China Exerts Its Rare Earth Leverage Over America
China has threatened to cut off our supply to rare earth metals in response to Trump’s tariffs, but the media reports on this issue seem to overlook the most important question we can ask at this time: Why are we dependent on China for essential metals in the first place?
Rare earth elements have special properties that are crucial for everything from smartphones to MRI machines, military drones, and multiple other things. According to reports, China is halting exports of seven heavy rare earth metals as well as some rare earth magnets. The CCP is clearly targeting the U.S. domestic tech and defense industries.
Many of us at Breitbart News have theorized that China will not curb American’s access to smartphones, which are highly addictive and keep Americans glued to their devices, often on CCP spy apps like TikTok, instead of doing anything productive with their time. We will be keeping an eye on that.
Rare earths aren’t necessarily all that rare, so to speak; but they are difficult and/or expensive to mine, process, and refine. For that reason, the U.S. has mostly opted out of producing our own. Shortly after joining Breitbart, our Economics Editor John Carney penned an essay urging President Trump to prevent China from cornering the market in rare earths. He wasn’t the only one sounding the alarm.
During his first administration, Trump himself, as well as his trade czar Peter Navarro, warned the country that we are vulnerable on this issue, as documented by Breitbart’s Jerome Hudson in his book 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know About Trump.
So, we in the Breitbart universe have been hip to this for a long time, but what have we done about it as a country?
Very little.
Blindsided by Enviro Bureaucracy and Hypocrisy
While China only controls about 30 percent of the rare earth minerals known to exist on the planet, they process about 85 percent of it. This is down from a peak of 97 percent a few years ago. The reason why they are able to dominate is partially because of American bureaucracy and hypocrisy. Our bureaucracy creates mountains of red tape that must be navigated in order to get these elements out of the ground (or ocean) and into useable form, in large part due to environmental concerns.
Our hypocrisy factor makes matters even more complicated for Americans because the same people on the political left who impose these strict regulations on American industries are perfectly comfortable with Communist China harvesting and manufacturing these same materials without any concern for the environment whatsoever. It is a meticulous and expensive endeavor to mine rare earths, and there will inevitably be a permitting process to minimize environmental impact, but surely there is a greener way of getting these materials than entrusting rare earths to China.
What’s more, we knew that China was capable of withholding rare earths for leverage because they had done so to Japan in 2010 over a minor political dispute.
We should have been prepared for this.
Perhaps now, we’ll finally have the reset we should have had many years ago.
“At the moment, the only light rare earth mining and processing facility in the Western Hemisphere is located in Mountain Pass, California. It reached a new high in 2024 by producing 45,000 metric tons of rare earth oxides. China produced about 270,000 metric tons of oxide in the same year,” Breitbart’s John Hayward noted in an article today. This stat is deeply concerning. We are not even trying to compete.
Time to Get Mining
There are steps we can take today to start the process of becoming independent of China for rare earths, and we need to begin now. For starters, America needs to immediately ramp up our own mining in places like Nebraska. We have rare earths in friendly countries in which we can safely and ethically mine. Next, we should absolutely buy Greenland in no small part for their rare earth deposits. (It will also help us counter China’s incursion into the arctic.)
A major source of rare earth metals is the ocean floor. Canada, Russia, and China are all actively mining the ocean for these materials. We must do more in this regard.
And if that’s not enough, we should try to find rare earths in space and mine those. There’s apparently an exceptional team of brave women astronauts (or is it “ass-tronauts”?) who might be just the group of industrious people to help us out of this crisis.
It is essential to decouple from China on rare earths. The hard work should have started more than a decade ago. It must start today.
This report includes research from Breitbart Tech Editor Colin Madine.
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