , in the interim prices dictated at market rates will definately spike.
I would guess that the part list of the F-35 isn't publicly available but this sort of implies someone who worked on the design of that airplane chose an alloy or a part knowing that it 100% depends on something that's only available from China. I just find it hard to believe.
( https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/07/pentagon-f-35-deliv... is related )
What does sound plausible is that some mil-spec actuator (let's say a pneumatic actuator or a motor) happens to have a magnet from China in it. That is not a big deal.
I find it hard to believe that a US mechanical engineer working on the F-35 part would spec an alloy that is only available from China as some fundamental part of the design. E.g. a wing, or body panels, etc. I don't have direct experience but from knowledge working in other manufacturing industries engineers tend to prefer locally available alloys as they're more familiar with their properties and they can easily get them for prototyping purposes Now if the entire wing of the F-35 is subcontracted to China then you'd expect Chinese alloys in that wing. Many products are subcontracted to China and so it's no surprise they'll have Chinese made magnets, alloys etc. But weapons systems are generally not. High end weapons systems like the F-35 may have some secret materials in them that are designed as part of that program and manufactures locally. I guess it's theoretically possible they use some raw materials from China but those being irreplaceable at any cost (when you're talking billion dollar systems and relatively low quantity) also doesn't pass the smell test.
What would settle this question is us getting a BOM of the F-35 with the specific parts/materials that are a concern. We're obviously not gonna get that. Alternatively some sort of reliable source, like head of engineering for one of these companies. I don't think we've seen this either.
The simplest explanation is that saying this impacts something like the F-35 sells more newspapers or advances some agenda. I'd buy the economic leverage argument; just not the national security one. Not without more evidence.
"So for sure we're not going to be able to replace 90% of the market in a blink."
That's BS. If the US considered the shortage important enough and really wanted to then it could do so in a flash.
If you doubt this just look at how the US turned its manufacturing around in WWII. The speed of the production ramp-up was truly amazing.
That was back when we had manufacturing knowledge. That’s all but gone.
The facetious reply to that is to look at what China has done with its command economy under the direction of its smart degree-engineer Politburo masters (unlike the USSR).
That's not a call for Communism, during WWII the US was essentially under a command economy and manufacturing companies made good profits—some fortunes. Furthermore, the US government was run by very bright people such as Vannevar Bush and Harry Hopkins (they must be rolling in their graves at today's shambles).
The US doesn't have to go to such lengths today but it could partially do so by mandating that certain critical/strategic industries be directed to produce strategic goods and materials.
The real issues are lack of political will and stupid ideological differences.
"RE elemets mining/refining is ~80% China dominated, even US and other producers mined ores go to China for refinement."
If this is a problem now then tough. Decades ago this would have been seen as a major strategic/security issue.
One can have little sympathy when security is deliberately traded away for a few dollars extra profit.
BTW, rare earths aren't exactly rare and the US has enough chemical knowhow how to refine them. Sorry, any shortage is of the US's own making.
Technically RE are abudant, what makes them “rare” is that extraction is costly, capital intensive and environmentally unfriendly.
Gold and platinum group elements are far less abundant than REs and "extraction is costly, capital intensive and environmentally unfriendly", and yet we still engage in mining and refining them.
We've now reached the point where the strategic and economic importance of REs is enough to overcome those impediments/objections. As I mentioned earlier, this was very predictable at least 15 years ago. It's not lack of foresight but rather lack of political will—thus there's been no cogent or effective forward planning policy in place.
Yes, the mines are not in China, but the refining is. Is it impossible to onshore refining for supply security?
It’s possible but it’ll take a decade or two if you start today.
It only takes a decade or two if there is zero urgency and you give every rando with an axe to grind, both imaginary and real, veto power over the project.
The other option is to just build things that need to be built.
> It only takes a decade or two if there is zero urgency and you give every rando with an axe to grind, both imaginary and real, veto power over the project.
The issue is the vetoes are layered and entrenched.
Some EPA rules makes it effectively impossible but are to varying extents actually protecting the environment, so you'd want someone who knows what they're doing to rewrite them in a way that can do both things at once. Zoning rules prohibit anyone from operating a mine there or building housing for the workers near the mine and local NIMBYs control the local zoning boards. Various OSHA regulations, state and federal mining rules, transportation rules, etc. are in the same state as the EPA ones.
There isn't any one place you can go to unbotch it all at once but getting them each to do it individually is non-trivial unless your plan is to just vaporize them all simultaneously.
If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.
NASA put a human on the moon in less than 10 years in the 60s, and today it's taken then a little longer than 10 years to get a single unmanned launch up with SLS.
> If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.
That's a big part of the problem. The vetoes have evolved to resist political reformists.
Most of these regulations come from unelected administrative agencies. You can swap out the President of the United States and they're still mostly the same people. The President can issue them general orders but a single elected individual doesn't have the bandwidth to drill down into all the specifics in all the agencies, even though that's what it'd take to fix it.
The nearest you could come to it would be to actually vaporize them -- stop doing these things at the federal level at all. It was never intended to be that way, that's why the federal executive branch has only one elected official. Instead you have the states do it, which a) gives you a house cleaning because they have to start over and b) gives you 50 chances to get it right instead of just one so that one bad regulatory choice can't destroy an industry nationwide.
But that's just a major problem, not the only problem. Zoning is nearly as bad, maybe even worse, but is local. Because that one isn't caused by unaccountability, it's caused by NIMBYs. For that you can't just limit the powers of the federal government, you even need to restrict the local governments from doing that.
That one would be easy to fix, on paper -- require that in any 100 square miles of land area at least 50% of the land can't prohibit anything other than noxious industrial uses, meaning you can build mixed commercial and residential with unlimited density, and in any 10,000 square miles of land area, at least half of that 50% (i.e. 25%) has to be completely unzoned, meaning you can build literally anything. Then the people who want single family homes can have the other 50% of the land area, just not the >90% it currently is in many areas. But now actually do that.
If it's one thing the US gov has down, it's how to move super slow. No way it gets done in a 10 years.
There's two parts to this:
1. US government contracting preferentially selecting over the last 75 years for people who are used to working slow and dotting every i / crossing every t -- i.e. business as usual
2. Regulations during business as usual slowing down the maximum throughput of processes
That isn't to say that other people don't still exist in the US, just that they're not currently at government contractors, because the government hasn't prioritized their core competencies (speed).
It's entirely possible that, similar as was done to military command staff at the outbreak of WWII, the US rewrites its regs, fires people who are incompetent at working at a faster pace, and recognizes and elevates talent.
Unfortunately the current executive branch, while tearing down regulations, then has more interest in profiteering and nepotism than truly pushing exceptional engineers.
Maybe if the environmental reviews are typical.
But if the project is fast tracked as a national security issue?
This was identified as national security issue over a decade ago.
Rare earths are not rare on Earth, but production of rare earth metals is rare and difficult and almost exclusively done by China. There are two other factors that make this announcement important though. One is the use of the foreign direct product rule, which means China is requiring all use of rare earths produced by China to be tracked and require approval, and all military applications are not going to be approved (why would China arm it's competitors?) The other factor is that while things like F-35's may only use a few hundred pounds of rare earths each and there are not many of them, things like smart bombs and semiconductors need rare earths and there are a LOT of those. If China can truly cut the US from China's production, it's likely going to greatly reduce the US's current attempts to scale up both weapons production and the more advanced semiconductors (like GPU's for AI) until the US can get alternate sources. It will take 5-10 years to build alternate sources (some small pilot projects are near completion, but scaling up will take a while), so during that time the US could be short on weapons and compute power. The US military has done some stock piling of rare earths, but it's a fairly small stockpile. So worst case is no weapons or AI for the US for some time.
There will also be consumer effects. EV's, drones, phones, TV's, RC cars, and more all use rare earths or rare earth magnets. Because rare earths were cheap before, most quality electric motors now use them. China can now cut off those uses also if they want to.
