China’s rare earth chokehold is the real arms race

Crossed Wires: Forget AI — China’s rare earth chokehold is the real arms race

Like most people, I assume, I have cursorily read about “rare earth minerals” and was vaguely aware of the fragility of supply chains. But also, like most people, I had only a fuzzy idea of what these things are, and why they might be significant. There always seemed to be more important stories in the news – Israel, Ukraine, immigration, crypto, AI, the economy.

Then, on Friday, 10 October, Donald Trump had a meltdown about China. He posted the following on Truth Social (somewhat abbreviated here for sanity’s sake):

“It has just been learnt that China has taken an extraordinarily aggressive position on Trade in sending an extremely hostile letter to the World, stating that they were going to, effective 1 November 2025, impose large-scale Export Controls on virtually every product they make, and some not even made by them. This affects ALL Countries, without exception, and was obviously a plan devised by them years ago. It is absolutely unheard of in International Trade, and a moral disgrace in dealing with other Nations.”

This was immediately followed by heavyweight tariff threats (100% over and above existing tariffs on China), which resulted in a sharp pullback in  markets around the world. A vicious war of words followed between various Chinese and US government officials, including US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is normally cautious with words. In an interview with the Financial Times he accused China of trying to hurt the world’s economy, saying: “This is a sign of how weak their economy is and they want to pull everyone else down with them… maybe there is some Leninist business model where hurting your customers is a good idea…”