china has clearly stated that they intend to continue supplying rare earths to non-military sectors. that means that any western RE industry would still be competing with china’s products for consumer goods (i.e. they will not be able to compete and will thus derive no profit from this end of the sector, unlike the situation during china’s RE rise).
We both know the US would sanction Chinese exports, prevent western companies (US+EU plus assorted Pacific vassals) from buying Chinese ones and force them to buy the western ones or at least slap a tariff on the Chines ones to make the western ones competitive. Heck they’d probably threaten the biggest private western consumers to throw their money and weight behind getting this running ASAP regardless of how dirty and dangerous it is. So while the rest stands, this isn’t a real objection. Western government and military will be a captive customer and as their capacity will likely take a while to get large enough to even service western weapons makers plus tech companies I don’t think they need to worry about competing on the open market with China.
More realistically I think the west will set up an elaborate scheme of shell companies and buyers to route rare earths to their war industry. They’ll have their tech companies and tech companies in pliable countries like India, Europe, and whoever else wants to suck up to the US invent production capacity, purchase the rare earths for purported civilian uses then divert them from the manufacturer. For example say Nvidia (more realistically it would be some private company in India, Europe, Africa that they cut a deal with). They just ship them to the plant, then ship out only 10% of the wafers they claim they’re making, shipping the rest onwards mixed in with their actual product through a series of intermediaries. The US is very good at this. It will raise costs quite a bit but China has very limited visibility into US/western supply chains due to among other things not being an empire of hackers like the US, not controlling SWIFT and monetary flows, and so on. The west will use this to build up a stock-pile. It will impede their abilities if China is willing to stop supplies to the west entirely to carry on a sustained 10 year war against China for example but give them enough ability to stockpile a reserve to launch an initial attack and sustain some fighting for a while at a moderate cadence and moderate to low intensity.
It definitely is enough to make the west wary of starting a war against China next year or the year after but they’re schemers and they’ll go to incredible lengths to get around this.
We both know the US would sanction Chinese exports, prevent western companies (US+EU plus assorted Pacific vassals) from buying Chinese ones and force them to buy the western ones or at least slap a tariff on the Chines ones to make the western ones competitive. Heck they’d probably threaten the biggest private western consumers to throw their money and weight behind getting this running ASAP regardless of how dirty and dangerous it is. So while the rest stands, this isn’t a real objection. Western government and military will be a captive customer and as their capacity will likely take a while to get large enough to even service western weapons makers plus tech companies I don’t think they need to worry about competing on the open market with China.
More realistically I think the west will set up an elaborate scheme of shell companies and buyers to route rare earths to their war industry. They’ll have their tech companies and tech companies in pliable countries like India, Europe, and whoever else wants to suck up to the US invent production capacity, purchase the rare earths for purported civilian uses then divert them from the manufacturer. For example say Nvidia (more realistically it would be some private company in India, Europe, Africa that they cut a deal with). They just ship them to the plant, then ship out only 10% of the wafers they claim they’re making, shipping the rest onwards mixed in with their actual product through a series of intermediaries. The US is very good at this. It will raise costs quite a bit but China has very limited visibility into US/western supply chains due to among other things not being an empire of hackers like the US, not controlling SWIFT and monetary flows, and so on. The west will use this to build up a stock-pile. It will impede their abilities if China is willing to stop supplies to the west entirely to carry on a sustained 10 year war against China for example but give them enough ability to stockpile a reserve to launch an initial attack and sustain some fighting for a while at a moderate cadence and moderate to low intensity.
It definitely is enough to make the west wary of starting a war against China next year or the year after but they’re schemers and they’ll go to incredible lengths to get around this.