How effectively China can halt sales to the US is debatable. The CIA could start a toy manufacturer front company and buy rare earth magnets for example. China may eventually find out and cut them off, but then the CIA can just start a new front company. Buying from European or Asian companies as intermediaries may be difficult to enforce. If a war started over Taiwan, China could just cut off all shipments to the world. So there is perhaps a five year window here where China can exercise power via rare earths. Beyond that alternate sources will likely be in place.
So one thing China is "saying" here is that if the US is going to cut China off from advanced computer chips, China is going to make it impossible to make those chips so the US won't have them either. This could be enough to bring a sudden halt to US AI investment. It would definitely introduce a big new uncertainty.
"It will take 5-10 years to build alternate sources (some small pilot projects are near completion, but scaling up will take a while), so during that time the US could be short on weapons"
As I said elsewhere, if the US really wanted to it could solve the shortage in only months. I refer you to the phenomenal retooling exercise and enormous production growth in WWII. I suggest you read those stats.
It's just a matter of will.
From about the 1910s to the 1960s, the USA was considered the world's factory. If you wanted the get a product made, you'd go there to set up a production line; if you wanted to make a factory elsewhere, you'd hire American experts to teach you and tool it up for you.
The USA no longer has that role for hardware, although it does for software.
The US had the knowledge in the workforce to do the retooling 80 years ago, why do you think that still exists? You can believe that all you want, it's a comforting thought but I don't see 2025 USA having at all the same capacity.
The US still one of the leading countries in the world for mining and refining by any measure. It has extensive expertise and its mineral wealth is unusually diverse.
All of this is despite the fact the US effectively banned new mining several decades ago. The US is a mineral juggernaut and has the technical knowledge but growth has been severely restricted as a matter of policy for a long time.
By analogy, US oil production was in terminal decline since the 1970s and presumed dead at the end of the 20th century. Now the US is the world’s leading oil producer with no sign of slowing down.
There is every reason to believe the same thing would happen if the US decided to re-open the mountain west to mineral exploration.
> How effectively China can halt sales to the US is debatable.
Every intermediary or degree of separation introduced raises the price as each link in the chain demands their slice of the action. They might not be able to stop sales, but I imagine they might make it quite expensive.
As you said, rare earth elements aren't really rare--they are very abundant. But they are mixed in with themselves (there's 17 of them) and lots of other elements. Think of it like if you had 50 different colored sands and had huge amounts of all of them, then mixed them all up. The rarity is that you're not going to go through that sand and find a big patch of blue sand.
There's plenty of them, and all over the world. It's also important to separate the mining of rare earths from the processing/refining. 60% of REEs come from mines in China. But 90% of the processing is done in China (for some of them, heavy REEs, 100% of it is done there).
It wasn't always this way, but started to change in the 80s and 90s as Chinese firms were able to process rare earths at much lower costs. It was a mix of things--labor rates, lax standards, as well as state subsidies (the latter shouldn't be overlooked).
It's difficult to reopen processors, and starting up new ones requires a lot of time and money. We can do it, we just can't flip a switch and start it up. Also, China has developed a lot of new technology to do it and have export controls on the tech. Also, we have much more severe environmental standards these days that would make it even more difficult to get going.
I think it’s a bit like TMSC and bringing back chip manufacturing. Sounds easy in theory till you go to do it.
My cursory understanding of why we don’t process this stuff anymore is environmental degradation more so than money.
Happy to ship the externalities elsewhere while it cheap and we’re on good/friendly terms.
Yes, though money is still a big part of it. An Australian company (Lynas) developed the capability but was struggling to get investment largely because they couldn't produce them as cheaply as China's scale/subsidies/etc could.
When Japan was temporarily cut off from rare earths they became an investor (willing to pay more to reduce single-vendor risks), but apparently it was hard to get the US at the time to care enough. At least that's the story that was floating around.
"…as cheaply as China's scale/subsidies/etc could."
Not an issue if China blockades sales. There are strategic and security issues so governments should also mandate production.
... if they are reasonably bright and are thinking reasonably far ahead, and care about their country
From a companion article: "For instance, an F-35 contains more than 900 pounds of REEs, an Arleigh Burke–class DDG-51 destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds, and a Virginia-class submarine uses about 9,200 pounds."
That’s just a reporter who hasn’t done their research.
Rare earth are used as additives to things like iron and other metals.
I’ll bet the reporter saw “9,200 pounds of rare earth alloys” and decided “alloys” is too confusing and dropped it.
They're not rare but you have to process them and basically only China does. No clue as to the share of the equipment that is rare earths but if you need a component you need it. Doesn't matter if it's small or in theory cheap. If it's unavailable you don't have a substitute.
This has all been known for over a decade but no one invested in an alternate supply chain.
>I thought "rare earths" were not rare at all
Propaganda. Some strategic rare earth is indeed rare.
As in economically extractable stuff are geologically rare.
The strategic heavy stuff (dysprosium, terbium, yttrium) for high performing magnets are ECONOMICALLY extracted from ionic clay deposits mostly in PRC, myanmar (controlled by PRC), and small pockets else where (Lynas Australia+Malaysia) which is <10% i.e. not enough for world demand but process still depends on PRC tech.
Rare earth is not rare for these HeavyREE in the sense that fresh water is not rare for a desert nation next to the ocean, you just have to spend $$$ desalinate. Except this is 2000s, and the technology to do so at scale doesn't exist. US+co would have to plow through order magnitude more rocks to get the small % of HREE, i.e it's much more energy intensive and polluting to the point where it might not even be strategically viable. See how PRC has MORE shale deposits than US on paper but they still have to import fossil because the shale is technically hard to access.
TLDR is PRC controls like ~90% of supply and ~100% of process for some strategic HREEs, i.e. more than US EUV tier control. The only saving grace is HREE doesn't depreciate like semiconductors so if it can be smuggled (like US did with Ti from USSR during coldwar) it would be golden, but you also can't rent HREE from the cloud. So it depends on how strong PRC enforces controls. The other reminder is there is host of other elements that are also strategic (Ga/Ge for radars etc), which PRC also functionally has 100% control over due to having ability to process to sigmas of purity, i.e. imagine if everyone has oil but only one country has refinery technology.
if you cant stop north korea or russia buying things from blackmarket, the no one can stop the US from buying such things
US has more resources and allies that can be used as a supplier, its just making things more expensive
How expensive matters, can stop NK and RU from access/buying in quantities that effects planning. And we're talking about a lot of commodity tier globally diffused/produced components where there are many sources and enforcement is really US weaponing the dollars. Different from PRC having production monopoly over critical input for high temperature magnets that say a F35 or AIM120 component needs but have no alternate supply chains for. It's not COTs stuff like chips from washing machines used for a lowend drone.
Just like EUV block, it's really matter of how much buying such things (in quantities required) gets disrupted, i.e. enough to degrade supply chain enough that force US to make expensive / different choices, waste 100s of billions and decades to retool MIC away PRC HREE. PRC has less highend compute for training than it would otherwise have without EUV block, and US can likely have less high-end hulls, airframes, less performent munitions and sensors etc... amount of access ripples across strategic landscape.
All current US+co HREE for some strategic elements touch PRC supply chains. And TBH PRC can probably execute export controls much more effectively than US, but these are PRC's first legislated, structured global export controls from PRC. So hard to say how effective it will be, but they may very well be able to stop US+co more than US+co can stop NK or RU.
PRC can go full nuclear, functionally 100% some strategic HREE components to be produced in PRC. Like how US wants 50% highend semi produced in CONUS, but with semi, US is only one key chokehold supplier and has to negotiate with multiple parties, PRC can solely control HREE that's concentrated in PRC for short/medium term. Again that translates to US not able to build up platforms&stockpiles in sufficient #s, or spend $100Bs and critically, more time to design around shortage. Next thing you know, short/medium term procurement changes enough entire force / deterence balance breaks.
