Last month, in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, China imposed new export controls on rare earth materials and magnets. Officially, these aren’t bans—but practically, shipments have stopped. This is no small issue: America’s tech leadership, military readiness, and clean energy ambitions all rely on rare earths. This latest disruption exposes a strategic vulnerability—one that we, not China, created through years of strategic neglect. Without immediate action to rebuild our industrial base, spur innovation, and train a skilled workforce, we will lose our economic and military advantage.

We’ve played spectator to this spectacle before. In 2010, after a maritime clash, China halted rare earth exports to Japan, triggering a scramble to build alternative supply chains. Tokyo poured resources into recycling, new mining, and material substitution.

Yet even with deep technical expertise, a stake in Malaysia’s rare earth producer Lynas, and China’s reliance on Japanese industry for advanced rare earth components, Japan could not break free from Chinese supply—and they had substantially more leverage then than the U.S. has now. China relied on imports of Japanese components made from rare earth.

Japan learned a simple truth the hard way: China had built an unassailable lead by producing cheap, high-quality supply at scale. Replicating that capacity would require decades of work and material produced outside China would always cost more.

Still, China’s dominance wasn’t inevitable; it resulted from three decades of dedicated industrial policy and strategic commitment. More than 30 years ago, China imported rare earth processing capabilities developed in the U.S. and Europe. Initially, Chinese firms struggled to match Western efficiency. A trader told me he once saw bits of blue plastic mixed into piles of mineral concentrate—the shovelers had gone too deep and scraped up pieces of the tarp beneath, contaminating the batch.

Through sustained experimentation and incremental refinement, Chinese firms mastered techniques no textbook could teach—the precise dance of acids, heat, and timing that transforms raw rock into high-performance material. They then adapted those techniques to local realities.

For example, they pioneered hydrochloric acid-based extraction methods compatible with low-cost infrastructure like polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, and fiberglass, avoiding the need for expensive........

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