While the media focuses obsessively on the future of Fed Chairman Jay Powell, they are all but ignoring a major breakthrough engineered by the Trump administration that will ultimately reset our relations with China and free the U.S. from Beijing Blackmail.
Joe Biden’s presidency was pockmarked by sporadic kowtowing to China, like allowing a spy balloon to sail unimpeded over U.S. military installations; dismantling President Trump’s “China Initiative,” meant to counter Beijing’s espionage and intellectual property theft in U.S.; and failure to impose secondary sanctions on the country most enabling Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Why was Biden’s White House so timid? Some thought that the Biden family was worried China might reveal unsavory secrets about their activities in the country. Perhaps, but they also knew that Beijing held U.S. national security in a death grip. At any moment, the Chinese Communist Party could withhold critical rare earths from our defense and electronics industries. Without the essential magnets produced by those elements, U.S. production of missile guidance systems, semiconductors and more pedestrian products like MRI scanners, cellphones and Teslas grinds to a halt.
Fast-forward to Trump moving to punish China for its illegal trade practices and President Xi Jinping playing his get-out-of-jail-free card, countering Trump’s damaging tariffs by blocking exports of seven medium and heavy rare earth elements. The move caused the U.S. to stand down, but also alerted the nation once again that Beijing’s smart and dogged effort to corner the world’s supply of rare earths has given China a potent weapon.
It isn’t the first time China has used its dominance of rare earths strategically. In 2010, China retaliated against Japan in a fishing dispute by cutting off rare earths. Trump is, appropriately, moving to free the U.S. from this dangerous noose.
It is not the actual minerals that are in short supply; rare earths are everywhere, including in the United States, though often found in small quantities that makes extraction costly. China, on the other hand, accounts for 60-70 percent of global rare earth production, and more than 90 percent of heavy rare earths. It has achieved that dominance by its usual practice of flooding the market, undercutting rival mining outfits on price and driving competitors out of business. China has also staked out a commanding position in rare earths refining.
…
On May 16, a judge in Lahore handed Jessica Iqbal, a 16-year-old Catholic girl, back to her 32-year-old Muslim abductor, despite clear signs that she was coerced into claiming she had converted to Islam and married him. Pictured: The Lahore High Court. (Photo by Arif Ali/AFP via Getty Images)