Has China Put America Into the pre-WWII “Japan Trap?”

Most modern weapon systems require rare earths to manufacture, including expendables like missiles and drones. Rare earths are less mined than they are refined, and China controls over 90% of the refining capability. Rare earths are generally found in small amounts in other ores. For example, Gallium in Aluminum. To get Gallium, you have to refine mountains of aluminum. Gallium comes from Bauxite as part of the refining process.

Fifty grams of Gallium per metric ton of refined aluminum.

China produces 98% of it.

Now Canada used to produce a lot of Gallium, as a side benefit of processing a lot of aluminum. But Canadian aluminum wasn’t as cheap as Chinese Aluminum. And this is the problem, if you want to scale you need long term contracts not just for Gallium but the Aluminum. (Do you trust any contract underwritten by the US government? If so, many bridges are available for sale to you.)

Every rare earth has similar issues.

Now cast your mind back to pre-war Asia. Japan is kicking ass, especially against the Chinese. They’ve conquered Taiwan, Korea and South Manchuria. All of this requires lots of oil, and they buy that oil from America, primarily, which was the Saudi Arabia of the day. FDR (who hated the Japanese and was a Sinophile) cut off oil exports to Japan.

Japan had only so much in the way of oil reserves. It decided to use them to go to war, grabbing as much territory as possible, while they still existed. Some of the their conquests: Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and Borneo, had oil.

The situation today isn’t identical. There’s no non-China rare earth production to seize. Everyone else is pretty much happy to sell to America, they just don’t have enough to matter.

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But what does matter is that if China’s rare earth ban continues, America loses the ability to make large volumes of advanced weapons. Every time i look into estimates of how long it will take to get rare earths production up and running the West, the optimistic numbers are at about ten years, with a median around twenty. China itself took about twenty years, in the 80s and 90s.

China is going stronger. Everyone with sense admits that. Even before the rare-earth ban it was clear that the West is growing weaker. In ten years, let alone twenty, no one will be able to pretend America can win a war against China.

So the rare earths ban means that if the US wants war against China, it has to be soon. Within a year, I’d say.

Note that this isn’t just about China. The West supplies Ukraine and Israel, for example, with weapons which have tons (literally) of rare earths in them. The ability to keep doing this is being taken away.

Heck, forget arming proxies, the West won’t be able to produce enough missiles and drones and radar and so on for its own military needs, meaning its ability to project power and keep other nations cowed and in line will go way down.

(At this point many of you are thinking “and this is bad, how?”)

So this is fairly existential for America. Its ability to bully everyone is about to be reduced significantly for ten to twenty years, by which time all its enemies will be well supplied by the Chinese and Russians with weapons more advanced than American ones.

Use it or lose it. I suspect this may be part of the reasoning (by the few parts of American government capable of reasoning) around attacking Venezuela, for example.

But the reason that America officials are freaking out about the rare earth ban is it really does matter. That America and the West let themselves get into the position is insane, people (including me) were pointing out this vulnerability twenty years ago. But if there’s one thing the West can’t do any more it’s definitely think beyond three months or “but China’s rare earths are cheaper, so we can’t do anything!!!!!”

Assuming a war can be avoided, the best outcome here (but bad for most citizens of the West because there are a lot of civilian rare earth applications) is for China to just leave the restrictions on permanently.

Oh, and as a ray of sunshine. If the US can’t supply Israel with weapons and if Russia and China won’t, well… More on that later.

China’s finally flexing its muscles. It spent the last eight years, ever since Trump’s absolutely crazed and stupid Huawei sanctions, making sure it has all the trump cards and no significant vulnerabilities.

And it had done so. Goodbye (not) Pax Americana.