China's New Rare Earth and Magnet Restrictions Threaten US Defense Supply Chains
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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?
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.
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.
Not an issue if China blockades sales. There are strategic and security issues so governments should also mandate production.
This has all been known for over a decade but no one invested in an alternate supply chain.
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.
The other option is to just build things that need to be built.
1. US government contracting preferentially selecting over the last 75 years for people who are used to working slow and dotting every i / crossing every t -- i.e. business as usual
2. Regulations during business as usual slowing down the maximum throughput of processes
That isn't to say that other people don't still exist in the US, just that they're not currently at government contractors, because the government hasn't prioritized their core competencies (speed).
It's entirely possible that, similar as was done to military command staff at the outbreak of WWII, the US rewrites its regs, fires people who are incompetent at working at a faster pace, and recognizes and elevates talent.
Unfortunately the current executive branch, while tearing down regulations, then has more interest in profiteering and nepotism than truly pushing exceptional engineers.
The issue is the vetoes are layered and entrenched.
Some EPA rules makes it effectively impossible but are to varying extents actually protecting the environment, so you'd want someone who knows what they're doing to rewrite them in a way that can do both things at once. Zoning rules prohibit anyone from operating a mine there or building housing for the workers near the mine and local NIMBYs control the local zoning boards. Various OSHA regulations, state and federal mining rules, transportation rules, etc. are in the same state as the EPA ones.
There isn't any one place you can go to unbotch it all at once but getting them each to do it individually is non-trivial unless your plan is to just vaporize them all simultaneously.
NASA put a human on the moon in less than 10 years in the 60s, and today it's taken then a little longer than 10 years to get a single unmanned launch up with SLS.
That's a big part of the problem. The vetoes have evolved to resist political reformists.
Most of these regulations come from unelected administrative agencies. You can swap out the President of the United States and they're still mostly the same people. The President can issue them general orders but a single elected individual doesn't have the bandwidth to drill down into all the specifics in all the agencies, even though that's what it'd take to fix it.
The nearest you could come to it would be to actually vaporize them -- stop doing these things at the federal level at all. It was never intended to be that way, that's why the federal executive branch has only one elected official. Instead you have the states do it, which a) gives you a house cleaning because they have to start over and b) gives you 50 chances to get it right instead of just one so that one bad regulatory choice can't destroy an industry nationwide.
But that's just a major problem, not the only problem. Zoning is nearly as bad, maybe even worse, but is local. Because that one isn't caused by unaccountability, it's caused by NIMBYs. For that you can't just limit the powers of the federal government, you even need to restrict the local governments from doing that.
That one would be easy to fix, on paper -- require that in any 100 square miles of land area at least 50% of the land can't prohibit anything other than noxious industrial uses, meaning you can build mixed commercial and residential with unlimited density, and in any 10,000 square miles of land area, at least half of that 50% (i.e. 25%) has to be completely unzoned, meaning you can build literally anything. Then the people who want single family homes can have the other 50% of the land area, just not the >90% it currently is in many areas. But now actually do that.
But if the project is fast tracked as a national security issue?
This was identified as national security issue over a decade ago.
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.
Think about much bigger chunks of semiconductor industry where TSMC represents 100% of world's capacity for certain most advanced production nodes.
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.
We are so deep in AI and super computing or wasteful server side computing that we forget that lower end chips are in absolutely everything. And China can produce those just fine.
Then you need this for all the various REEs for the final goods.
You don't just build a mine and off you go. The US gave up a lot of strategic supply chains a long time ago.
This was identified as a threat back in 2015. The DoD has been buying big stakes in non-Chinese mines, and ramping up the MP mine in Nevada.
Could it be disruptive if China chokes off supply? Sure. Is it an existential threat? No
Probably because that alternative was to build next gen programs to be less performant, and can't settle when platform last 30/40/50 years now.
The problem isn't lol US start making fancy magnets. The problem is lol modern US MIC hardware performance/overmatch is built around access to ABUNDANT fancy magnets that can only be built at scale/cost via processes PRC pioneered because they have (relatively unique) access to geologicly bound ionic clay deposits in PRC backyard. That capability doesn't exist in past history. US+co never had it. And if US can't replicate it, the entire current tranch of military hardware based on size, weight, (SWaP) of pushing highend PRC magnetics to their limits (motors of missiles, planes, precision motors, aesa radars, sonars), might not even make operational sense.
