Highlights
- China dominates rare earth elements with 61% of global mining and 90-92% of processing.
- This domination poses a significant strategic threat to U.S. industrial and defense capabilities.
- The U.S. remains critically vulnerable and requires comprehensive industrial policy, government action, and coordinated efforts to break China’s strategic mineral control.
- Rare earth elements are essential for advanced technologies like smartphones, electric vehicles (EVs), wind turbines, and critical defense systems.
- The supply of rare earth elements is a national security imperative.
A recent online presentation (opens in a new tab) titled “Rare Earths, Global Tensions, and the Strategic Crisis” offered a timely, accessible overview of rare earth elements (REEs) and the growing U.S.-China supply chain confrontation. While the speaker captured many key facts, Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) finds the presentation, though valuable, understated the severity of America’s position and missed critical dimensions of the industrial challenge now facing the West.
The video accurately explained that rare earth elements — including 15 lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium — are essential to modern life, underpinning smartphones, EVs, wind turbines, stealth fighters, missile systems, and advanced radar. It correctly described how “rare” refers to economically viable concentrations, not natural abundance, and highlighted the expensive, environmentally damaging nature of extraction and separation. It also correctly portrayed China’s dominance: 61% of global mining, 90–92% of processing, and near-total control of magnet manufacturing.
Where the presentation excelled was in its straightforward explanation of China’s leverage. It cited Beijing’s past strategic weaponization of REE exports, such as the 2010 Japan dispute, and noted new 2025 licensing controls on heavy rare earths. It emphasized how the U.S. defense industrial base, including F-35 jets and Tomahawk missiles, remains dangerously exposed, as it relies on China for over 70% of rare earth element (REE) compounds.
What’s Missing?
However, the presentation missed critical nuances and sometimes framed the recovery path too optimistically. It understates how deeply structural China’s dominance is: a 30+ year investment in not just mining, but also in chemical engineering, metallurgical expertise, and large-scale production networks that enable the rapid conversion of oxides to metals, alloys, magnets, and finished systems.
It lightly referenced American and Australian efforts (e.g., Lynas’ Texas plant), but glossed over the slow permitting process, regulatory gaps, community opposition, and the total lack of scaled domestic metallization and magnet production in the U.S. today.
Critically, the presentation failed to address companion mineral challenges (like how rare earths often co-occur with radioactive thorium, complicating U.S. permitting), and made no mention of China’s aggressive “resource nationalism” policies, including forced downstream integration — whereby China doesn’t just control materials, but the full advanced component supply chain (motors, batteries, guidance systems).
Furthermore, the speaker did not highlight the chronic underinvestment and political fragmentation within the United States, nor the urgent need for comprehensive industrial policy, not just “investment” or “research and development,” to rebuild national capacity at scale.
Summary
Overall, the video provided an effective primer for general audiences but fell short in conveying the magnitude of the threat. Strategic minerals are not a “medium-term” problem; they are an immediate national security crisis.
Without forceful government action — including Defense Production Act expansions, emergency stockpiling, fast-track permitting, direct investment incentives, public-private manufacturing partnerships, and workforce re-education for metallurgical and chemical engineering skills — the United States will remain vulnerable to Chinese leverage through 2030 and beyond.
REEx reminds policymakers, government officials, politicians, investors, and industrial leaders: awareness is important, but alone it is useless. Only coordinated, aggressive, and sustained action will break China’s strategic grip on the materials that define 21st-century military, technological, and economic power.
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