mmediately after its stand-off with China, Japan’s government passed a ¥100bn ($1.2bn) supplemental budget for rare-earth supply chains. It also developed a national strategy for breaking China’s chokehold on the materials. This involved finding alternative sources of rare earths, reducing their overall use, and stockpiling them for the next... See more

While China accounts for approximately 60 percent of global REE production, it is responsible for 90 percent of processing, a

China has demonstrated a willingness to weaponize REEs over the last 15 years.

"They put a lot of state resources behind building processing capabilities, such that the minerals come from different places and then they get sent to China for refining," Baskaran says. "What China has been extraordinarily good at is connecting their foreign policy to secure rare earths from around the world."

Brent Elliott, a research associate professor of geology at the University of Texas, estimates the U.S. has sufficient resources to meet demand. "It's about the extraction potential and the logistics of getting it out of the ground in a way that is environmentally sensitive but also socially responsible," he says.

Partly because it is... See more