Then strategic delimma is budgetting 100s of billions into retrofitting/integrating of alternative components with slightly different (potentially inferior) performance characteristics. Or trillions in new programs based on alternative material assumptions. That's the real killer. Moving away from PRC HREE dependency =/= make more rocks, but if make more rocks no worky, or settle with making slightly different/less performant rocks, then have to redesign/reengineer/requalify the entire force structure over decades.
For strategic reasons the Military budgets enormous funds on items that may or may not pay off, it's a recognized gamble that all militaries engage in out of deemed necessity.
Why "potentially inferior performance", are you suggesting the US doesn't possess mining and chemistry expertise that are up to Chinese standards?
Just because the US hasn't needed to process REs to certain standards or requirements in the past doesn't mean it's not capable of doing so.
No, the opposite. Most militaries import equipment / are takers. Most militaries not engaged in very expensive R&D and capex to maintain overmatch. Most militaries buy off the shelf from vendors and make do because defense budget not priority unlike US.
US military budget while enormous is not unlimited, already experiencing extreme capitilization issues across the force, active naval hulls, airframes age etc are all in very bad state. 100's of billions buys a lot of hardware, but more importantly non trivial DELAYs a lot of hardware if there needs to be reengineeering.
>up to Chinese standards >it's not capable of doing so
A bunch of the HREE US _NEVER_ had industrial process knowledge for commercial mining. PRC accumulated 20+ years of R&D, build out workforce, infra, supply chains. Do I think US replicate part of that / hit PRC quality AND quantity in short time, i.e. before have to start substituting components if PRC locks down REE hard. Serious doubts, i.e. dysprosium, terbim for heat resistent magnets were lab tech and ONLY PRC has ever extracted at scale, and it's application is ONLY because PRC can extract them at scale. It's like saying PRC has lab EUV technology too, but doesn't mean they can do commercial scale, or even strategic scale unlike ASML who has decades of R&D and tacit knowledge. There's is zero reason to believe US is remotely capable of spinning up scale of HREE operation required in critical timeframe.
Now keep in mind PRC HREE is ONLY viable because they have specific geologic deposits that are economic to extract at scale. US does not have those deposits, US to break hard rocks (vs PRC leech from soft clay), it's magnitudes less output, if US needs to spend 100X more effort for same unit of HREE, it may not even be strategically sustainable, see how PRC has more shale than US but can't extract it economically, because it's very deep so doesn't even try and ended up pivoting to entirely different tech stack - renewables - despite US wanking about blockading PRC oil SLOCs for decades.
This is like when people say but US was industrial powerhouse in WW2, US can mobilize again. But the reality is US industrial capacity was 5/5 in WW2, but PRC has changed the denominator to 50. There is a lot of things US can't do now. Not that it can't do _eventually_ but can't do on timelines required. MIC overmatch is about doing things in strategic relelvant timeframe, i.e. we're talking about HREE that goes into sensors, aelectronic warfare actuators for highend aviation/missiles performance, the bread and butter of next gen platforms.
At some point, the time constraint may compel US it's strategically better off basically retooling to different componets with different material science - that's decades + trillions pivot. Presumably short term stopgaps would be less performant since US MIC R&D does make effort to use leading edge for overmatch, whatever alternative they switch to will be second best. But again the real killer is every part of this is time friction, measured in decades that disrupt the entire procurement cycle, split force design, it's not problem you can throw money at - which again even US DoD/W seemingly doesn't have... or else US wouldn't be going through capitalization squeeze in navy/airforce. This translates to US overmatch declining, regional force balance / deterence changing, expose US posture to decades of vunerability. It's ripple of technical turn strategic issues US doesn't have the TIME to figure out in short/medium term, and arguably money, at least without taking from elsewhere, which in DoD/W case is going to be procurement, because most other costs fixed.