You can't stop north korea/russia buying from the capitalist west (How do Russia get over a billion dollars worth of serialized/tracked aircraft parts to replenish their fleet this year? How do serialized/batch tracked parts end up underground when you track which airplane every part goes into?). It might be different for China, where instead of politicians/government people overlooking loopholes (because money must flow) China executes people for not following the rules.
Yeah, its really hard to track equipment electronic parts
imagine tracking sand, thats what china really trying to do buddy
The US has an abundance of rare earth and many other metals, substantially more than all but a few other countries. Aggressive and cynical environmental activism that buries mine development in decades of lawsuits has made it financially infeasible to develop domestic resources to the point where even mineral exploration is rarely done in the US anymore. No point in exploring for minerals if you won’t be allowed to mine them.
In principle, metal refineries are not that difficult to build and operate. It isn’t rocket science and could be done relatively quickly if the US really wanted to. In practice, any attempt at doing so will be buried in decades of cynical blocking actions by political activists. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out the parties blocking this are substantially albeit indirectly supported by adversarial countries.
It is no different than why we can’t build housing. Unless the US adopts an attitude of telling the haters to go pound sand because building things is important to the furtherance of civilization, nothing will happen.
We as a culture and society give veto power over damn near everything to far too many people that couldn’t be trusted with authority over a lemonade stand.
The know-how has been lost so those currently looking to build plants have to relearn the processes. At the same time they need to examine new methods using different chemicals depending on the material they are extracting from and the particular impurities that need to be removed.
Ball park for a processing plant is 1.5b and 2-3 years from digging foundations to operations if the funds are there and it's fully approved. A lot of the metallurgical testing can be done in parallel with the build, but getting off-take partners requires being able to prove you can supply, and the off-take partners usually supply a lot of the funding.
Case in point, Lynas' Seadrift project in Texas is stalled and may not proceed due to an waste-water permitting issue and the USG not wanting to provide the additional funding required, or fully commit and guarantee off-take.
Build the refiners next to your house then.
There's a happy medium where we scaled back regulations to allow enough production, but don't pretend there won't be losers from that.
> Aggressive and cynical environmental activism
How is environmental activism cynical? My understanding is that RE mining is terrible for the environment. If I must cause some level of pollution, I don't think it's cynical to want it to happen far from where I am.
The is an enormous amount of environmental activism that exists to achieve an ideological result, it has nothing to do with science or a reasonable analysis of tradeoffs. They cynically exploit people’s ignorance of the subject to justify their actions.
A well-known example of this were regulations that require super-low arsenic levels in water. The thresholds were set extremely low, far below natural levels in most mining districts. The proposed limits were so low that ironically it would put some populations at risk of arsenic deficiency — arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology, much of which comes from water. The people pushing to set levels so absurdly low were anti-mining activists.
If you operate a mine, that benchmark for water quality is now your problem, even if the natural levels are much higher. This puts the mining operation in the somewhat intractable position of remediating the arsenic levels of ambient nature as a pre-condition of mining. You can’t just ensure the arsenic is at the level it was when you found it, you have to reduce to some idealized standard that can be intractably expensive to meet and has no scientific basis. It is exploitive and ugly by people that don’t care about the long-term implications as long as it serves their short-term ideological purpose. Civilization requires mining, it does little to help the environment by exporting it to other countries.
I’m a major nature lover and conservationist, grew up in remote rural areas, and spend more time in the deep wilderness than most, but I am also a relevant scientist by training. The amount of scientific malpractice that happens under the pretext of “saving the environment” in the US is pretty damn gross. There are good people inside the Department of the Interior that try to mitigate the worst excesses but the onslaught is unrelenting.
On the specific point of rare earth mining, the chemistry of rare earth ores are naturally unpleasant, much like gold and silver ores. For historical reasons, the massive deposits of gold and silver in the US were developed before any real regulations. Some of those made quite a mess (see: silver mines of Idaho). Modern versions run quite clean but the hurdles to opening new mines are so prohibitively expensive that the US mostly only still operates the grandfathered pre-regulation mines.
REE mining has none of these advantages. The demand for REE is almost entirely modern, so none of it was grandfathered in. I’m sure the US could operate them at a level that is adequately clean but there is a huge contingent of activists that are against all mining and refining on principle and use the myriad levers created by policy over the last several decades to make sure that never happens in the US.
That said, a few months ago the US government announced a strategic investment in the largest REE deposit in the world, which happens to be in the US but has spent most of its time in bankruptcy. I have to imagine that the intention is to streamline production under some kind of exemption.
Mountain Pass is not a great deposit. It requires blasting to extract from the bastnasite and is low in heavy rare earths such as Dysprosium and Terbium.
There are many better deposits in Australia with more HRE or Brazil (huge ionic clay deposits). Lynas's Mt Weld is weathered carbonatite so also lot more economical for mining.
Halleck Creek is the one to watch in the US as it looks to have a lot more HRE.
reminds me of the just stop oil protest that stopped the cooking oil truck. People who don't know enough, trying to stop what they don't understand.
In US history, the pendulum swung hard in favor of mining interests getting whatever they wanted at the expense of workers and the people who lived near mines, and the environment.
But the pendulum swung back just as hard when blowing the tops off of mountains and letting towns of people live surrounded by poisons became unacceptable.
The way to prevent the excesses from pendulum swingbacks isn't to call people cynical or ideological for reacting in a disproportionate way to the very real excesses and psychopathic tendencies of purely profit driven resource exploitation, but to understand those tendencies and to put real guardrails in that will stop the incentives from becoming powerful enough to drive them.
Greenpeace activism against golden rice in the Philippines is the quintessential case study even though it's adjacent to environmentalism. It displays not just cynicism but the abject cruelty - mass death and bodily harm - that these disgusting activists are capable of inflicting on the world's most vulnerable people.
Why is it harder to supply people with vitamins than to supply them with seeds that require advanced engineering? Will the golden rice stay golden without careful breeding? Someone is cynical here.
Because getting special seeds into the hands of a few farmers is feasible, but getting vitamins into the hands of millions of extremely poor people and getting them to change their habits is not feasible. These people already eat rice and the distribution of rice to them is already established. They don't have to change a single thing.
it's cynical because these activists who do it are using it for fame and clout; they still enjoy the benefits of these environmental destruction (which is simply exported else where, or the costs borne by someone else other than them).
What would be your definition of meaningful climate activism against rare earth elements?
Or is this one of those "there is no ethical consumption, therefore everyone is a hypocrite and nobody can criticize anyone over anything" type gotchas?
Rare earths are messy to refine on the cheap, and refining them without environmental damage is expensive. One reason China got a leg up on rare earths is they didn’t sweat the environmental damage for a long time (now they are sweating it which is one reason they are holding back exports, but the advantage is too good for the, to completely swear it off).
Yes.. that.. If you are against oil and plastics, walk your talk. If you are against rare earth, walk your talk. If you have a degree in chem-eng, and you're building low plastic solutions, and you're critical, then you're being honest. Saying "no no no" but doing it on a new cell phone you know was built on rare earth is like a vegan giving a talk while sitting on their new leather couch.
I'm sorry, but how many activists have any fame or clout that they use in any way other than for causes ? I can only think of Greta Thunberg, but can't really remember her ever using her "fame and clout" for anything other than bringing attention to problems. When she signs a sponsorship deal, then we can talk, but until then...
If supply was cut off and critical defense tech was at risk of being crippled I am certain it would be deemed a matter of nation security and things would move very quickly.
it's rare compared to other stuff. plus you have the issue of refinement.
China uses slave labor and extremely toxic environmental damage to build this stuff. Western countries banned that sort of thing. We have to relax our laws or increase tariffs to have a domestic industry.
Some Chinese language source claims that it's a reaction to the Pakistan-US rare earth deal.
My pet theory is that this is intended as an attack to the concept of long-arm jurisdiction itself, due to
1. This is the first ever long-arm jurisdiction policy from China.
2. Diplomatically, China usually advocates for the total sovereignty of each country within its border.
3. The recent chip entity list has been a huge headache.
4. Notice how the language mirrors the US justification for the chip restriction: dual use, national security.
> Some Chinese language source claims that it's a reaction to the Pakistan-US rare earth deal.
