Agreed. A comprehensive Rare Earth industry takes decades and plenty of investments to build. Let alone build at scale. The US and friends would have to dismantle plenty of environmental taboo in order to setup lagre scale mining and refining facilities. It requires plenty of investments, skilled manpower, and waste management costs. ROI is gonna take years, maybe even decades for the West. The capitalists don't have the patience to invest in something like that.It’s hilarious, delusional even, to seriously suggest that the US could actually build up its own alternative comprehensive RE industry and supply chain.
China sanctioning RE is a similar level strategic move to America sanctioning oil to Japan during WWII. Without access to these critical elements, western advanced manufacturing becomes one massive paperweight. And we all know how the Japanese responded to the American oil sanctions eventually.
This risk of RE move would not have escaped China’s attention, and indeed was probably the overriding concern on China’s side to playing this card. This is why China was very gentle and restrained in the RE card application, to test how America and the west would respond as much as to test how effective the card was.
America and the collective wests response has convinced China that they would respond the same way as Japan did, so now they are kicking in contingency plans to counter the western war prep and no doubt kicking its own war prep into higher gears.
Ideally, China restricting RE to the West should be a great opportunity for entrepreneurs. But since genuine entrepreneurship have been systematically crushed by the old and entrenched capitalists and banksters, no actual boom is gonna happen. The same old billionaires and investors are gonna gang up and attempt to setup their own RE industry. And its gonna go the way like how the Americans have attempted to move TSMC's foundries to Arizona. Big talk, big money spent, but too little imagination, and too little results.
I expect little Supapowar India to hype itself up to becoming the next "Global Rare Earth Hub" to replace China. Long story short, its not gonna happen.
