“People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.” That’s a saying that President Trump should have taken to heart before slapping aggressive tariffs on Chinese imports, because China has one thing that the US lacks and needs: rare earth minerals. These minerals are necessary components of high-tech equipment like automobiles, robots, and military equipment.
China mines about 70% of the world’s rare earth minerals, and it processes about 90% of them. In the wake of Trump’s tariffs, China began to require exporters of rare earths to get licenses to sell their goods internationally—and those licenses have been slow to come when they’ve come at all. So the exports of these minerals from China has slowed to a crawl. There’s a growing concern that global auto manufacturers will have to pause production if they can’t get their hands on enough magnets made from rare earth minerals. The US is left to depend on a small company, MP Materials, to boost the production and processing of rare earth minerals domestically.
President Trump understandably is upset about the situation, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio countered China’s moves by announcing plans to cancel the visas of Chinese students inside the US. China response: Calling Harvard a “party school” and touting its own universities. Chinese AI company DeepSeek expressed pride that its founders were educated in China.
Such ridiculous tit-for-tat among world powers could easily have been avoided. The US government has long known that America’s dependence on China for rare earth minerals was a problem, but it never acted on the recommendations of the studies it had commissioned.
Most recently, the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, established in 2023, warned in a December 12, 2023 report that the US was too dependent on China for rare earth minerals. Here are some of its suggestions that the US should have heeded:
