Trump & Albanese Announce “$3B Plan” to Dethrone China in Rare Earths…🤡
https://x.com/StarboySAR/status/1980890320796885102
Breaking: Trump & Albanese Announce “$3B Plan” to Dethrone China in Rare Earths…
I couldn't help but laugh until I cried at the latest geopolitical insight from the guy who thought "injecting bleach" was a good idea for fighting COVID! 
After wiping away my tears, I just had to sit down and write a longer post.
Yesterday Donald Trump claimed “In about a year from now, we'll have so much critical minerals and rare earths that you won't know what to do with them. They'll be worth about two dollars.”
Sure, Don. And I’ve got a gallium refinery in Guangdong selling the American Dream for $1.99 
Let’s be real: This latest saga is a perfect metaphor for the West's entire approach to containing China
The article from TIME (time.com/7327042/trump-) highlights a desperate Western scramble to break China's dominance in rare earths and critical minerals—the very lifeblood of the 21st-century economy, from EVs to F-35s.
The usual Blah Blah Blah...The U.S. and Australia “intend to” invest billions… “intend to” speed up permits… “intend to” build a gallium refinery plant in Western Australia (cos the Pentagon urgently needs gallium for its missiles, EWs and radars)
Translation: We've got PowerPoint slides, not supply chains.
Meanwhile, China refines over 90% of the world’s rare earths—not because we hoard, but because we built the infrastructure, expertise, and industrial ecosystem over the past 4 decades while the West outsourced and deregulated itself into dependency
US and Australian experts promptly poured cold water on the celebration: Building a supply chain independent of China? It will take at least 10-20 years! America’s own processing plants haven’t even gotten their “birth certificates”—Talon Metals’ nickel mine processing plant, relocated from Minnesota to North Dakota, has been waiting for permits for years; Australia’s Lynas received $258 million in US funding to build a rare earth plant in Texas, but two years later, not even the foundation has been laid, stuck on wastewater treatment permits; even MP Materials, America’s “star enterprise,” still has to ship two-thirds of its rare earth concentrates to China for processing
So Trump's plan is to dig up those $2 “surplus” rare earths from PowerPoint presentations in a year?
America’s fatal flaw has never been a “lack of mines,” but a “lack of sense”—more precisely, a lack of processing capacity.
As mentioned before, China accounts for 90% of the world’s rare earth refining output but also for 92% of global processing control. The US imports 70% of its rare earth compounds from China, and 87% of the US military’s weapons supply chain (including the 417 kilograms of rare earths needed for each F-35 fighter jet) is bottlenecked by China’s processing links.
Trump previously tried to get rare earths from Ukraine, only to fall out with Zelenskyy and after realizing that Russia is winning the war (remember that Ukraine–United States Mineral Resources Agreement, no one talks about it anymore?) Then he sought to trade for rare earth mines with the DRC but had to first help fight anti-government rebels; then he negotiated with Russia but refused to accept Russia's position and to lift sanctions.
After running in circles, he could only rope in Australia as a “sucker”— Australia which had just sent a P-8A spy plane to provoke China over it's Xisha/Paracel Islands in the South China Sea- coincidentally (?) when Albanese signed the rare earth deal with Trump
Yet, no one seems to notice that Australia lacks high-precision purification technology, making the agreement nothing more than a fresh coat of paint on America’s hegemonic decline
What’s even more ironic is that China’s rare earth advantage has never been a “monopoly,” but the result of market choices: Building a refinery costs a third of what it does in the US, and the industrial chain is so complete that it covers everything from mines to magnets in one seamless step.
Trump’s attempt to “create a supply chain” through executive orders is like shoveling sand to create a microchip—last year, when China tightened export controls on critical items like gallium and germanium, the US military panicked immediately: A Government Accountability Office report showed that over 1,000 US military weapon systems and more than 20,000 components were affected. The EU reaction was even more idiotic, suggesting “space mining” to avoid relying on China, only to be mocked: “You can’t even figure out how to fast track mining and processing on Earth, and you want to mine rare earths on the moon?”
Trump probably thinks rare earths are like canned goods in a supermarket—sign an agreement and fill the shelves. But the reality is: In a year, the US will most likely not have “so much rare earths we won’t know what to do with them,” but rather military and US defense contractors “not knowing what to do” as they scramble to find rare earths and magnets; Australia won’t be a “strategic partner,” but a “sucker” tied to America’s war machine.
And what about the Submarines? Trump “accelerating” AUKUS? Please. The Virginia-class subs are backlogged, budgets are imploding, and even the U.S. Navy admits AUKUS needs “clarity”—i.e., they still don’t know how to pull it off without Chinese-made components sneaking in through third-party suppliers or outright smuggling them out of China 
The truth? You can’t mine your way out of strategic incompetence. But hey—keep laughing all the way to the (two-dollar) bank, Don 
posted by Satish Sharma at
12:59
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