The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
We did lose manufacturing jobs, but not because we "sold" them, it's because productivity has increased so much. This happens to all mature economies, where services and knowledge work become a larger percent of GDP as productivity, education, and living standards increase.
By requiring the US to rely on often adversarial countries to supply some of its most crucial military components like rare earth minerals, the US couldn’t really go toe to toe with those countries.
I’m just not sure if they factored in the rapid technological rise of those adversarial countries like China.
Or maybe it really is the simplest answer that it was all purely in effort to obtain the greatest profit margins…
Being self-sufficient prevents you from conflict both in preventing external politics from potentially cutting off from critical supplies, and by making the potential fruits of conquest and war fairly limited. Like who is going to go to war over 5% cheaper steel? You will trade for that deal, but likely not kill. But the trading could be part of the source of the problem because it can hollow out your own native industry over enough time, or prevent native industry from being built when it can be bought cheap.
1) more economic engagement would somehow make China democratic
2) an economically integrated China would be more interested in maintaining international stability
3) WTO membership would force China to follow trade rules
Indulging in conspiracy at least allows you to pretend that the "top level" had a plan here.
It's much more comforting to think there was a positive intention for the way things turned out, and not just greed and short-sightedness.
Lots of people have written about "the cycles of empires".
This kind of psychologizing can be used to subjectively argue either case.
For example, I could say that it's much more comforting to think that current circumstances are artifacts of greedy fools rather than coordination by malevolent and powerful actors.
> that the "top level" had a plan here
You're also being somewhat reductive here. Sure, entry-level conspiracies rely on an all-powerful council with top-down authority, but there are more nuanced understandings where they can arrive out of alliances of convenience between rival factions.
Addendum: I think this is bad.
Manufacturing jobs are killed by automation. Robots replaced people in plants.
This is happening in Europe and Asia too.
People "dreaming" or cushy well paid union jobs assembling stuff are talking nonsense nostalgia.
1 - Way more polluting than anybody even considered possible before.
Because when these plants and facilities come up for reinvestment the rules and laws have inevitably made a piecemeal sell out the only financially viable move.
The environmentalists point at the financiers. The financiers point at the environmentalists. It's like the two party system.
Worse, there was always some degree of unwritten understanding between government and big business. Like if big business built out a factory they would expect to use it for 50-100yr with refreshes every 30 or so. When the government started crapping on that sort of thing to the degree that various investments became wholly non-viable it became risky to make those investments, less of them, less to spread any risk over, more expensive, it's a spiral. And so if you can't be sure your facility will be allowed to be viable in the long term you've gotta milk what you can each quarter.
Some said that these price signals only make sense if globalisation lasts forever, but their remarks were dismissed as depressing.
I have no idea who will move what way in the future so I can only guess what we will regret in 10 years. However I must act on the world as I know it lest things get worse. (what makes things worse is open for debate)
The export restrictions were not initiated by China, but they were an extremely moderate response to the US "sanctions" that blocked the sales to China of modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment, in order to eliminate the competition and to increase the prices in the DRAM and SSDs markets.
These US "sanctions", which were intended to preserve the monopoly of Micron et al., were the precondition that allowed the huge increase in the prices of memory products when the AI companies grabbed a large part of the production.
In my opinion, China has chosen extreme restraint in their response to the "sanctions" initiated by USA, presumably because they think that they would lose too much if cutting all the commerce with USA.
For me, I would have considered an unacceptable insult when another country declares that they want my country to remain a country that is technologically inferior and they would do anything to achieve this, notwithstanding anything of what they may have said and promised in the past. I certainly would not have wanted any further relations with such a country.
Type of government does have an effect on economic and military policy, but being a liberal democracy does not make automatically make a country less interested in pursuing naked self-interest.
- What do you mean "the right direction"? Do you mean the "open and free direction" that "Hey you can't have our Nvidia chips but must keep selling us cheap rare earth"? - And who are "we"? I suggest "we"'d better take care of "ourselves" instead of "react".
The electoral constituencies for the antinomianism, authoritarianism and victim-complex revanchism in the West that has prevented friendship between the world powers are all comprised of the same alliance between two groups repeated hundreds of times: moderately impoverished populist masses facing more of the same and industry oligarchs looking to return the west to feudal plantation economies as reprisal for any cultural slights they feel the public has given them.
The latter group always exists to some extent but the former group only exists because disposable energy (joules, watts, BTU, etc) per capita has been steadily falling since 1973. The golden age of shale exploitation bucked this trend but that has ended too. You can fiddle about with using different financial or interest rates proxies for this if you want but going into joules per person after extraction is the heart of the matter.
If this decline did not exist, we would not be in the world we're in by a long shot. But if you look at the predictions they're all off. The media, academia, popular culture and business culture expected continuous growth to put fusion power plants on Mars. The UN, IEA, DoE, Long Now people expected moderate growth to sustainable replacement of gas turbines with optimistic greentech buildout figures that use more lithium and copper than can ever be mined. The economic counterculture like NakedCapitalism and The Oil Drum expected Mad Max.
Nobody predicted the existence of the voter base that brought us the last run of presidents, they predicted different voter bases. Some of the predictors even imagined that the importance of Pennsylvania Avenue would slowly vanish without anybody minding.
Surely there was someone in the 1980s or 90s that saw the demographic writing on the wall and tried to warn everyone and got laughed at.
When someone says "Didnt lose its...", A mine that is shutdown is a loss, because its no longer financially viable to operate. So are we debating what "lose" means?
Open up any old idled steel plants lately?