Maybe they approached India for a deal that was too lopsided in favour of US for the former to accept so US did the show-and-tell cozying up to Pakistan to get a better while publicly shitting on India? Just follow the money?
Xi is getting China ready to attack Taiwan in 2026 or 2027, and the now mutual unwinding of economic relations between the US and China is underway. Still frenemies at this point, but Trump is aiming for more enemy status sooner because it causes media drama and draws attention to him. The US will be screwed because domestic production takes years to happen and it has lost most of its machine tool suppliers, knowledge, and workers. Manufacturing productivity is essential for any sort of war, as evidenced by the history of the American Civil War and WW II.
If the US doesn't impeach and remove Trump and Vance, and get a real, war-time leader who isn't a celebrity reality star ASAP, it will be doomed as China will rapidly seize Taiwan, disrupt Western chip production and plunge the West into an economic armageddon, and likely widen to a war with Japan who would definitely intervene militarily to defend economic technological resources in Taiwan. No more incompetent, self-destructive, corrupt, ideologue chaos can be tolerated.
I remember talking with someone well over a decade ago who predicted this over Thanksgiving Dinner. The politicians decided to let Magnequench, an Indiana company that made the small, very high torque rare-earth magnet servomotors you need if you want to steer missile fins, etc. get sold to China.
He used to work incorporating those motors into other gear, and predicted this would come back to bite us.
My understanding is the main thing keeping us from ramping up the US domestic rare earth supply chain is the cost of environmental compliance. A long term thinking DOD would have kept this in mind for National Security reasons, and funded things just to keep our supplies viable. As it is, we have vast national security stockpiles of various raw materials, but you know how well central planning worked out for the Soviets.
If we're getting military supplies from a rival, isn't it already threatened?
Who isn't a "rival" for this administration?
No one. That is why they are trying to set up an autarky
I'd say it's more of an incredibly large vulnerability, but in this case it may be the same thing.
No matter if it's called a threat or a vulnerability, hopefully this'll spur more action towards moving away from China for raw earths and magnets.
I’ve never understood the attempt to draw a difference between threat and a vulnerability.
I’ve done offensive security work and worked on defensive security systems professionally. It seems to me like there’s a certain less technical side of computer security that cares a little too much about making definitions and checkboxes - when I get asked in an interview if I think threats or vulnerabilities are a bigger issue I know that job is not a good fit.
Threat = intent + opportunity + capability.
The vulnerability is the opportunity.
At the same time, wouldn't a bright adversary hide their intent and capabilities?
They are different things, so it makes sense to have two different terms to describe two different (but related) ideas. Your example interview question doesn't make much sense to me, though.
A vulnerability is a known potential weakness in a system. A threat is someone telling you they’re going to exploit the known weakness.
And China has always been a threat.
Not always. Just recently.
I didn't know there was a difference, I was just sticking with the term used in the title.
Exactly. What a sad situation we find ourselves in.
The reality is that it's probably good they're forcing our hand now rather than keep dumping and stringing us along.
This is not the first time they "forced our hand".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earths_trade_dispute
Either were not actually that bothered by the restriction and are using this to gin up conflict, or we've been this incompetent at responding to existential threats for over a decade and a half, including multiple presidents, both parties holding power, and this current admin's first term.
I am not really excited about either situation.
It could be both.
Thank you for letting me know that no matter how bad it is, it can always get worse.
Ha.
I think the bigger problem than the military is probably the nascent EV industry here. It must use orders of magnitude more of them than the defense industry, which can surely source them indirectly much the way China is still getting the chips we have export controls on.
I doubt they can kill our missile production no matter what they do but they can probably kill Tesla.
That could be China's real motivation as well, they have BYD and Xiaomi with a good shot at outcompeting the US globally in EVs.
It’s probably a major factor. Also, it’s great way to hammer back at the sanctions we already put in place.
This assumes we’re able to build a rare earth processing infrastructure in a reasonable timeframe, let’s say 10 years. I would not bet on it! America struggles to build anything quickly today except for software and capital.
That’s a pretty confident and sweeping statement.
How the I-95 Bridge Reopened Just 12 Days After Fiery Collapse (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-28/resurrect...)
They call this a miracle even in the article you linked.
I dunno they built out fracking pretty quickly to become one of the worlds biggest oil producers, no reason why they couldn’t if willing to destroy the environment like China is.
it took decades of technological improvement to work out how to do fracking.
So we’re talking about refining rare earths which we know how to do for decades. But good try.
Same as what we've done to them with the GPU supply.
It's time for us to grow anti-fragility and independence. And we should expect China to do the same.
Sucks for US soybean farmers, but it would have undoubtedly happened in the future regardless.
We need to distribute critical manufacturing far and wide amongst our allies, and onshore some of the most important pieces. (Though I'm not sure the current admin considers our allies as friends, which is not a great idea during this great reshuffling.)
In the last 9 months, we’ve seen the destruction of US international soft power on an unimaginable scale. It’s like watching a family fortune - built up over decades - go up in smoke in the hands of an irresponsible young heir.
It will be impossible or difficult for the US to “leverage” its traditional allies in the way it has in the past. NATO and trade were powerful tools to protect US interests but have been devalued considerably by what has happened this year.
Public sentiment towards the US in these countries is at unprecedented historic lows and given these allies were democracies, this means their political class cannot continue to support the US almost unconditionally like they have in the past. This destruction of goodwill will take a generation to repair.
I’m not sure our “allies” consider us allies any more.
It's deeper than that, it's about loyalties among you. Trump wants US military to get paid even with the federal government shutdown. [1] Like your executive fearing mercenaries changing their mind, instead of household troops staying in place when the pay chest takes a bit to show up.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce808gvp56mo
PS: Sorry guys, you fucked up. Hard. And by extension fucked everyone else, so expect no sympathies. We will be busy with the new boss, while trying to keep our democracies not going to crap too. New boss, worse boss than old boss.
There are no “allies” only interests. Nobody is an “ally” of the US because they like us. They are “allies” because it’s in their own interest to be one.
When China starts throwing its weight around in the Pacific you’ll pretty quickly see those “allies” cozy back up.
Who are the US’s allies these days? A bunch of petro state monarchies in the Middle East?
> It's time for us to grow anti-fragility and independence. And we should expect China to do the same.
Now imagine if people stopped strong-arming each other.
This is bad. This whole debacle has only proven two things: you can't trust China. And you can't trust the USA. Globalisation is slowly going to reverse :(
I mean you should definitely be careful with China, but I don't see how this example is evidence that we shouldn't trust China as it is mainly a response to heavy US tariffs and pulling back from established trade deals. The US seems like the far better "You can't trust them" candidate in this situation.
More like monopolies are bad, be at company, country or currency level.
The vague, general and ill specified argument of "national security" can mean anything, from "we are totally screwed" up to "our fighter's LCD screen has 10% less contrast than it should". Only an insider can provide some context in what RE means currently.
This is the intent of every last CSIS publication: to promote the expansion of the military industrial complex with pearl-clutching language.
High temperature magnets for motors (controlling flight surfaces), radar, sonar, lasers. TLDR miniturization, increase power draw. Might have to reduce range due to heaver components, or keep range by deliver smaller payloads, all while sensing less because you can't power emitters as hard, i.e. now you're using more ordnance to attack/defend. But main issue is if you can't smuggle, designing around is expensive / long process and all of a sudden your inventory has 2 supply chains for new / legacy fleet.
Isn't it widely accepted that every country is playing the art of the deal with America after having been bullied by this administration so much? I wouldn't be surprised if China ekes out a better negotiation than EU or other countries because of this play - because this is the only language this administration understands.
On a related note, I am not sure the 20% EU deal is that bad for the EU. Any practical ramifications are a few years in the future (building local production) and whenever Trump threatens to rise tariffs by n% because of x they can always counter with n+20% and erase the board.
