Highlights

• The U.S. voluntarily surrendered rare earth supply chain dominance through decades of corporate profit-seeking and market outsourcing.
• China's rare earth monopoly was built because Western nations stopped investing in domestic industrial capabilities.
• America needs a comprehensive rare earth strategy involving capital investment, allied partnerships, streamlined permitting, and public accountability.

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Sometimes, to understand the truth about America’s rare earth crisis, you have to read the foreign press along with Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) — and lately, it’s the Indian outlet ThePrint (opens in a new tab) that has dared to say what many in the Washington circuit won’t: China didn’t steal the rare earth monopoly; the United States simply gave it away. And, as the piece notes, India helped.

Praveen Swami’s ThePrint essay cuts through the noise. While the U.S. political and corporate leadership class blames Beijing’s export controls and “economic warfare,” it was decades of Western short-termism (and lots of profit taking) — deregulated (and regulated) markets, offshored mining, and corporate risk aversion — that allowed China to dominate a supply chain essential for modern civilization. Rare earths aren’t rare; they’re everywhere. What’s rare is the political will to mine, refine, and manufacture them responsibly.

Truth, Speculation, and Bias — the REEx Read

Let’s separate facts from flourish.

True: The U.S. offshored refining and magnet production to China starting in the late 1980s, when environmental rules and labor costs made domestic processing unattractive. Corporations followed profits, not patriotism, while Washington looked away, far far away.

True: India, too, shuttered or underfunded its once-promising monazite refining and heavy rare earth programs, choosing easier imports over industrial sovereignty.

Speculative: Swami suggests this was “corporate greed colluding with government negligence.” That’s half-right. It wasn’t always greed; it was ideology too (lots of it) — the blind faith in “global efficiency” that hollowed out strategic capacity.

And on to some bias: ThePrint frames China’s rise as partly virtuous — a hard-working industrial miracle. That’s state-friendly romanticism. But it’s still closer to reality than the Western myth that Beijing simply “stole” the supply chain through coercion. The truth: China built it because others stopped trying. And they had a vision to leverage that monopoly to monetize the green energy wave, then wrestle control of digital currency. Read REEx, we provide the receipts.

 What the West Must Do Now

It’s time for U.S. leaders to stop wagging fingers and start breaking ground. Decades of lectures about “market forces” brought us here; it’ll take industrial policy, not slogans, to get us out. And a few deals here and there are a start (President Trump has done more to kick-start the reindustrialization), but far more is needed.

America needs a rare earth strategy with teeth — a coordinated, funded plan across Defense, Energy, Commerce, and State. That means:

• Capital investment in refining, separation, and magnet manufacturing — not just a mining focus
• Allied partnerships with nations like India and Australia that share both resources and democratic interests. Far more collaborative culture than is in vogue in DC today, where nationalistic case-by-case tariffs are the norm.
• Streamlined permitting with rigorous but realistic environmental oversight.
• Public accountability for companies that still rely on Chinese intermediate products while lobbying for “security exemptions.”

The Bottom Line

ThePrint’s piece reminds us that the real rare earth crisis isn’t about China’s power — it’s about our abdication of it. The West’s dependency wasn’t imposed; it was purchased, outsourced, and rationalized by the very institutions that now cry foul.

If America wants resilience, it must reclaim the industrial courage it once exported. The era of finger-pointing is over. The era of execution — and responsibility — must begin.

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