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's not a call for Communism, during WWII the US was essentially under a command economy and manufacturing companies made good profits—some fortunes. Furthermore, the US government was run by very bright people such as Vannevar Bush and Harry Hopkins (they must be rolling in their graves at today's shambles).
The US doesn't have to go to such lengths today but it could partially do so by mandating that certain critical/strategic industries be directed to produce strategic goods and materials.
The real issues are lack of political will and stupid ideological differences.
( https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/07/pentagon-f-35-deliv... is related )
What does sound plausible is that some mil-spec actuator (let's say a pneumatic actuator or a motor) happens to have a magnet from China in it. That is not a big deal.
I find it hard to believe that a US mechanical engineer working on the F-35 part would spec an alloy that is only available from China as some fundamental part of the design. E.g. a wing, or body panels, etc. I don't have direct experience but from knowledge working in other manufacturing industries engineers tend to prefer locally available alloys as they're more familiar with their properties and they can easily get them for prototyping purposes Now if the entire wing of the F-35 is subcontracted to China then you'd expect Chinese alloys in that wing. Many products are subcontracted to China and so it's no surprise they'll have Chinese made magnets, alloys etc. But weapons systems are generally not. High end weapons systems like the F-35 may have some secret materials in them that are designed as part of that program and manufactures locally. I guess it's theoretically possible they use some raw materials from China but those being irreplaceable at any cost (when you're talking billion dollar systems and relatively low quantity) also doesn't pass the smell test.
What would settle this question is us getting a BOM of the F-35 with the specific parts/materials that are a concern. We're obviously not gonna get that. Alternatively some sort of reliable source, like head of engineering for one of these companies. I don't think we've seen this either.
The simplest explanation is that saying this impacts something like the F-35 sells more newspapers or advances some agenda. I'd buy the economic leverage argument; just not the national security one. Not without more evidence.
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.
We've now reached the point where the strategic and economic importance of REs is enough to overcome those impediments/objections. As I mentioned earlier, this was very predictable at least 15 years ago. It's not lack of foresight but rather lack of political will—thus there's been no cogent or effective forward planning policy in place.
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.
Rare earth are used as additives to things like iron and other metals.
I’ll bet the reporter saw “9,200 pounds of rare earth alloys” and decided “alloys” is too confusing and dropped it.
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.
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 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.
All of this is despite the fact the US effectively banned new mining several decades ago. The US is a mineral juggernaut and has the technical knowledge but growth has been severely restricted as a matter of policy for a long time.
By analogy, US oil production was in terminal decline since the 1970s and presumed dead at the end of the 20th century. Now the US is the world’s leading oil producer with no sign of slowing down.
There is every reason to believe the same thing would happen if the US decided to re-open the mountain west to mineral exploration.
The USA no longer has that role for hardware, although it does for software.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There are many better deposits in Australia with more HRE or Brazil (huge ionic clay deposits). Lynas's Mt Weld is weathered carbonatite so also lot more economical for mining.
Halleck Creek is the one to watch in the US as it looks to have a lot more HRE.
In this context, because the environmental activists don't want an end to their lifestyle products or especially the pillars of modern civilization (plastic, concrete, fertilizer, steel), they just want the costs to be borne by poorer countries, which in turn have less responsible resource extraction regulations than the developed world, which is WORSE for the environment on net.
The environmental activists aren't arguing for responsible resource extraction at home, they effectuate the ban of resource extraction at home, and only at home.
The global appetite for energy and resources doesn't recede because you choose not to mine, the mining is just done elsewhere. In China, in the Congo, etc.
True concern for the environment would mean that each consumer (at least the largest ones) should be stewarding their own extraction requirements. The endless lawsuits, protests, and rhetoric often make onshoring impossible.
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.
Ball park for a processing plant is 1.5b and 2-3 years from digging foundations to operations if the funds are there and it's fully approved. A lot of the metallurgical testing can be done in parallel with the build, but getting off-take partners requires being able to prove you can supply, and the off-take partners usually supply a lot of the funding.
Case in point, Lynas' Seadrift project in Texas is stalled and may not proceed due to an waste-water permitting issue and the USG not wanting to provide the additional funding required, or fully commit and guarantee off-take.
