China’s Chokehold Strangles U.S. Defense

USA and China boxing gloves facing each other.

China’s grip on the rare earths America needs for weapons, energy, and industry is the quiet chokehold our enemies hope Washington never breaks.

Story Snapshot

China controls most rare earth mining, processing, and magnets, giving Beijing dangerous leverage over U.S. defense and industry.
Decades of offshoring, green virtue signaling, and globalist thinking helped China build this near-monopoly.
Breaking Beijing’s chokehold is technically and economically possible, but requires full-spectrum U.S.-led action across the entire supply chain.
Trump’s America First agenda aligns with rebuilding secure, domestic and allied rare earth capacity instead of relying on hostile regimes.

How Beijing Gained a Chokehold on America’s Critical Minerals

Since the late 1980s, China intentionally built a full rare earth industrial chain—from mining to advanced magnets—while U.S. leaders from both parties chased cheap imports and green headlines. Chinese state planners used subsidies, lax environmental rules, and aggressive export tactics to undercut American and allied producers. As Western facilities shut down, Beijing’s share climbed to the majority of global mining and roughly nine out of ten tons of processing and magnet production, turning a niche metals sector into a strategic weapon.

Rare earth elements power guided missiles, fighter jet electronics, radar, precision motors, and the magnets in everything from smartphones to wind turbines. While deposits exist worldwide, the dirty, complex processing ended up concentrated inside China as globalist policymakers outsourced industry and ignored national security. When China briefly tightened export quotas in 2010 during a dispute with Japan, prices spiked and factories worldwide panicked. Washington finally saw that a hostile communist regime held the fuse on America’s high-tech and defense supply chains.

Globalism, Green Ideology, and the Road to Dependence

During the 1990s and 2000s, Western elites praised “free trade” and climate summits while standing by as domestic rare earth processing collapsed. Environmental rules at home grew stricter, but instead of pairing them with strategic industrial policy, leaders simply imported the same materials from Chinese facilities with far lower standards. The result was the worst of both worlds: shuttered American plants, lost blue-collar jobs, and the exact same environmental impact—only now under the control of the Chinese Communist Party and outside U.S. law or oversight.

Past administrations and European bureaucrats treated rare earths as just another commodity, not a strategic resource bound up with constitutional defense obligations and economic sovereignty. Subsidies and mandates that rapidly pushed electric vehicles and wind power expanded demand for rare earth magnets without ensuring secure supply. As green rhetoric escalated, so did dependence on Beijing’s factories. China learned it could raise or lower export restrictions to spook markets, influence negotiations, and discourage rival projects by crashing prices once Western investors tried to build alternatives.

What It Would Take to Break China’s Rare Earth Monopoly

Industry research is clear: turning the tide on China’s dominance is possible if the United States and close allies build full, integrated supply chains—not just new mines. That means American-led partnerships that cover exploration, mining, chemical separation, metals, alloys, magnet plants, and recycling. It requires long-term contracts, stable permitting, and serious capital so projects survive the boom-and-bust cycles China has weaponized. Without midstream processing hubs on friendly soil, new mines simply ship ore back to China and the leverage problem remains.

Analysts emphasize that allied processing hubs must meet high environmental standards while still competing on cost and scale. That demands smarter regulation, not anti-industry activism: clear rules, modern technology, and predictable approvals instead of endless lawsuits and agency delays. Strategic stockpiles and defense procurement can anchor demand, helping private investors resist China’s tactic of temporarily flooding markets to bankrupt competitors. By coordinating with partners like Australia, Japan, and trusted African nations, the U.S. can support responsible projects and deny Beijing automatic control of new deposits.

Trump’s America First Turn: From Vulnerable to Resilient

With Trump back in the White House, the political climate is far more favorable to rebuilding critical mineral independence than under the Biden bureaucracy. The same America First mindset that slashed red tape, revived energy production, and confronted China on trade fits perfectly with a serious rare earth strategy. Prioritizing national security over climate showmanship or ESG talking points means backing domestic mining, processing, and manufacturing, even if it upsets globalist institutions or green lobbies that preferred cheap Chinese supply.

Turning the tide on China’s dominance of the rare earth market is possible. Here’s what it would take https://t.co/sgM6Uie2Sz #News @fastcompany

— Jill Sugita-Pappas (Hulme) (@JillSHulme) December 9, 2025

For conservative readers, the stakes are simple: a nation that cannot supply its own defense materials is a nation that risks losing its freedom. Depending on the CCP for the magnets that steer U.S. missiles or power radar systems hands leverage to an adversary openly hostile to American values, gun rights, and constitutional self-government. By insisting on secure, domestic-aligned rare earth chains, Trump’s America is choosing sovereignty over dependence and real security over feel-good slogans crafted in Davos and Beijing.