> If you were thoughtful about economic policy and truly believed a trade war was the solution, you'd prepare ahead of time (e.g. by stockpiling things like rare earth metals that are important to your economy and likely to be impacted by retaliatory tariffs).

Somewhat disagree -- stockpiling things is exactly the consumerism mindset that we (Americans) have all taken for granted and that no one seemed to have realized the potential growth in investing and/or building _actual_ infrastructure to accommodate the massive amounts of e-waste EOL versus just shipping them in bulk abroad to places like China.

I remember a story not too long ago where the CCP instituted a policy where they formally declared via the WTO to reduce their imports of American e-waste and effectively killed that faux industry. Faux as in that the stories that followed showed that our own recycling programs were just fronts to launder money than perform actual processing -- whether it'd be from lax oversight, cross-border shipments, mislabeling of contaminants, or being complicit in schemes to inflate their recycling credits globally.

Maybe its not directly REE related but we sure could have had those industries when it is still less unfavorable than the cost-benefit ratio of spent nuclear fuel reprocessing though the irony is, we're now less reliant on uranium imports from Kazakhstan and Russia (of all places).