President Trump has been in office for about five months. He has cleaned up some of the mess he inherited, but there are going to be things that are going to take a while. Our government has not always done a good job of predicting and dealing with future problems. The problem of obtaining rare earth minerals is one that could be very serious in the coming months.
On Tuesday, Victor Davis Hanson posted an article in The Asia Times. The article reported:
America usually has other countries over a barrel. Not the other way around – unless you’re old enough to remember when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cracked the whip and Washington and the West usually fell in line.
But last week China forced President Trump to back down on tough tariffs that were hurting the PRC.
Rare earth minerals. They’re nearly all sourced from China and Beijing choked off exports.
Major American companies – car makers for example – warned Trump they’d have to curtail or shut down operations in a matter of weeks.
…The Trump administration reduced tariffs in exchange for Beijing’s sort-of agreement to allow rare earth exports to US customers.
How much and how fast is unknown – but expect the PRC to slow-roll this and squeeze all it can – such as sensitive business data – from its customers.
At best, this is a temporary reprieve.
The US side also agreed to drop plans to ban Chinese students from US universities.
It’s not that they are rare. The US has plenty of rare earths. It’s just much cheaper to source from China, and US environmental laws make domestic mining and processing difficult and expensive.
They are essential for commercial manufacturing – cars, electronics, computers, etc.
And more ominously they’re needed for military production – to include aircraft, ships, submarines, radars, missiles, lasers, satellites, guidance systems, night vision devices and more.
It’s not Trump’s fault. He got caught holding the hot potato.
China’s chokehold on rare earths was known a long time ago.
American business and the US military knew. And Congress knew as well.
And they knew the Chinese might use their dominant position to squeeze other countries.
In 2010 after Japan detained a Chinese fishing boat that rammed a Coast Guard ship near Japan’s Senkaku islands, China banned rare earth exports to Japan.
Japanese industry squirmed. The boat and its skipper were returned.
And Japan set about finding alternate sources of rare earths.
The United States?
Apparently it did nothing.
It was 15 years of idiocy by the business class, officialdom and the military’s perfumed princes.
Please follow the link for further information. We need to be mining our own rare earth elements.