" The term "rare-earth" is a misnomer, because they are not actually scarce, but because they are found only in compounds, not as pure metals, and are difficult to isolate and purify. REEs are relatively plentiful in the entire Earth's crust (cerium being the 25th-most-abundant element at 68 parts per million, more abundant than copper), but in practice they are spread thinly as trace impurities, so to obtain rare earths at usable purity requires processing enormous amounts of raw ore which is costly and energy intensive. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element
What radioactive element is commonly found with rare earths and has to be separated? Thorium, the same stuff that could power future nuclear reactors and is commonly found on beaches in Kerala, India.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181016-why-india-wants-...
For now, China has a huge advantage in the facilities for the chemical processing of the rare-earth minerals, so that much of what is mined elsewhere still goes to China for the extraction and separation of the metals.
Some rare-earth metals are very cheap, like cerium and lanthanum. Even neodymium is not expensive. Unfortunately most applications also need at least small quantities of those rare-earth elements that are really rare, i.e. they form a very small fraction of the rare-earth elements contained in a mineral, and whose separation from the abundant rare-earth elements is also very expensive.
So this phrase that is too often repeated "Rare earths are not as rare as the name suggests" is actually false for most of the 14 REEs. Not rare are only lanthanum, cerium and neodymium, which cover only a small part of the applications of REEs, like deoxidizers in metallurgy and glass polishing and lighters. Most magnets with neodymium must also include other much less abundant rare-earth metals, to increase their upper limit for the working temperature.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
It became a bit of a news item a few months ago:
> Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in helium. While most people associate helium with balloons and funny voices, the element is used in a surprisingly wide variety of industrial settings, including semiconductor production, where its role in advanced lithography has been growing rapidly. But helium mining and exploration in North America has been practically non-existent for a variety of reasons. And while the US used to have a strategic helium reserve, the government started selling that down in the late 1990s. On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Snyder, the founder and CEO of North American Helium, which does helium mining in Canada. We discuss the properties of helium that make it so useful, as well as the difficulties of expanding global production and distribution.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/pe/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...
The US do high qualification job like engineering design, state of the art manufacturing and the such and other countries go to manufacture nuts, bolts and magnets that are mainly low qualification jobs for cheap.
But, we don't live in that world and the magnet dudes wanna wield the magnets against us and the high quali jobs dudes somehow wanna go back to making nuts and bolts.
It really doesn't feel like that's the case, but media and US politicians seem to have convinced the average Joe that every other country is an adversary trying to start a fight or something.
A healthy society finds roles for all it's citizens, not just the ones with the right credentials.
Reminder heavy REE i.e. the strategic stuff that goes into sensors (what modern US MIC is built around) is geologically rare - economically extracted from limited ionic clay deposits, which is much in fact rarer than... making magnets by smashing rocks for light ree.
That and the entire HREE economic extraction pipeline is Chinese, who build out the foundation tech over last 30+ years aka capability US/west has ever had. The physical reality = agglomerated Chinese mining cities of millions with vertically integrated industrial chains sustained tertiary mining/engineering pipeline larger than RoW combined.
Let's be real this not scale US capable of replicating even if it had ionic clays, and even if US manage to sort out LREE (mountain pass etc)... it still basically built its entire strategic MIC (i.e. sensors) on HREE that only PRC can process at scale. Which is kind of dumb, but here we are. But that's not going away for a long time, i.e. PRC will likely scale EUV to western levels well before US/west can scale HREE to Chinese levels, maybe F35s getting real radars before that.
EU Set to Lift Sanction on Chinese Firm to Save ASML Supplier[1]
> In exchange, the EU would remove trade restrictions it put on an unnamed Chinese firm accused of aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine.
> Sindlhauser, which relies on Chinese rare earths and critical minerals supplies, is at risk of going out of business in the coming months if China’s sanctions stay in place, according to the people. Targeting an otherwise obscure firm illustrates the lengths China is going to gain detailed knowledge into Europe’s economic pinch points.
> People familiar with the case say Sindlhauser is almost exclusively reliant on Chinese rare earths, and the listing caused a supply chain shock for the company that had until now done little work to diversify or minimize its dependence on the Chinese inputs.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-14/eu-set-to...
As an European, they've never done anything to me. In fact, it's our countries that pillaged and conquered and colonized China. I've seen our troops on their borders many times, not even once the opposite.
And it's our own allies consistently creating trouble next to our borders in the middle east or north africa and causing millions of refugees that of course don't cross the atlantic.
Why is China evil exactly? And why are they only evil since they started mathing/outpacing US financial dominance?
It's the US spying our leaders (remember Merkel's phone), it's the US bugging our infrastructure, it's the US consistently creating business and legal issues, it's the US threatening our territories (Greenland), it's US cloud vendors violating our data sovereignity and sharing it with any US court or agency.
Why is China the boogeyman exactly?
- Rare Earth Technologies. [1] PitchBook says they have about $1 million in investment. LinkedIn says they have 7 employees. Their site says they are going to have a pilot plant running in 2025. Right.
- Northern Minerals (Australia) [2] "Progressing the completion of a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) for a commercial-scale mining and processing operation". Australian penny stock, current AU$0.02, way down from peak of 2021. Five years in, and they're still at a feasibility study?
- Ucore Rare Metals [3] They got far enough to make some samples at lab scale. They have a demo plant. More real than the two above. But moving too slowly.
There are others; see [2]. Maybe one of them will get their act together.
A big problem with this industry, which the original article should have mentioned, is that there was a rare earth glut in 2015, when China flooded the market. Many of the US players went out of business. Mountain Pass mine shut down. The article's proposed investment vehicle should be stress-tested against the historical data from the last glut to see if it holds up.
[1] http://rareearth.tech/
[2] https://rare-earth-mining.com/top-10-rare-earth-mineral-proc...
[3] https://ucore.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-fvHJAMZf4
There are a lot of people at bench scale separation. None of the startups seem to be at small, profitable plant. That's when you can get serious investors.