Rare Earth, Even Rarer Common Sense: How We Let China Corner the Future While Washington Chased Headlines
Some manufacturing and mining worth bringing back
We spend six trillion dollars a year running the federal government — nine hundred billion of it on "defense" — and yet if China stopped shipping us dysprosium tomorrow, half our defense contractors would be on the phone to Beijing begging for deliveries. That's not a strategy. That's a hostage situation with really bad PR.
Rare earth elements are the most valuable stuff on Earth in the 21st century, and not because they're truly rare. They're scattered all over the globe — including in the U.S. — but they're hard to mine, harder to refine, and impossible to shortcut. You can't just stick a pipe in the ground and suck them out like oil. They come mixed in stubborn ores, require complex, dirty processing, and turn into something useful only after a long, toxic marriage between chemistry and engineering. The country that controls the refining stage controls the future.
From MILNET to Market-Only
There was a time when the U.S. government could build the future itself — the Interstate Highway System, Apollo, MILNET, the father of the internet. Then came the post–Cold War pivot: let private industry handle it. Need satellites? Buy launch services. Need microchips? Buy from whoever's cheapest. Need rare earth refining? Let China do it — they'll undercut us anyway.
The problem: industry won't invest in 20-year strategic capacity without someone paying for the risk. Washington's answer? Spend trillions on weapons contracts but pennies on the raw materials and industrial base those contracts require.
Congress Clocks Out
Congress stopped doing serious work almost 30 years ago. The Hill became a permanent campaign headquarters, not a governing body. There's always time for a hearing that boosts your re-election chances; there's never time for the slow, boring work of securing a nation's industrial base. The last time Congress tackled a long-term strategic issue with bipartisan urgency, AOL was still mailing out free internet CDs.
The rare earth timeline matches perfectly: the U.S. dominated production through the early 1990s, then let it collapse. Warnings from geologists and defense planners in the late '80s and '90s were ignored. Clinton and Bush worshipped at the altar of free trade. Obama talked "green jobs" while importing the minerals from Inner Mongolia. Trump shouted about "critical minerals" but barely funded solutions in his first term. Biden spent money, but permitting still moved on geologic time. Now Trump is back in office, promising $1 trillion defense budgets while we're still begging China for the materials to build weapons. The through-line is negligence in red and blue.
Meanwhile, in Beijing
Deng Xiaoping saw it coming in 1992: "The Middle East has oil; China has rare earths." China subsidized mining, perfected refining, and tolerated the environmental mess. Today, they control over 80% of global processing and much of the downstream manufacturing — the magnets, alloys, and phosphors that make everything from fighter jets to wind turbines to smartphones work. They also locked up overseas deposits in Africa, Southeast Asia, and even Greenland while we were watching cable news.
The Distraction Machine
In the same decades China was building refining plants, the U.S. Congress was building the largest archive of closed-door committee transcripts on scandals that changed nothing. Benghazi, Russiagate, Clinton emails, Hunter's laptop, impeachment cycles — all theater, no supply chain. These politically motivated investigations are camera-friendly, base-pleasing, and utterly useless in securing the raw materials that keep the lights on.
Now it's more tariffs and Jeffrey Epstein investigations — headline candy that will soak up months of news cycles and congressional bandwidth while adding exactly zero kilograms of neodymium to American factories.
Tariffs: The Ultimate Display of Weakness
Here's the most embarrassing part: we impose tariffs on China, and they can respond by simply stopping rare earth shipments. Within weeks, our defense contractors are on the phone begging Beijing for export licenses. That's not trade leverage — that's a hostage negotiation where we're holding the ransom note.
When your main trade weapon can be neutralized by Chinese bureaucrats refusing to process paperwork, you're not projecting strength. You're advertising that the world's supposed economic and military superpower can be brought to its knees by export restrictions on materials we should have been mining ourselves decades ago. Every exemption we quietly carve out for "critical" rare earth imports is a public admission that China has us over a barrel.
How Far Behind We Are
We're maybe 5–10 years behind in mining capacity. That gap is fixable. But in refining — the real choke point — we're 15–25 years behind. Full end-to-end independence? That's a multi-decade slog even if we start now. And China isn't freezing in place; they're expanding.
The Stakes
If China cut us off tomorrow, our defense industry, renewable energy projects, and tech sector would seize up. The world's most powerful military would discover it can't build a fighter jet without Beijing's permission. That's not hyperbole. That's our actual position.
The Call to Action
We need a Space Program for rare earth independence — but this isn't just about mining dysprosium. This is about rebuilding America's industrial backbone.
The Real Prize: Manufacturing Renaissance
Breaking China's rare earth stranglehold would create millions of jobs across the entire industrial ecosystem. Not jobs sewing pants that will move to Bangladesh next year, but sticky, high-skill positions that anchor entire regional economies:
Mining engineers and geologists to find and extract materials. Chemical process engineers to refine them. Environmental specialists to do it cleanly. Advanced materials researchers to improve the chemistry. Precision manufacturing technicians to turn refined elements into magnets, alloys, and electronic components. Quality control specialists to ensure military-grade reliability. And actual miners — skilled trades workers operating the equipment, maintaining the infrastructure, and extracting the materials that make everything else possible.
But the real multiplier effect comes from what happens next. Once you have engineers who can refine dysprosium, they can tackle other complex metallurgy problems. The technical capabilities transfer to advanced steel alloys, semiconductor materials, aerospace composites, battery chemistry, nuclear materials processing. The specialized equipment needed for rare earth processing creates demand for precision tooling, industrial automation, and control systems manufacturing.
Unlike software companies that can operate from anywhere, this manufacturing has to be geographically rooted. You get mining regions that come back to life, industrial clusters around processing facilities, and entire support ecosystems. Blue-collar and white-collar job creation in the same communities.
Every pound of domestic rare earth processing capacity makes it easier to justify the next advanced manufacturing facility. Pretty soon you have the industrial base to support semiconductor fabs, advanced battery plants, aerospace manufacturing — all the industries that actually matter for economic and military competition.
The Strategic Requirements:
Fund mining and refining capacity in the U.S. and allied countries
Streamline environmental permitting without gutting protections
Build strategic reserves of critical minerals
Stop pretending the market alone will fix this
This is how you go from being a service economy that imports everything to actually making things that matter again. Start with the chokepoint, then expand outward.
Until we stop letting political theater displace real strategic work, we'll keep losing the long games. Rare earths are just today's example. Tomorrow's will be worse.