Hopefully this motivates alternatives to rare earths, China dominates because they can get away with polluting huge areas. For 1 kg of rare earth, you get roughly 200–300 kg of rock tailings, 2–3 kg of chemical/toxic waste.
Any sources on this?
From everything I’ve read this is not the case and they instead made it a national priority to have a secure supply.
Wondering if anyone with knowledge can explain a little more.
We know Rare Earth are not rare. But do high concentration of Rare Earth exist? i.e larger total number of Kg per tonne extracted. Or is the number so small it is negligible? How big of a site would be needed if US were to be self sufficient? What is the highest cost of extraction? Electricity? Are extraction automated? Could it be automated? They say environmental issues, what exactly are those issues? Metallic or chemical contamination? How much more expensive would it be in the US if the initial Capex were not needed for ROI?
I mean I could ask those questions for every other industry that has China as supply Chain chock point but most post or articles seems to ignore it.
A better name might be trace metals. They're not actually rare just extremely dilute so you need to create huge chemical leaching ponds (sulfuric or hydrochloric acid) either above or below ground to sufficiently concentrate and collect them.
Of course the ponds create lots of waste gas and water, including radioactive elements and metals since you end up dissolving and concentrating those also. (So both metallic and chemical contamination) The ratio is something like 1 ton of rare earths = 2000 tons of toxic waste.
Seems to me like the issue is not so much the capex cost, but the regulatory and environmental cost. Doing it at scale in a way that doesn't harm the environment (and proving that) is likely prohibitably expensive in the US.
An issue that might not be obvious is that most of the metals in question are mined exclusively as secondary and tertiary ores. It is rarely profitable to mine them as primary ores and in some cases, like gallium, they don’t exist as primary ores. Consequently, there is a long list of metals that are mined almost entirely from the waste streams of primary metal ores with chemical processes that coincidentally have these other metals or which coincidentally partially refine other metals in the waste stream. This allows you to get a lot of work for free as a side-effect of processing the primary ore.
A canonical example of this is gallium, which famously doesn’t concentrate or form ores. However, the process of refining aluminum coincidentally partially refines gallium as a byproduct. So almost all gallium is produced by continued processing of the aluminum refinery waste stream even though aluminum ore contains no more gallium than a random rock.
China produces almost all of their REE from secondary and tertiary ores. The prerequisite to having these secondary and tertiary ore process is having a primary ore. If you are not processing primary ores, none of the secondary and tertiary ores will be available to you as an option. If you want to have a supply chain for diverse metals, you need to be processing diverse primary ores with an eye toward reprocessing the waste stream when it is chemically efficient.
The US has outsourced much of the primary ore processing that can produce a lot of metals that can only be economically produced as secondary ore products.
Just to ask the obvious question - if China has the ability to threaten the US War [0] supply chain, would it make sense for the US to adopt a more peaceful strategy? The Chinese seem to be slowly building up a dominant position without their army really leaving the Chinese borders. And their trade policy seems to mostly leverage producing high quality goods cheaply. Maybe the US could emulate that.
[0] That rename was the best gift Trump has given the international community so far.
My assumption is that the military supply chain in any country is a tiny percentage of rare earth supply, compared to the huge fraction that’s used in commercial applications. And since the military is prioritized and a perfect embargo doesn’t exist, “choking off the supply to crush the military” is almost impossible.
>would it make sense for the US to adopt a more peaceful strategy?
"Just be nicer when someone threatens to punch you in the mouth"
The structure of the Chinese economy is very different from ours. It's not that their trade policy "leverages producing high quality goods cheaply", as if there's something magic about the dirt in Shenzhen. More that they were able to play a very long game, and take advantage of continual missteps in industrial policy that started somewhere back in the 1990s. They have not won this game yet.
Who is threatening to punch who in the mouth?
> "Just be nicer when someone threatens to punch you in the mouth"
You forgot to mention that you punched this still in the month 5 times already, albeit quite the weak sucker punches
You’re right I forgot that PRC has no agency in their long term geopolitical activities, is always responsible and honest about what they’re doing, and anything bad happening is simply a result of the United States’ jingoism. “China good, America bad evil empire”. We get it man.
Nobody said that. But you reap what you sow.
Without US military intervention and support, Taiwan and Ukraine would fall. Then dozens of other islands in the Pacific as well as Eastern Europe. The U.S. economy and technological growth would be devastated if Taiwan (and TSMC) falls to the Chinese. This is a WW3 scenario.
My understanding based on the reports out of the military-industrial complex is that the decision over whether Taiwan falls sits pretty much entirely with the decision makers in Beijing. There isn't much the US can do about it. If they can't coerce Russia in Ukraine then they definitely can't coerce Chinese decision making about the security situation off the coast of China.
It is a bit late to use Taiwan and Ukraine as justifications for the US using a military solution. It isn't winning these fights.
The decision to invade sits with the leaders in Beijing. "The enemy gets a say", as the saying goes, and whether they would be successful is not obvious. It would be arguably the most complex amphibious invasion in history, definitely rivaling Normandy. The US has a lot of tools, both software and hardware, to bring to the fight in this scenario. Perhaps the question is on acceptable cost. There's also really only two times in the year when the weather in the Straight is calm enough to support that kind of invasion, and the sheer volume of hardware and systems they would have to move makes this kind of operation almost impossible to hide, though there are limited and imperfect ways to mask the preparation.
>It isn't winning these fights.
It absolutely is, right now, in Ukraine. The US has been able to use the Ukraine war as a massive real-time R&D laboratory for our weapons systems. The result is that Russia can no longer project naval power, their strategic air force is completely neutered, and they have tipped their hand for much of their signals and EW systems. The war is stalemated ... without the direct involvement of NATO (the wisdom of direct involvement is not relevant here).
This is to say that I disagree, there is a military solution to this problem.
I dunno, my read on Ukraine is it looks like the Ukranians are feeling their way toward some sort of a collapse. They haven't been able to stabilise the frontline, there was that discussion of lowering the mobilisation age earlier this year and the Russian negotiators don't seem to be in any hurry to make concessions. No certainty in a war but those aren't rosy signals.
Regardless, say China decides to take Taiwan. They set up a blockade with drones and missiles. If there is a counter the US has for that I haven't seen it, Taiwan pretty much disappears off the economic map. There is an interesting series of wargames [0] recently where CSIS looked at what might happen over the first 20 weeks of a blockade and it isn't pretty (let alone what presumably happens if China turns out to be willing to wage war for 12 months or more). My read on the "summery of game outcomes" section is that the US generally takes higher casualties than the Chinese, which is a not a position anyone wants to be in. Then the war drags out and we find out if the US has any idea how to manufacture ... I don't know what they'd need to maintain an attrition war like that. It looks quite hard and consequently the idea of material US support is probably a bluff. They've shown no willingness to bleed on behalf of other people.
Maybe if some sort of grand coalition of Asians comes together to fight and die protecting US hegemony in the Pacific it could work out well for the US. Crazier things have happened.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/lights-out-wargaming-chinese-b...
Australia, The Philippines, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and possibly France would join American military intervention. Not to mention Taiwan itself. Probably get logistical support from other places like Singapore, Thailand, etc.
American sentiment would change if mass casualties were inflicted on US troops.
This war scenario is different for Americans than Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. There is direct threat to the American homeland if Taiwan falls. Not to mention destroying our technology infrastructure and industry.
If China decides to annex Taiwan tomorrow, there is little the US can do about it without starting a nuclear war.
It would be the same as another power attempting to liberate Cuba from US punishment.
The US is not defending Taiwan for the sake of "supporting its people" it or because of TSMC. It's actually because Taiwan is part of the "First island chain", and it's crucial in keeping China away from taking the Pacific Ocean and threatening the US west coast. The US will throw everything it has to defend it. It is absolutely vital to US territorial security. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain
China wants Taiwan. Ideally not through bloodshed, but economically and strategically force them to reunite. Given the amount of trade and relationship between PRC and Taiwan, I would write off that possibility in the future.
