The bottleneck is refining capacity, not ore. A bunch of countries have rare earths, but only China has the factories, skilled workforce and scientists.
This is also true and very immediately relevant for the near/medium term.
But, if the US as a state/cabal of rulers is even still at all capable of long term planning, presumably they would realize the near medium and long term… ‘problems’ that could be ‘solved’ by at least starting the process of controlling the territory with the thing they need now and almost certainly will need in the future.
I mean this is simplifying but think of it like iron in a civilization game. Its a critical strategic resource… very likely ‘worth’ fighting over, unless you are exceedingly competent in many other realms of statecraft.
Unlike a strategy game where you can just seize a strategic resource and immediately begin using it, in the real world it would be many years or possibly even decades after seizing a territory before they’d be able to actually get any use out of it. Everything from finding workers to developing infrastructure to buying insurance becomes really hard once a territory becomes disputed.
The bottleneck is refining capacity, not ore. A bunch of countries have rare earths, but only China has the factories, skilled workforce and scientists.
This is also true and very immediately relevant for the near/medium term.
But, if the US as a state/cabal of rulers is even still at all capable of long term planning, presumably they would realize the near medium and long term… ‘problems’ that could be ‘solved’ by at least starting the process of controlling the territory with the thing they need now and almost certainly will need in the future.
I mean this is simplifying but think of it like iron in a civilization game. Its a critical strategic resource… very likely ‘worth’ fighting over, unless you are exceedingly competent in many other realms of statecraft.
There’s no near term solution to the problem.
Unlike a strategy game where you can just seize a strategic resource and immediately begin using it, in the real world it would be many years or possibly even decades after seizing a territory before they’d be able to actually get any use out of it. Everything from finding workers to developing infrastructure to buying insurance becomes really hard once a territory becomes disputed.