From the Financial Times:

China targets rare earth export curbs to hobble US defence industry

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https://www.ft.com/content/d3ed83f4-19bc-4d16-b510-415749c032c1

China is exploring limiting the export of rare earth minerals that are crucial for the manufacture of American F-35 fighter jets and other sophisticated weaponry, according to people involved in a government consultation.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology last month proposed draft controls on the production and export of 17 rare earth minerals in China, which controls about 80 per cent of global supply.

Industry executives said government officials had asked them how badly companies in the US and Europe, including defence contractors, would be affected if China restricted rare earth exports during a bilateral dispute.

“The government wants to know if the US may have trouble making F-35 fighter jets if China imposes an export ban,” said a Chinese government adviser who asked not to be identified. Industry executives added that Beijing wanted to better understand how quickly the US could secure alternative sources of rare earths and increase its own production capacity.

China isn’t stupid.  They control the market on materials we desperately need and so they are going to squeeze our balls.  This is a logical and strategically brilliant manuver.

We’re the ones who fucked ourselves.

There are rare earths in the United States.  We just don’t mine or refine them because the environmentalists shit a brick whenever someone tries to mine in the US.

This is functionally no different than what they did with oil, shutting down our production forcing us to buy from Middle Eastern nations that hate us.

We need domestic rare earth mining but the Left will not stand up to the environmentalists, we know that.

There is, of course, another option.

One of the richest nations for rare earth is Afghanistan.  We spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of American lives there.

The Left already calls us racist colonialists.  I say embrace it, since denying it does nothing.

Strip mine the fucking country to nothing.  If Lockheed needs rare earths for the F-35 get the Secretary of Raytheon Sherholder Dividends to get Biden to announce a program to get our money back in rare earths.

At least use the press’ willingness to suck that old man off to sell a colonial war of resource conquest to the American public as something great.

I truly don’t care if we spend $50 million teaching Afghani children gender-neutral pronouns in Urdu as long as we are bringing back needed minerals by the metric-fuck-ton.

Neither will The New York Times for that matter.

Either way, we’re going to have to do something, before China sets us back to using cathode-ray tubes just because they can.