Propaganda. Some strategic rare earth is indeed rare.
As in economically extractable stuff are geologically rare.
The strategic heavy stuff (dysprosium, terbium, yttrium) for high performing magnets are ECONOMICALLY extracted from ionic clay deposits mostly in PRC, myanmar (controlled by PRC), and small pockets else where (Lynas Australia+Malaysia) which is <10% i.e. not enough for world demand but process still depends on PRC tech.
Rare earth is not rare for these HeavyREE in the sense that fresh water is not rare for a desert nation next to the ocean, you just have to spend $$$ desalinate. Except this is 2000s, and the technology to do so at scale doesn't exist. US+co would have to plow through order magnitude more rocks to get the small % of HREE, i.e it's much more energy intensive and polluting to the point where it might not even be strategically viable. See how PRC has MORE shale deposits than US on paper but they still have to import fossil because the shale is technically hard to access.
TLDR is PRC controls like ~90% of supply and ~100% of process for some strategic HREEs, i.e. more than US EUV tier control. The only saving grace is HREE doesn't depreciate like semiconductors so if it can be smuggled (like US did with Ti from USSR during coldwar) it would be golden, but you also can't rent HREE from the cloud. So it depends on how strong PRC enforces controls. The other reminder is there is host of other elements that are also strategic (Ga/Ge for radars etc), which PRC also functionally has 100% control over due to having ability to process to sigmas of purity, i.e. imagine if everyone has oil but only one country has refinery technology.
US has more resources and allies that can be used as a supplier, its just making things more expensive
Just like EUV block, it's really matter of how much buying such things (in quantities required) gets disrupted, i.e. enough to degrade supply chain enough that force US to make expensive / different choices, waste 100s of billions and decades to retool MIC away PRC HREE. PRC has less highend compute for training than it would otherwise have without EUV block, and US can likely have less high-end hulls, airframes, less performent munitions and sensors etc... amount of access ripples across strategic landscape.
All current US+co HREE for some strategic elements touch PRC supply chains. And TBH PRC can probably execute export controls much more effectively than US, but these are PRC's first legislated, structured global export controls from PRC. So hard to say how effective it will be, but they may very well be able to stop US+co more than US+co can stop NK or RU.
PRC can go full nuclear, functionally 100% some strategic HREE components to be produced in PRC. Like how US wants 50% highend semi produced in CONUS, but with semi, US is only one key chokehold supplier and has to negotiate with multiple parties, PRC can solely control HREE that's concentrated in PRC for short/medium term. Again that translates to US not able to build up platforms&stockpiles in sufficient #s, or spend $100Bs and critically, more time to design around shortage. Next thing you know, short/medium term procurement changes enough entire force / deterence balance breaks.
imagine tracking sand, thats what china really trying to do buddy
This is somewhat dated (2012), but I suspect that it hasn't changed much: <5%[1].
1. Rare Earths Shortage Would Spur Pentagon to Action, Gopal Ratnam, Bloomberg April 9, 2012 https://archive.ph/1aEF8
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.
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?
If the US doesn't impeach and remove Trump and Vance, and get a real, war-time leader who isn't a celebrity reality star ASAP, it will be doomed as China will rapidly seize Taiwan, disrupt Western chip production and plunge the West into an economic armageddon, and likely widen to a war with Japan who would definitely intervene militarily to defend economic technological resources in Taiwan. No more incompetent, self-destructive, corrupt, ideologue chaos can be tolerated.
He used to work incorporating those motors into other gear, and predicted this would come back to bite us.
My understanding is the main thing keeping us from ramping up the US domestic rare earth supply chain is the cost of environmental compliance. A long term thinking DOD would have kept this in mind for National Security reasons, and funded things just to keep our supplies viable. As it is, we have vast national security stockpiles of various raw materials, but you know how well central planning worked out for the Soviets.
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 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.
The vulnerability is the opportunity.
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.)
Now imagine if people stopped strong-arming each other.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce808gvp56mo
PS: Sorry guys, you fucked up. Hard. And by extension fucked everyone else, so expect no sympathies. We will be busy with the new boss, while trying to keep our democracies not going to crap too. New boss, worse boss than old boss.