You say that as if it were a bad thing lol.
Also regarding Taiwan, the situation is actually very simple. Imagine one(or many) US State becoming independent just to keep relying on slavery to prop up its economy. Don't you think the rest of the US shouldn't have to step up and put an end to this depravity? Now, if you agree with me, then you should also agree with me on Taiwan. Taiwan is a backward capitalist dictatorship. Why shouldn't the rest of the democratic Chinese homeland take over this island to install a legitimate socialist democracy?
I was gonna commend you for the perfect sarcasm of your comment, but your comment history suggests you actually mean it... if words have so little meaning to you that you can call China (and Venezuela) democracies, then I highly doubt we're talking about the same reality.
I mean, I'm a communist so I perceive these countries to be the leading forces of democracy worldwide. When a State serves the general welfare of its citizens, I hold it to be a democratic State. On the other hang, western oligarchies with their pedo-presidents, where citizens are very unsatisfied of their leadership and who get imprisoned for speaking out against genocide, are dictatorships in my opinion.
I’m very unsympathetic to making China some boogeyman intent on world domination, but I have to say that speaking out against the government isn’t exactly welcomed with open arms there.
I mean, open criticism of the govt is super okay. Peeps do this all the time. Protests are part of daily life. But openly calling for an armed rebellion will get you arrested for sure, like in many other countries.
How about saying you think the leader looks like Winnie the Pooh?
Satire and making fun of officials is also normal. Y'all took this meme way too seriously.
So you’re saying I could post a picture of Xi Jinping and say our country is broken because we’re lead by an idiot who looks like Winnie the Pooh while posting some ai mash up of the two and it would be fine? Even if it gained traction and was widely shared?
I honestly don’t believe that, but readily admit I could be in a propaganda bubble. Anything you can point to as examples of large scale mocking of powerful people being acceptable in China?
How about "our country should have a free market economy because I think that is morally correct"?
How about "our country should not be led by the Communist Party because Communism is a mistaken, harmful idea?" (or if you prefer, "because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't reflect the correct version of communism"?)
How about "our country should have a multiparty competitive electoral democracy with direct elections for the central government"?
How about "we should be allowed to directly access all foreign Internet content"? [I know a very large number of countries are having trouble with this concept lately, but here the question is about the right to say this rather than whether it happens.]
How about "there should not be a state, because state systems are not the ideal way to run a society" (or "because there is no way for states to acquire legitimate authority to rule populations")?
How about "as citizens, we should be able to directly recall individual members of the central government by secret ballot"?
How about "our political system should not formally favor any party and should not give any form of special status or position to any party; no political party should be identified by name in the constitution or any legislation"?
How about "some territorial units of our country should be able to have a process by which they could choose whether to continue to be part of our country"? [This is another one that many countries have been having trouble with, so again the question is whether people can advocate this.]
How about "we should have rule of law, with a legal system that binds the government as well as private parties, and that is applied by a completely independent judiciary, giving a fair and objective hearing to all sides in every matter, and is not required or expected to favor the state, government, or any party in interpreting or applying the law, and decides all cases openly and publicly on the basis of written, public legal principles and instruments"?
How about "high-profile court case __________ was wrongly decided, resulting in an unjust outcome, and we should try to figure out how to keep that from happening again"?
How about "our country was in the wrong in its conflict with ____________ on the occasion of ___________"?
How about "we should immediately begin a process to draft a new constitution for our country, with no political or ideological preconditions of any kind"?
Edit: I am thinking of all of these things as things that are either completely politically normal elsewhere or that are advocated by a noticeable segment of the population elsewhere. It's clear that people don't necessarily prevail when they advocate these things, like no state has dissolved itself because of advocacy by anarchists, and some states that don't have a process for secession or constituent assemblies or whatever haven't ended up creating those things just because people asked for them. (E.g. Canada and the UK created a process for a province to have a referendum on secession, but Spain didn't, and the U.S. only allows this for some kinds of political units and has never agreed to make the referendum results automatically binding. Or, in Germany, it might arguably be considered illegal to hold a constituent assembly to create a new constitution without a requirement to maintain some existing entrenched clauses from the existing constitution in the new text.) So again, I am not focusing on whether people can achieve each of these political goals in modern China through advocacy (some of them directly contradict each other), but whether they can advocate these things in a nonviolent fashion and avoid any form of punishment by the government.
I'm not sure what your point is. Whilst a lot of the opinions you shared here are legal in CN, they are considered frowned up (communism being harmful), edgy (free marketism), or backward(direct recall of the executive), thats why they are uncommon. The proof is that China's top legislature has many political parties besides the communist party (which keeps 2/3 of all seats by constitutional guarantee). Some political activities and ideologies are proscribed, but imo that's healthy. A bit like how Germany officially prohibits nazi parties.
If I were you, I'd simply get in touch with chinese or vietnamese peeps and ask their own opinion of their respective country. You will see that it's normal folks - just like you -, and that they aspire to similar things. You may get surprised that many will say that, yes, their country is democratic. These countries are more than the propaganda you hear on the TV, and they are a lot more accessible than you might think :)
I've personally met Chinese people who were stopped by force or threat of force from saying what they wanted to say about domestic politics.
There are many selection biases in how I came to know the people that I do, and it's entirely possible that there are many, many more people who are quite happy with the government and/or its restrictions on speech. However, I can confirm that the Chinese government is, in fact, oppressing a non-zero number of political dissidents.
If these people you know were publicly calling for the socialist system to be overthrown and replaced by a bourgeois liberal democracy, then I'm afraid to say I don't see anything wrong with this kind of oppression.
For example, I wish my country (Switzerland) were actively cracking down on Nazis, so oppression is okay for me. It really depends who's the target. Censorship is just a tool. One can yield it for good, or for bad purposes.
Can you see how this makes it look like the "socialist system" only survives by force, by physically preventing people from thinking and talking about its flaws? That it can't actually withstand criticism at all?
(That's exactly what I've personally believed for a long time, and your position tends to confirm that impression for me.)
Is it possible that you're not concerned about this issue because you follow a school of Marxist thought in which it's considered literally impossible for people to persuade each other about important political questions, because all people are constrained to believe particular things based on their situations?
Wow, a real life tankie. I'm no fan of the neoliberal western order but you're delusional if you think China is in any way democratic.
maybe we just need a big rock half the size of Earth made entirely of rare earths from the cosmos to strike the planet. this would solve all of our rare earths problems. we would never need rare earths again.
Is it time for carbon-based technologies to be made available?
China has also suspended purchasing of BHP iron ore as a negotiating tactic to lower prices. They banned Australian barley, wine and coal when the previous government upset them.
Honestly, everyone should put tarrifs on china. Bringing them into the WTO was the biggest mistake made. People thought it would drive them to democracy. Instead the opposite has happened. The sooner, Chinese companies are forced to compete fairly the better. When western countries can sell cars in China as easy as BYD can ship shit boxes to the west, the better. Until then, fuck them.
Raise tariffs, restrict trade, disincentivise investment in China. Build out manufacturing capabilities in western countries
Not unique to China. Japan also withheld critical semiconductor materials from Korea due to Korea not backing down on historical disputes in 2019 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/japan-south-korea-dispute-im...
> People thought it would drive them to democracy
That's the White House's cover story, not the actual reason. China is in the WTO because the Fortune 500 needed a stable tariff regime to streamline production offshoring to a country with weak labor and environmental protections, but without the political instability of actual democracies.
One of the speculations I've seen going around about the iron ore thing is that China wants to buy it off us (Australia) in RMB, not USD.
Good, if the US is weak enough maybe we wont try to start a war
The problem is if the US thinks they’ll be weaker in the future then it would be in their interest start the war sooner instead of waiting. I think it’s China who is taking the long term approach.
My understanding is the pentagon was planning for 2025 and it slipped to 2026 a few years ago.
That was my read on it as well. Wait too long and the margin for success will disappear, if it was ever there at all.
