How China got the US over a rare earth barrel

AllAfrica

20-06-2025

Who's gonna tell you when it's too late?
Who's gonna tell you things aren't so great?
You can't go on, thinking nothing's wrong, but now
Who's gonna drive you home tonight?
– The Cars
'Just when I thought I was out,' Michael Corleone lamented, 'They pull me back in.'
This column was originally intended to be about the lamentable state of America's rare earths dependency and how decades of delusional thinking – 'Rare earths are not rare!', 'We taught China rare earth processing!' – led to the current predicament.
But who cares about rare earths now; the Middle East is once again a conflagration likely to ruin all of US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby's best-laid pivot to Asia plans whether President Donald Trump drops that 30,000-pound bomb on Iran or not. The Persian Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean will tie down US naval assets for another decade.
Michael Corleone's fatal flaw was that he did not understand what business he was in. He was a gangster, and there is no escape from murder, death and ruin in that line of work. Karma came for Philip Tattaglia, Barzini, Cuneo, Stracci, Moe Green and Hyman Roth. Why would it be any different for Michael and the Corleone family?
Since the end of World War II, the United States has run a maritime empire and there is no escape from entanglement, overstretch and ruin in that line of work. Karma came for the Minoans, Phoenicians, Italian merchant states, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British and Japanese empires. Why would it be any different for America?
The reason the US is dependent on China for rare earth elements is that ores with extractable concentrations are, in fact, rare and processing these ores into usable concentrates is, in fact, incredibly difficult.
The purpose of maritime empires is to harvest wealth from far-flung imperial possessions – or, more palatably, a rules-based international order. This need not be as self-serving as it sounds.
Japan was allowed to have a very nice four-decade-long run between 1945 and 1985. Europe got the Marshall Plan and eight decades of security, allowing the old country (literally) to fund generous pension and welfare programs. Nixon's rapprochement with Mao removed the US Seventh Fleet as a Pacific threat, paving the way for China's coastal industrialization.
In return, the US got decades of Middle Eastern oil arguably for free (crude oil paid for in dollars recycled into US investments). America also got manufactured goods from Asia and Europe on the same trade and creamed off the best and brightest from all corners of the world to become the empire's minions.
All of the above should be grounds for celebration. It's all America could have asked for as a maritime empire. And yet, we are all familiar with the downsides. Maritime empires contain the seeds of their own destruction, magnifying capitalism's iniquities as wealth concentrates in ever fewer hands.
Karl Marx wrote 'Das Kapital'at the height of the British Empire, showcasing brutal exploitation in Britain's own factories. The Trump presidency (both terms) is a reaction to America's neglected working class.
The reason the US is dependent on China for rare earth elements is because processing technology has advanced multiple generations in the past two decades. The majority of the world's rare earths are now processed in Baotou Inner Mongolia, largely using third-generation sulfuric acid roasting technology, having long ago abandoned polluting in-situ leaching.
Because of unavoidable foreign entanglements, maritime empires are not able to enjoy what should be a major perk of hegemony – to not have to expend resources on the military.
The spoils of maritime empires can only be collected with expensive navies and far-flung bases if not occasional (perhaps continual) spillage of blood. And America's collected spoils have, of late, not been well distributed among the citizenry, particularly among those asked to do the bleeding.
Mischief is irresistible for empires with forward-deployed militaries. The US has conducted about 200 military interventions since the end of WWII, 50 since the end of the Cold War.
The most significant of these have been abject disasters – Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – draining the empire of blood, treasure, domestic vitality and international goodwill. Mischief is once again at work, enticing America back into the Middle East just a few short years after humiliatingly crashing out of Afghanistan.
America's pivot to Asia will never happen, just like Michael Corleone could never extricate the family business from its criminal past. The empire has collected too many barnacles.
This is the exact opposite of the domino theory. It does not get easier. At some point, foreign entanglements stop benefiting the empire and become, at best, leeches and, at worst, ruinous distractions.
The US, bled dry by two decades of never-ending wars, can only pivot to Asia by abandoning the Middle East and Ukraine. But like bickering concubines, manipulative allies conspire for the emperor's favor. In every stable of concubines, there is always a favorite who outmaneuvers the rest and imposes her will on a besotted emperor.
America's Wu Zetian just unleashed a surprise attack on Iran demanding the emperor's total attention, leaving beautiful, faithful, innocent and delicate Taiwan to twist in the wind.
The US is dependent on China for rare earth elements because rare earth chemistry programs are offered at dozens of Chinese universities versus none in the US.
China has produced over 50,000 rare earth patents in the past two decades versus a de minimis number anywhere else. Cutting-edge science in the field is published in a handful of dedicated Chinese rare earth journals.
China does not do foreign entanglements. Historically, China expanded organically by incorporating different polities into the Chinese state. That is what makes China China.
Unlike maritime empires, the entire purpose of the Chinese state is to harness the major perk of hegemony– not having to waste resources on the military and, instead, deploy them on public works projects, from Yellow River dykes to high-speed rail.
In the early 15th century, after commissioning seven magnificent imperial treasure voyages over three decades, reaching as far west as the east coast of Africa and establishing China as the world's pre-eminent seafaring nation, the Ming Dynasty court suddenly turned its back on maritime power.
Historians have asked why ever since. Whether it was economics, Confucian conservatism or banal power struggles, abandoning maritime power set China up for European and Japanese predation in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In a full accounting of history, maritime empires have not fared much better. Competition for overseas assets led to the slaughter of two World Wars, immolating much of Europe's accumulated wealth. Imperial possessions, acquired over a span of four centuries, evaporated in the blink of a few decades.
The reason the US is dependent on China for rare earth elements is because of a maddening inability to concentrate. The US has known of its risky reliance on China for rare earths for two decades.
In 2010, China weaponized its rare earth stranglehold on Japan during an East China Sea border dispute. In 2019, after President Trump launched a trade and tech war, China State Television not so subtly broadcast President Xi Jinping's visit to a rare earth processing plant. And somehow, in 2025, China has become an even more dominant supplier of rare earth elements.
In all these instances, the exact same narratives were parroted by the English media – rare earths are not actually rare, China dominates rare earth processing because it is polluting, the US transferred rare earth processing technology to China. These shibboleths, which fall apart on close scrutiny, have tied America's hands for two decades.
Halfhearted efforts to resolve the problem fell by the wayside when China refrained from pulling the rare earth trigger – until now, in 2025, when China is putting the squeeze on rare earth exports for military use just as strategic competition with the US is entering its most intense phase and right when conflicts in Israel and Ukraine are consuming an inordinate amount of military hardware.
Like Michael Corleone, the US tried to convince itself that it was in a different business. 'The Godfather' is a tragedy worthy of – and rhyming with – both 'Macbeth' and 'King Lear.' Michael was blinded by ambition, thought of himself as more than a gangster and ultimately brought ruin onto himself and the Corleone family.
The US consciously chose to be a maritime empire, stationing troops in 800 bases across the world, and then convinced itself that it was more than just an extractive empire, above the nitty-gritty, dirty work of resource extraction and immune from manipulation by vassals. Let us hope that this does not end in a Godfather-esque tragedy.