When China starts throwing its weight around in the Pacific you’ll pretty quickly see those “allies” cozy back up.
It will be impossible or difficult for the US to “leverage” its traditional allies in the way it has in the past. NATO and trade were powerful tools to protect US interests but have been devalued considerably by what has happened this year.
Public sentiment towards the US in these countries is at unprecedented historic lows and given these allies were democracies, this means their political class cannot continue to support the US almost unconditionally like they have in the past. This destruction of goodwill will take a generation to repair.
How the I-95 Bridge Reopened Just 12 Days After Fiery Collapse (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-28/resurrect...)
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.
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.
From everything I’ve read this is not the case and they instead made it a national priority to have a secure supply.
Biden was trying to fix this problem by on-shoring more chip manufacturing, but Trump put a stop to that.
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.
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.
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.
[0] That rename was the best gift Trump has given the international community so far.
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.
>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.
Regardless, say China decides to take Taiwan. They set up a blockade with drones and missiles. If there is a counter the US has for that I haven't seen it, Taiwan pretty much disappears off the economic map. There is an interesting series of wargames [0] recently where CSIS looked at what might happen over the first 20 weeks of a blockade and it isn't pretty (let alone what presumably happens if China turns out to be willing to wage war for 12 months or more). My read on the "summery of game outcomes" section is that the US generally takes higher casualties than the Chinese, which is a not a position anyone wants to be in. Then the war drags out and we find out if the US has any idea how to manufacture ... I don't know what they'd need to maintain an attrition war like that. It looks quite hard and consequently the idea of material US support is probably a bluff. They've shown no willingness to bleed on behalf of other people.
Maybe if some sort of grand coalition of Asians comes together to fight and die protecting US hegemony in the Pacific it could work out well for the US. Crazier things have happened.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/lights-out-wargaming-chinese-b...
American sentiment would change if mass casualties were inflicted on US troops.
This war scenario is different for Americans than Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. There is direct threat to the American homeland if Taiwan falls. Not to mention destroying our technology infrastructure and industry.
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?
How about "our country should not be led by the Communist Party because Communism is a mistaken, harmful idea?" (or if you prefer, "because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't reflect the correct version of communism"?)
How about "our country should have a multiparty competitive electoral democracy with direct elections for the central government"?
How about "we should be allowed to directly access all foreign Internet content"? [I know a very large number of countries are having trouble with this concept lately, but here the question is about the right to say this rather than whether it happens.]
How about "there should not be a state, because state systems are not the ideal way to run a society" (or "because there is no way for states to acquire legitimate authority to rule populations")?
How about "as citizens, we should be able to directly recall individual members of the central government by secret ballot"?
How about "our political system should not formally favor any party and should not give any form of special status or position to any party; no political party should be identified by name in the constitution or any legislation"?
How about "some territorial units of our country should be able to have a process by which they could choose whether to continue to be part of our country"? [This is another one that many countries have been having trouble with, so again the question is whether people can advocate this.]
How about "we should have rule of law, with a legal system that binds the government as well as private parties, and that is applied by a completely independent judiciary, giving a fair and objective hearing to all sides in every matter, and is not required or expected to favor the state, government, or any party in interpreting or applying the law, and decides all cases openly and publicly on the basis of written, public legal principles and instruments"?
How about "high-profile court case __________ was wrongly decided, resulting in an unjust outcome, and we should try to figure out how to keep that from happening again"?
How about "our country was in the wrong in its conflict with ____________ on the occasion of ___________"?
How about "we should immediately begin a process to draft a new constitution for our country, with no political or ideological preconditions of any kind"?
Edit: I am thinking of all of these things as things that are either completely politically normal elsewhere or that are advocated by a noticeable segment of the population elsewhere. It's clear that people don't necessarily prevail when they advocate these things, like no state has dissolved itself because of advocacy by anarchists, and some states that don't have a process for secession or constituent assemblies or whatever haven't ended up creating those things just because people asked for them. (E.g. Canada and the UK created a process for a province to have a referendum on secession, but Spain didn't, and the U.S. only allows this for some kinds of political units and has never agreed to make the referendum results automatically binding. Or, in Germany, it might arguably be considered illegal to hold a constituent assembly to create a new constitution without a requirement to maintain some existing entrenched clauses from the existing constitution in the new text.) So again, I am not focusing on whether people can achieve each of these political goals in modern China through advocacy (some of them directly contradict each other), but whether they can advocate these things in a nonviolent fashion and avoid any form of punishment by the government.