My understanding is that by delaying it they already figured out it can't be done anymore
A strong US keeps China out of Taiwan and Russia out of Europe, so at least there's that.
If the Taliban were too much for the US to handle, I don't see how a direct confrontation with a nuclear power is on the table.
The US would have a hard time occupying Russia or China, for sure. It's very ignorant to think that has any bearing on the direct confrontation part.
A weak one invites them.
Neither of these are problems that concern us, and to a great extent are manufactured by us.
I am sort of curious to hear your isolationist alternate history of WWII and the decades after.
My friend, China invading Taiwan would be catastrophically ruinous to the American economy and would almost assuredly trigger a hot war because of it.
Biden was trying to fix this problem by on-shoring more chip manufacturing, but Trump put a stop to that.
the US being weak is why new wars start. Like it or hate it, the reason there was many decades of (relative) peace after the fall of the USSR is due to the US being the only superpower. Obviously, china doesnt like that.
Decades of peace? The US were bystanders in the wars in Rwanda, Bosnia and East Timor in the 90s, and invaded Iraq and Afghanistan within 12 years of the fall of the USSR.
none of those are on the scale of the cold war. People in the west lived very peaceful lives, which was my implication of the decades of peace.
Our government really fought a trade war with China (the last mini trade war were Trump got concessions) and then started another trade war expecting to fight the exact same war again and not evolving/preparing knowing you can never fight the same war twice? We have the worst political class ever.
I believe the tariff fiasco has crossed a line that marks the beginning of the end of American Empire and there's really no going back.
America is a one-party state. That party is neoliberalism. On economics and foreign policy there's almost no daylight between the major parties in the US and really foreign policy is economics. Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism.
Political discourse is dominated by culture war issues not economics. Race, gender, sexual oreintation, immigration status, etc are intentional distractions designed to divide the working class while the government steals from you to give it to the wealthy. As LBJ put it:
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Southern states were so deeply concerned that poor white people would unit with freed slaves they went out of their way to sow these kinds of racial divisions.
Why tariffs have crossed a line is because the Republicans seem to have forgotten that protecting the economic order is the point of culture war issues. You're not meant to actually start messing twith the economic order. Trade is so intertwined on the global stage that no country stands self-sufficient. China can wield an extremely large stick here. Rare earths are just the tip of the iceberg.
The US produces very little now and that's mostly weapons (and some commercial airplanes). You might say tech products but they're almost all produced in China. We have a dysfunctional economy that teeters on the brink of collapse where basics like food, water and shelter are getting out of reach for many people. Take out data centers being built and our economy is in decline and that's another theft from the public too as we're all paying for the electricity. Now that might be fine if those AI data centers actually produced something but... they don't.
The capitalist dream here seems to be to produce AI to displace workers but where does it end? Who buys your stuff if nobody has a job and those who do have no disposable income?
AI data centers, weapons and private equity firms. That's the modern US economy.
Compare that to China where the government is building infrastructure at an incredible rate and is investing in public services.
I feel like the epitaph for the United States of America will be something like "For a brief time we created a lot of shareholder value."
The US is second by manufacturing output after China. It's just not true that "US produces very little".
It is true that the US manufacturing supply chain relies heavily on imports. It's also true that manufacturing works best when you've not caused every other nation to put blanket tariffs on your goods.
> On economics and foreign policy there's almost no daylight between the major parties in the US
This is, and the rudeness is warranted here, a breathtakingly stupid thing to claim. Are you just not looking at what the Republican party has become, or do you think the full-throated support of Trump's policies by the Republican party doesn't imply the Republican party's policies are Trump's policies?
The idea that the Democratic Party and Trump Party's economic and foreign policies have no daylight between them is laughable.
From the 100% tariffs, the plans to pave over Gaza and build hotels, slashing and burning social safety nets, threatening to annex Canada and Greenland, canceling chip fab plans in the US, the list goes on forever.
To add, the idea that there tariffs in any way reflect neoliberal orthodoxy is bizarre as well. They are the antithesis for neoliberal free trade economics.
And where was that said?
> America is a one-party state. That party is neoliberalism. On economics and foreign policy there's almost no daylight between the major parties in the US and really foreign policy is economics.
There.
So you actually just ignored the rest of the comment talking about how the tariffs were a departure from the economic order?
It says following:
> Why tariffs have crossed a line is because the Republicans seem to have forgotten that protecting the economic order is the point of culture war issues.
It does not say it is not neoliberalism. Just that it is tactical mistake related to culture war.
Explain to me how there's any substantive difference between either party on:
- Israel
- The rest of the Middle East
- Ukraine
- NATO
- China (tariffs notwithstanding)
- Russia
Even on something like immigration, the ICE Gestapo are only really an escalation of what both parties have been doing. Kamala's immigration plan in the last election cycle was esentially identical to Trump's 2020 platform. Obama was called, among other things, the deporter-in-chief (eg [1]). Biden blocked more asylum seekers under Title 42 than Trump did in his first term.
[1]: https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2019/table3...
Ukraine - Trump all but openly supports Russia. Democrats dont.
NATO - Trump and republicans are intentionally trying to dismantle it. Democrats dont.
Russia - Republicans admire what Russia stands for. Democrats dont.
And the claim that parties are the same on immigration is beyond absurd too. Yes they are fully easily distinguishable. It does not mean that Democrats are like the caricature conservatives make with "anything goes" policies. Just because they are not in complete extreme does not mean they are the same. And they were definitely not creating the "you can arrest people on their skin color alone" philosophy conservatives use.
> Ukraine - Trump all but openly supports Russia. Democrats dont.
What is different in Ukraine now vs under Biden? The war hasn't ended. We haven't stopped supplying Ukraine.
The US was always going to support Ukraine no matter who was in office at the time the war started. The only reason you heard noise from the Republicans against it was because Russia invaded when Biden was in office. That's literally it.
> NATO - Trump and republicans are intentionally trying to dismantle it. Democrats dont.
How exactly? Trump has forced NATO members to spend more on their military (~2% GDP, as per the NATO charter). NATO expansion into the former Warsaw bloc countries began under Clinton, continued under Bush and kept going under Obama. There's no difference here.
> Russia - Republicans admire what Russia stands for. Democrats dont.
I don't really care about rhetoric. People say things. It doesn't mean a lot. Not compared to what they do anyway. It's a bit like Erdogan in Turkey waving his fist in the air saying "I'm so mad at you, Israel". Is he actually? No. Turkey could collapse Israel's economy overnight if they really wanted to.
> Just because they are not in complete extreme does not mean they are the same. And they were definitely not creating the "you can arrest people on their skin color alone" philosophy conservatives use.
Assuming we have elections again and assuming Democrats try to win a presidential election (they did not try to win 2024) and assuming we get another Democratic administration, watch what they roll back of Republican policy. Historically, it's been very little.
Remember Trump's 2017 tax cuts? What of that got rolled back? The Democrats held the House, Senate and the White House for Biden's first 2 years. They could've claimed they needed to to pay for COVID economic relief.
Bush created ICE in 2003. Remember how Obama disbanded ICE? Oh wait, Biden disbanded ICE? Oh wait... And it's not like disbanding ICE is a new idea. It's not.
The job of the Democrats is to use the idea of defending institutions as an excuse to do nothing.
> What is different in Ukraine now vs under Biden? The war hasn't ended. We haven't stopped supplying Ukraine.
What is different is that USA did actually stopped supporting Ukraine entirely for months. What also happened is that USA negotiated with Putin only, consistently putting Ukraine at disadvantage in those pretend peace deals. What also happened was that USA was giving Putin everything he wanted both in appearance and reality. What was also different was naked attempt to extort Ukraine and give them noting while giving their territory to Russia while demanding they give minerals to USA in exchange of "protection".
The approach and support in this completely is completely different from before. Biden mistake was to disallow attacks on Russian territory before Trump could take over and turn toward Russia he and his people admire so much.
> Trump has forced NATO members to spend more on their military
Trump made NATO members not believe USA will hold their part of the agreement. Trump lied about NATO and NATO members. I mean, others already helped America in their war and Trump clearly said he wont reciprocate.
