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I prefer my earths medium rare or medium

It's worth mentioning that this article is from 2023

the extent to which the US/the west is behind on this stuff can't be overstated. rare earth extraction/refining is not something that can just have money thrown at it to build capacity. one can make the case that chip technology is an area where the US/western proxies did the cutting edge research and china is catching up. even in this scenario, it's hard to imagine the US rebuilding high tech capacity, but the knowledge at least does exist in places like taiwan/korea.

rare earth refining is different. the west has benefited from and coasted off of chinese R&D for 2 generations now. for decades, these commodities have been just that, commodities, meaning bulk products that are sold with low margins. the west has been happy to coast because capital would rather make money making huge margin on high tech/financial products and advertising apps. most high tech rare earth applications require very high purity or very specialized rare earth precursor ingredients to go into manufacturing processes. however, rare earth refining is finicky, hard, and all R&D and worker/industrial capacity for it has been in china for decades. to start rebuilding this would require focused effort to generate appropriate material scientists/PhD/researchers that have the fundamental understanding necessary, followed by focused effort and state policy to support the industrial engineering to implement RE extraction at full scale in the west. how many non-chinese people can read chinese language academic publications? it's a paltry amount, especially as chinese academics in the west are chased out and move back to China.

if the US was run by a functional state that can do industrial policy (read: the CPC), then starting today it would take 20 years to build/rebuild rare earth extraction capacity. as it is, the US is run by a state that can't do industrial policy and relies on market fundamentalism - that is a 50 year recipe at best.

Don't worry, thanks to the tariffs I'm sure billions are ready to be poured into mining them in the USA. Lmao

Is it better or worse that Trump is incompetent?

The problem is of course the more you throw your weight around against big countries the less weight you have. The US as global hegemon could afford to sanction all kinds of small countries and just extort the world with their power for a long time. But once they extended this to Russia the whole thing began to crack and break because they went too far with too large of a country.

As a short term trade hard-ball tactic this is fine but if they keep it up it will encourage the west to create alternative production capacity. All they really need to do is mine the stuff, then process it in some place like post-war Ukraine that's totally corrupt and under their thumb with horrible job safety standards and cheap wages and no pesky environmental regulations. Make no mistake, this stuff has alarm bells ringing not just in Washington but in Berlin, in Paris, in London, in the EU because they deeply fear the rise of China and seeing power exercised in just the way their China whisperers always fear-mongered it would be by China is enough to further harden the already conventional wisdom that China cannot be allowed to replace the US or to rise to the level of a great power because it will threaten liberalism, "European values", and "liberal democracy" because they'll swing their power around against anyone who stands against them and the west very much intends to create more atrocity propaganda (and is often run by those who uncritically believe it and don't understand it's propaganda).

What I'm saying is basically this kind of thing helps the decoupling accelerationists.

Are the capitalists greedy enough and foolish enough with not enough forward planning or class consciousness about what a rising communist state means to prevent the rise of alternative processors or will they marshal and discipline themselves and each other for war? That is the defining question of our age. We know that in the past the US prevented large US corporations like IBM from making in modern terms billions of dollars in profit by disallowing them contracts with the USSR during the first cold war. That was contrary to pure simplistic capitalist interests but in line with more thoughtful capitalist interests of destroying communism for the greater good and longevity of capitalism. The amount of trade between the USSR and US was never anywhere near the levels of trade we see between the US and modern China. Clearly many planners of empire know this is a problem and want to put a stop to it. So it's really down to which faction of the bourgeoisie wins out and how much discipline they can inflict on the rest of their class.