If I were you, I'd simply get in touch with chinese or vietnamese peeps and ask their own opinion of their respective country. You will see that it's normal folks - just like you -, and that they aspire to similar things. You may get surprised that many will say that, yes, their country is democratic. These countries are more than the propaganda you hear on the TV, and they are a lot more accessible than you might think :)
There are many selection biases in how I came to know the people that I do, and it's entirely possible that there are many, many more people who are quite happy with the government and/or its restrictions on speech. However, I can confirm that the Chinese government is, in fact, oppressing a non-zero number of political dissidents.
For example, I wish my country (Switzerland) were actively cracking down on Nazis, so oppression is okay for me. It really depends who's the target. Censorship is just a tool. One can yield it for good, or for bad purposes.
(That's exactly what I've personally believed for a long time, and your position tends to confirm that impression for me.)
Is it possible that you're not concerned about this issue because you follow a school of Marxist thought in which it's considered literally impossible for people to persuade each other about important political questions, because all people are constrained to believe particular things based on their situations?
Edit: if you are curious, historical and dialectical materialism are the sciences and philosophies I was refering to.
Well, it really isn't.
At the end of the day, ideologies are just fronts for material interests. You argue for your material interests, and they might be at odds with the material interests of the masses.
If a revolutionary movement wants to achieve its goals, it must take care that such deviations don't take root, especially if they use naïve liberal humanism and appeals to human emotion as Trojan horses.
Honestly, this applies to movements in general. You can see this in the USA. Trump's dictatorship was nurtured and empowered by naïve liberal humanist moderates who thought they could debate and 'when they go low, we go high' their way into power and stability.
Decry censorship and ideological rigidity all you want, your enemies won't think twice about using everything in their power to crush you.
I honestly don’t believe that, but readily admit I could be in a propaganda bubble. Anything you can point to as examples of large scale mocking of powerful people being acceptable in China?
It would be the same as another power attempting to liberate Cuba from US punishment.
"Just be nicer when someone threatens to punch you in the mouth"
The structure of the Chinese economy is very different from ours. It's not that their trade policy "leverages producing high quality goods cheaply", as if there's something magic about the dirt in Shenzhen. More that they were able to play a very long game, and take advantage of continual missteps in industrial policy that started somewhere back in the 1990s. They have not won this game yet.
You forgot to mention that you punched this still in the month 5 times already, albeit quite the weak sucker punches
Honestly, everyone should put tarrifs on china. Bringing them into the WTO was the biggest mistake made. People thought it would drive them to democracy. Instead the opposite has happened. The sooner, Chinese companies are forced to compete fairly the better. When western countries can sell cars in China as easy as BYD can ship shit boxes to the west, the better. Until then, fuck them.
Raise tariffs, restrict trade, disincentivise investment in China. Build out manufacturing capabilities in western countries
That's the White House's cover story, not the actual reason. China is in the WTO because the Fortune 500 needed a stable tariff regime to streamline production offshoring to a country with weak labor and environmental protections, but without the political instability of actual democracies.
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."
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.
There.
> Why tariffs have crossed a line is because the Republicans seem to have forgotten that protecting the economic order is the point of culture war issues.
It does not say it is not neoliberalism. Just that it is tactical mistake related to culture war.
- 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...
NATO - Trump and republicans are intentionally trying to dismantle it. Democrats dont.
Russia - Republicans admire what Russia stands for. Democrats dont.
And the claim that parties are the same on immigration is beyond absurd too. Yes they are fully easily distinguishable. It does not mean that Democrats are like the caricature conservatives make with "anything goes" policies. Just because they are not in complete extreme does not mean they are the same. And they were definitely not creating the "you can arrest people on their skin color alone" philosophy conservatives use.