> NATO expansion into the former Warsaw bloc countries began under Clinton, continued under Bush and kept going under Obama. There's no difference here.
Yes, eastern countries wanted to go to NATO, lobbed a lot and gained the security they craved.
> People say things. It doesn't mean a lot.
It does mean a lot, actually.
Funny, ICE was not doing pure racial profiling it is doing now. Pretending things are the same under both administration is just pure lie.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Honestly, what did the Americans expect?
We all were screaming that Trump was going to start a trade war and how that was going to be bad for everyone. Even the most cynical of us didn't think he'd lose.
> Even the most cynical of us didn't think he'd lose.
Excuse me? As a sentence it's a fine sentence. It's not anchored in reality. Paul Krugman amongst others has been constantly reminding his subscriber list (448,000) that this is a trade war which only has losers. There is no factual basis to the assertion either only the most cynical of us, or didn't think.
There's almost half a million people who still listen to Paul Krugman?
30 years ago I might be surprised by us losing a trade war, I am not surprised whatsoever now. On paper the US still has high manufacturing production, but it is high production in a limited number of products and industries that
What? He is a moron, and is advised by morons, I mean we are talking about a person that started a trade war with Canada.
Uhm, a lot of us knew America didn’t have very good cards in this fight, definitely not the great cards Trump thought we had. It’s clear to me now that China will be the next world power now that Trump has disassembled the only real advantages we had (high tech innovator, attractor of world talent, world trust).
If Trump wasn’t such a bully and narcissist you’d have to believe he’s on the Chinese payroll to destroy America.
I simply believe he'd be too stupid to execute any sort of Manchurian candidate plot. Letting him follow his capricious, ruinous whims is more advantageous for adversaries anyway.
> Even the most cynical of us didn't think he'd lose.
Perhaps a few within the US bubble thought that.
From the outside the asymmetry was pretty clear, the bulk of global manufacturing takes place within China, the bulk of mining and processing of technological vital inputs was under a Chinese umbrella, and the time to rebuild manufacturing and supply pipelines was on the order of a decade plus.
The US is a customer in a world full of customers and potential trade partners, China has found other customers, trade partners have been forced to develop trade outside of former US trade agreements.
It would have taken a long term careful plan to bring back manufacturing, trade dominance and critical supply chains to the US, doable but not exactly Trump's forte.
America needed to innovate its way out of the problem, maybe also focused on creating supply chains and alliances that weren’t purely based on cheapest prices. But they never bothered, they still aren’t bothering. It’s like our leadership thinks the world will just give us free stuff because we are somehow exceptional.
how can we not be exceptional when all we hear from the day we are born till we are six feet under is that we are exceptional. god bless america and all that…
Why do/did you think he wouldn't lose?
The reason people were screaming is because they expected America to lose. They were screaming about how stupid it is.
Define lose. China is in far more pain, and they are doing the world a favor in sending the signals on what needs to be done elsewhere to reduce the risk of over reliance on a mercantilist state.
Good thing we found out what our dependencies are on China were before we got in a shooting war with them.
We knew about these dependencies since around 2014, definitely it was known during Trump 1, that America still hasn’t bothered getting its own rare earth refining up (the elements themselves aren’t that rare) is just bizarre, but private enterprise has continuously scoffed at doing it given the cheap prices the Chinese offered us.
Yes. There was a rare earth glut in 2015, when the China price went way down. Mountain Pass CA mine shut down. Molycorp went bankrupt. MP Minerals now owns that mine, and claims to have ore to magnet capability, although not at full capacity. They've been sending ore to China for refining. Now that has to stop.
There are four steps:
- Mining.
- Beneficiation - raw dirt goes in, most of the uninteresting dirt is removed, low grade ore comes out. Mostly a mechanical process. Done at the mining site. Biggest problem is getting rid of the waste. Mountain Pass pipes it to Nevada. Really.
- Separation - low-grade ore goes in, and the various elements are separated out. Usually separate from the mine site. Currently China has over 80% of the capacity for this step. US capability in this area is weak. MP Minerals has a pilot plant. So does a startup, Ucore.[1] They claim to be scaling up. Total investment in Ucore seems to be about $55 million, which is small for the importance of this business.
- Smelting and magnet making - MP Minerals has a modest plant in an industrial park in Texas.
The US military demand for rare earths probably isn't that high compared to consumer demand.
Nobody wants to overspend, because the last two times rare earth producers overspent, the price crashed and many players went bust. The problem with this industry is price volatility vs large fixed capital expenditures. Now pricing, subsidies, and export controls are so political that volatility is worse.
[1] https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2024/09/18/mining-tech/t...
Humanities majors running America couldn’t grok the risk they were taking by incentivizing the outsourcing of these mining and refining processes.
This behavior to ban sales of materials needed for every advanced engine, actuator, sensor, etc. is why the Taiwan situation is fraught.
> Humanities majors running America couldn’t grok the risk they were taking by incentivizing the outsourcing of these mining and refining processes.
Outsourcing of everything wasn't incentivized, it was forced on the US industry by Wall Street and their Republican friends. Around 2005-2006 there were 2 Congress bills about balancing the US current trade account, both were written and sponsored by Democrats but neither could get enough sponsors for a vote.
At that time, the GOP was full speed "outsource baby, outsource" and Wall Street analysts would bury any company refusing to follow the party line.
This hits the nail correctly. It's really funny to see people act like it was different heads running the economy back then, you've got the same big businesses and same big names now directly running the US government. The ones that outsourced everything and stripped away America's ability to be self-reliant are the same ones now stripping away America's ability to trade with even its closest allies.
People mistake their actions now as protectionism when it's about looting and pillaging what little is left so that they can keep their death grip on capital.
I wouldn't hasten to blame outsourcing on one political party or the other. Those of us old enough to remember Ross Perot and his "giant sucking sound" (his projection that free trade agreements under consideration in the early 1990s would lead to outsourcing and negative outcomes for the American economy) also remember that he was a third-party candidate. Both of the big parties and their candidates (Bush and Clinton back then) supported philosophies of trade that would (and in retrospect did) lead to outsourcing. Until Trump, neither party was willing to commit political capital towards questioning the free trade orthodoxy in any meaningful way, and it was free trade that lowered barriers to outsourcing.
> I wouldn't hasten to blame outsourcing on one political party or the other.
I don't blame it on one political party, I'm setting the blame record straight. The current admin blames the Democrats for everything including outsourcing, when in fact only some Democrats tried to prevent it from going too far.
> Ross Perot and his "giant sucking sound"
The guy damaged the independent candidate idea more than anyone because he was politically illiterate - a common occurrence among big ego business owners.
> Until Trump, neither party was willing to commit political capital towards questioning the free trade orthodoxy.
On the contrary, The GOP and the Trump admin are trying to make political capital by hyping ridiculously implemented tariffs which fuel inflation, kill the dollar and put a lot of small businesses in danger. Trump doesn't even rise to the level of Perot, rumors are already floating around about who's actually running the show.
"Questioning the free trade orthodoxy" isn't the same as doing the right thing at the right time and place. We get tariffs at arbitrary levels, on a haywire timetable and that cannot be good for anything besides speculation, which the people pay for via inflation.
Hey, leave us humanities majors out of it. Most of us have studied critical thinking skills and ethics, which could have easily been used to avoid the various geopolitical messes we’re in right now.
Sounds more like business majors. Who spend their spare time shoving humanities majors into lockers.
Lockers in college?
What a hilarious world view that humanity majors are running the U.S.
The U.S. is ran by wealthy elites, who run the U.S. in such a way to make themselves more wealthy.
Of course they would outsource every job and business related resource mining operations if that meant more profit in the short term. It’s just good business!
It seems to me the people running America are Trump (business), Bezos (engineering), Musk (Physics), Pichai (engineering), Zuckerberg (CS), Mike Johnson (business), John Thune (business), etc
but yeah the Vice President has a humanities degree