Recently I was listening to a Chris Miller interview about his new book Chip War, and he basically asserted that there’s nothing geologically unique about China vis-a-vis rare-earth minerals (whatever the name might indicate).

Apparently the world has just outsourced its rare-earth mining and so forth to China because it’s cheaper, in terms of regulatory, political, and environment costs.

If this is the case--and, if you couldn’t guess, I don’t know anything about this topic--maybe it’s not unreasonable to think that the US’s cost:benefit analysis on a lot of this stuff is just changing, rapidly. And if that’s so, you’d expect a change in our approach to rare earths to be next.