What is different in Ukraine now vs under Biden? The war hasn't ended. We haven't stopped supplying Ukraine.
The US was always going to support Ukraine no matter who was in office at the time the war started. The only reason you heard noise from the Republicans against it was because Russia invaded when Biden was in office. That's literally it.
> NATO - Trump and republicans are intentionally trying to dismantle it. Democrats dont.
How exactly? Trump has forced NATO members to spend more on their military (~2% GDP, as per the NATO charter). NATO expansion into the former Warsaw bloc countries began under Clinton, continued under Bush and kept going under Obama. There's no difference here.
> Russia - Republicans admire what Russia stands for. Democrats dont.
I don't really care about rhetoric. People say things. It doesn't mean a lot. Not compared to what they do anyway. It's a bit like Erdogan in Turkey waving his fist in the air saying "I'm so mad at you, Israel". Is he actually? No. Turkey could collapse Israel's economy overnight if they really wanted to.
> Just because they are not in complete extreme does not mean they are the same. And they were definitely not creating the "you can arrest people on their skin color alone" philosophy conservatives use.
Assuming we have elections again and assuming Democrats try to win a presidential election (they did not try to win 2024) and assuming we get another Democratic administration, watch what they roll back of Republican policy. Historically, it's been very little.
Remember Trump's 2017 tax cuts? What of that got rolled back? The Democrats held the House, Senate and the White House for Biden's first 2 years. They could've claimed they needed to to pay for COVID economic relief.
Bush created ICE in 2003. Remember how Obama disbanded ICE? Oh wait, Biden disbanded ICE? Oh wait... And it's not like disbanding ICE is a new idea. It's not.
The job of the Democrats is to use the idea of defending institutions as an excuse to do nothing.
What is different is that USA did actually stopped supporting Ukraine entirely for months. What also happened is that USA negotiated with Putin only, consistently putting Ukraine at disadvantage in those pretend peace deals. What also happened was that USA was giving Putin everything he wanted both in appearance and reality. What was also different was naked attempt to extort Ukraine and give them noting while giving their territory to Russia while demanding they give minerals to USA in exchange of "protection".
The approach and support in this completely is completely different from before. Biden mistake was to disallow attacks on Russian territory before Trump could take over and turn toward Russia he and his people admire so much.
> Trump has forced NATO members to spend more on their military
Trump made NATO members not believe USA will hold their part of the agreement. Trump lied about NATO and NATO members. I mean, others already helped America in their war and Trump clearly said he wont reciprocate.
> NATO expansion into the former Warsaw bloc countries began under Clinton, continued under Bush and kept going under Obama. There's no difference here.
Yes, eastern countries wanted to go to NATO, lobbed a lot and gained the security they craved.
> People say things. It doesn't mean a lot.
It does mean a lot, actually.
Funny, ICE was not doing pure racial profiling it is doing now. Pretending things are the same under both administration is just pure lie.
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...
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.
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.
This behavior to ban sales of materials needed for every advanced engine, actuator, sensor, etc. is why the Taiwan situation is fraught.
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.
People mistake their actions now as protectionism when it's about looting and pillaging what little is left so that they can keep their death grip on capital.
I don't blame it on one political party, I'm setting the blame record straight. The current admin blames the Democrats for everything including outsourcing, when in fact only some Democrats tried to prevent it from going too far.
> Ross Perot and his "giant sucking sound"
The guy damaged the independent candidate idea more than anyone because he was politically illiterate - a common occurrence among big ego business owners.
> Until Trump, neither party was willing to commit political capital towards questioning the free trade orthodoxy.
On the contrary, The GOP and the Trump admin are trying to make political capital by hyping ridiculously implemented tariffs which fuel inflation, kill the dollar and put a lot of small businesses in danger. Trump doesn't even rise to the level of Perot, rumors are already floating around about who's actually running the show.
"Questioning the free trade orthodoxy" isn't the same as doing the right thing at the right time and place. We get tariffs at arbitrary levels, on a haywire timetable and that cannot be good for anything besides speculation, which the people pay for via inflation.
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!
but yeah the Vice President has a humanities degree