Photograph Source: Peggy Greb, US department of agriculture – Public Domain

China may have paused its rare earth ban in November, but such a sanction remains a sword of Damocles over U.S. arms manufacturers. Nor is it China’s only high-tech weapon. Quite apart from its ability to tank the U.S. economy by – first step – ditching U.S. debt, Beijing can easily overcome Washington in three technological arenas: rare earths, jamming Starlink, which is so critical on any western battlefield, and, as geo-political researcher Brian Berletic has convincingly argued on X on January 15, by securing its and its allies’ information space. This trio of challenges has many implications, for instance: on January 12, the Trump regime slapped tariffs on anyone buying Iranian oil, so India stopped much of this trade pronto – but China picked up the slack and now purchases almost ALL Iranian oil. Is Beijing being tariffed by the geniuses in Washington? No way. It trades with Iran with impunity and not in dollars, because at the first whiff of trouble from the U.S., the 5000-year-old civilization can slam export controls back on Gallium, Germanium, Graphite, Antinomy and other rare earths and bingo! It zaps most American weapons production to a halt.

How can China do this? Because it’s home to 60 percent of the world’s rare earths, and the other 40 percent are nearly inaccessible. Even more unassailably, 90 percent of all rare earth processing occurs in China. So Beijing literally sells Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other U.S. arms makers the materials, without which they cannot produce modern weapons. That includes radar, submarines, F-35s, drones and missiles. In short, China has American defense contractors by the throat and knows this very well.

And not just weapons producers. Electric vehicles, wind turbines, laptops, data centers, smart-phones and AI infrastructure like semi-conductors and data storage all depend on rare earths only available from China. So if Donald “Over 100........

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