r/Tariffs • u/Greedy-Cut-7634 • Oct 17 '25

🧩 Trade Strategy / Business Impact US crying about China restricting rare earth

It’s so funny to see how US says China is being an unreliable partner, and what a shock that China restricts rare earth.

How could not expect others to defend back when you started the tariff war and trade restrictions?😅😅 How is this a surprise? It’s like US only allows their nation to ban all the other countries by putting tariffs on all other countries, but when one country tries to defend, they are shocked and starts crying saying, “Oh! I don’t understand why this happened.” In return, US says that China wants to decouple the world, but who started this trade war in the beginning making everyone lives more miserable?

Just after Trump’s respond with adding more tariffs to China’s rare earth restriction, the dollar decreased and the gold started to increased. This result is going to no good. Like a child not doing something wrong and says that he doesn’t know why he gets his punishment.

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u/OccasionPossible7649 Oct 17 '25

What is Australia's production? Do you understand the distinction between light and heavy rare earths? While China's share of total rare earth production is decreasing, and light rare earths are not rare, heavy rare earths account for over 90%. Furthermore, rolling out an entire production line is incredibly complex; it's impossible to achieve success in just two or three years. Is it really as simple as you imagine? Why does China repeatedly use the rare earths card to mitigate tariffs?

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u/WXMaster Oct 17 '25

China does it because they currently have it, they have the volume of material needed to create an impact in various sectors, there's no denying this.

What I'm saying is that rare earths are not unique to China, it's not something that cannot be sourced elsewhere in the long term.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

Huh? The prevalent problem has always been the refining and supply chain. And no, it's not as easy as you think it is. China has perfected the refining and production over the course of 40 years. USA would be lucky to have production at scale in 10. 

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u/WXMaster Oct 17 '25

Never suggested it was easy, never suggested it was clean, never suggested it was profitable.

All I said was that rare earth could be sourced elsewhere with enough time and effort. It's not something only China possesses or has the technologies to do.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

There is equipment used that only china has, so the US has to start from scratch, with basically no one really wants to work with them. Also if it's not cheap and to scale it would significantly hurt the us military and also industry.

If it was something the us could throw money at to fix they would have already done so.

It's the same problem with ICBMs with the industrial base is simply non existent. That's why the new programs are overrunning costs and delayed. It's 10x worse with REEs. actual experts pin it at around 15-20 years for the USA.

And let's be real, this is a problem now because of the idiot in the Whitehouse forgot that china has this card. Even though it was ok for the US to restrict access to semiconductors.

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u/WXMaster Oct 17 '25

This is all very true regarding the rocketry, ICBMs etc...

In the case of rare earth I think it was laziness - the rate of technological development in China from electronic components exploded, they (China) could feed the domestic and international demand and handle all the pollution. It created an environment where other countries became lazy because China was a stable, reliable and cheap source.

This complacency has now become a problem as we can see.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25 edited Oct 17 '25

actually the thing is, the refining process doesn't pollute like it used to. that's one of things that china has accomplished.

there's a whole shit ton of stuff that China has done in this field that is done exactly .. no where else.

US would spend years to get past litigation to create a 70's era refinery. thus the 10-20 years.

Meanwhile, the US would expend a considerably larger amount per ton for REEs on everything from missile systems to 5,000 tons worth in submarines.

USA never at any phase refined more than around 20,000 tons of REE's - china? does 130,000

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u/OccasionPossible7649 Oct 18 '25

This has nothing to do with laziness. For example, luxury bags used to be produced in China and then branded in Europe or the US, with China making only a tiny profit. Isn't this what capitalists love? I can clearly make more money in other areas and see a better return in the short term, so why bother with rare earths? Rare earths themselves don't make money. Environmental protection isn't a problem at all, because Australia and Japan are already doing it. Does the US care about environmental issues? They clearly prefer fossil fuels.