"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Seems like China just wants to negotiate tariffs and uses rare earths restrictions to negotiate.
———-
AI insights below:
I need to verify this document first. Several claims here smell off.*Document is real (99% certainty).* CSIS published this October 9, 2025. All facts verified through multiple reputable sources.
## Real Sources Confirmed:
China's Ministry of Commerce Announcement No. 61 of 2025, issued October 9, 2025, expands rare earth export restrictions and applies China's version of the Foreign Direct Product Rule for the first time. The Department of Defense was indeed renamed Department of War (as secondary title) via executive order on September 5, 2025. DOD invested $400M in MP Materials in July 2025, becoming the largest shareholder with 15% stake, plus $150M loan and $110/kg price floor guarantee for 10 years.
## Weight of This Change - *9/10 Severity*
This is a *major escalation* (95% certainty). Here's why:
*China's leverage is massive:*
- Controls 70% of mining, 90% of processing, 93% of magnet production
- Foreign entities now need licenses to export ANY product with >0.1% Chinese rare earths OR made with Chinese technology
- Starting December 1, 2025, military-affiliated companies will be denied licenses and military use requests automatically rejected
*U.S. is badly positioned:*
- China expands military capability 5-6x faster than U.S.
- Noveon Magnetics is currently the only U.S. rare earth magnet manufacturer
- MP Materials' new facility won't start until 2028, with only 10,000 MT annual capacity
- That's *3% of global demand* (90% certainty based on context)
*Defense impact is direct:*
F-35s, Virginia/Columbia-class subs, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, and Predator drones all require these materials. U.S. was already struggling to keep production pace.
*This is negotiation theater* (80% certainty):
China announced this 3 weeks before Trump-Xi APEC meeting in South Korea. China's Ministry of Commerce explicitly stated openness to export control dialogues. It's leverage, not a permanent ban.
*Bottom line:* China can now choke U.S. defense production at will for the next 3+ years. The U.S. is betting $400M+ that MP Materials can scale fast enough. They're 3-5 years behind schedule and facing a monopoly with 90%+ market share.
To back up my answer. Some people have other opinions, and this is what I think, given the research below. Feel free to disclaim it as wrong, but specify what’s wrong.
—-
And is it slop if it’s accurate? Or just because it’s from AI?
The point is that anyone here can ask the same question to the bot. You're not adding value. If you want to use a bot answer as source material, distill it down to its valuable essence in respect of our time.
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.
> 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…
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.
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.
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.
Or you redesign the part without use of neodymium magnets.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.)
Who are the US’s allies these days? A bunch of petro state monarchies in the Middle East?
I’m not sure our “allies” consider us allies any more.
> 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 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.
it took decades of technological improvement to work out how to do fracking.
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.
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.
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.
Threat = intent + opportunity + capability.
The vulnerability is the opportunity.
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.
Exactly. What a sad situation we find ourselves in.
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 :(
More like monopolies are bad, be at company, country or currency level.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
A strong US keeps China out of Taiwan and Russia out of Europe, so at least there's that.
A weak one invites them.
Neither of these are problems that concern us, and to a great extent are manufactured by us.
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.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Honestly, what did the Americans expect?
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?
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...
Seems like China just wants to negotiate tariffs and uses rare earths restrictions to negotiate.
———-
AI insights below:
I need to verify this document first. Several claims here smell off.*Document is real (99% certainty).* CSIS published this October 9, 2025. All facts verified through multiple reputable sources.
## Real Sources Confirmed:
China's Ministry of Commerce Announcement No. 61 of 2025, issued October 9, 2025, expands rare earth export restrictions and applies China's version of the Foreign Direct Product Rule for the first time. The Department of Defense was indeed renamed Department of War (as secondary title) via executive order on September 5, 2025. DOD invested $400M in MP Materials in July 2025, becoming the largest shareholder with 15% stake, plus $150M loan and $110/kg price floor guarantee for 10 years.
## Weight of This Change - *9/10 Severity*
This is a *major escalation* (95% certainty). Here's why:
*China's leverage is massive:* - Controls 70% of mining, 90% of processing, 93% of magnet production - Foreign entities now need licenses to export ANY product with >0.1% Chinese rare earths OR made with Chinese technology - Starting December 1, 2025, military-affiliated companies will be denied licenses and military use requests automatically rejected
*U.S. is badly positioned:* - China expands military capability 5-6x faster than U.S. - Noveon Magnetics is currently the only U.S. rare earth magnet manufacturer - MP Materials' new facility won't start until 2028, with only 10,000 MT annual capacity - That's *3% of global demand* (90% certainty based on context)
*Defense impact is direct:* F-35s, Virginia/Columbia-class subs, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, and Predator drones all require these materials. U.S. was already struggling to keep production pace.
*This is negotiation theater* (80% certainty): China announced this 3 weeks before Trump-Xi APEC meeting in South Korea. China's Ministry of Commerce explicitly stated openness to export control dialogues. It's leverage, not a permanent ban.
*Bottom line:* China can now choke U.S. defense production at will for the next 3+ years. The U.S. is betting $400M+ that MP Materials can scale fast enough. They're 3-5 years behind schedule and facing a monopoly with 90%+ market share.
What's the purpose of posting AI slop here? If anyone is interested we can all generate this sort of useless output ourselves
To back up my answer. Some people have other opinions, and this is what I think, given the research below. Feel free to disclaim it as wrong, but specify what’s wrong.
—-
And is it slop if it’s accurate? Or just because it’s from AI?
The point is that anyone here can ask the same question to the bot. You're not adding value. If you want to use a bot answer as source material, distill it down to its valuable essence in respect of our time.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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