{"id":52,"date":"2026-05-26T21:42:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T21:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2026-05-26T21:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T21:42:13","slug":"trendingnow-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=52","title":{"rendered":"Trendingnow"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Thetis dipped her infant son in the River Styx to make him immortal, holding him by the heel \u2014 the one place the water never touched. Achilles grew up to be the greatest warrior of his age, his armor impenetrable, his enemies routed. Nobody worried about the heel. Why would they? Everything else worked so well.<\/p>\n

Read more Trendingnow<\/a><\/p>\n

America\u2019s industrial story follows the same arc. Decades of semiconductor leadership, unmatched aerospace manufacturing, the most sophisticated defense supply chain in history \u2014 and, running beneath all of it, a single exposed tendon. Rare earths: the 17 chemically similar elements that make electric motors spin efficiently, that keep missile guidance fins stable at supersonic speeds, that sit inside every F-35, every EV drivetrain, every wind turbine nacelle. For years, nobody worried much about them. Everything else worked so well.<\/p>\n

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McKinsey & Company analysts have spent the past several years tracing the outline of the wound. The firm projects a shortfall of up to 30% in magnetic rare earth supply globally by 2035 \u2014 unless China dramatically expands output or the rest of the world sharply accelerates production. For dysprosium and terbium, the heavy rare earths that prevent magnets from demagnetizing inside electric motors and missile guidance fins, the numbers are worse: producers outside China are projected to meet less than 20% of global demand for those two elements by 2035. Similar estimates come from CRU Group and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.<\/p>\n

The river Thetis used wasn\u2019t magic. It was strategy.<\/p>\n

How China came to dominate<\/h2>\n

Rare earths aren\u2019t particularly scarce in the earth\u2019s crust \u2014 the name is a misnomer. What makes them irreplaceable is that they are nearly impossible to separate cleanly from one another and from surrounding rock. The chemistry required is toxic, expensive, and technically demanding. China didn\u2019t win the rare earths race by having more of the dirt. It won by mastering the refining \u2014 and by deciding, decades ago, that it wanted to.<\/p>\n

That decision had a name. President Xi Jinping\u2019s \u201cdual circulation\u201d doctrine \u2014 make the world dependent on China while insulating China from dependence on anyone else \u2014 found its proof of concept in rare earths and permanent magnets long before it became official policy. \u201cThey didn\u2019t just fall into that,\u201d economist Soumaya Keynes told Fortune<\/em> earlier this month. \u201cThey learned about those supply chains. They had a strategy to become the world\u2019s leader.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Keynes and her co-author Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, make this case in How to Win a Trade War<\/em>, their new book published this spring. While America was fortifying everything else, China was studying the heel.<\/p>\n

Achilles went to battle anyway. So did American industry.<\/p>\n

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For a generation, Washington ran a version of Achilles\u2019 logic: the armor was good enough. The U.S. poured billions into the CHIPS Act to boost domestic semiconductor production but never mandated that anyone actually buy the chips. \u201cThey didn\u2019t force anyone else to actually buy the chips that Intel was going to make,\u201d Keynes said. \u201cAnd that was a problem.\u201d The rare earths story is a rerun of that structural failure, at higher strategic stakes: supply funded, demand assumed, the full chain never closed.<\/p>\n

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\u201cMeaningful diversification will take longer than many anticipate,\u201d Michel Van Hoey, the McKinsey senior partner who leads the firm\u2019s metals and mining practice, told Bloomberg earlier this month. <\/p>\n

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Any nascent U.S. rare earth industry is small enough that Beijing could simply flood the market with cheap material and wait for the small player to give up. That tactic ended Molycorp \u2014 once the great hope of American rare earth independence \u2014 whose Mountain Pass mine filed for bankruptcy in 2015 before the Pentagon had fully registered what it had lost. China\u2019s rare earth producers, many of them state-owned enterprises, aren\u2019t maximizing quarterly returns. They are achieving national objectives.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThese companies are not just maximizing profits,\u201d Bown told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cThey\u2019re achieving other objectives on behalf of the Chinese government.\u201d Achilles had enemies who studied him. America has a rival that studied the supply chain.<\/p>\n

Washington finally moves<\/h2>\n

Then came the arrow.<\/p>\n

China controls roughly 70% of global rare earth mining and close to 90% of refining and processing capacity \u2014 the chokepoint that actually matters. When Beijing slapped export controls on samarium, dysprosium and terbium in retaliation for President Trump\u2019s tariffs last year, U.S. automakers warned they were weeks away from halting production lines. A November truce loosened the spigot, but only partly. Fresh restrictions targeting Japan in early 2026, after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi\u2019s remarks on Taiwan, sent another tremor through magnet supply chains that feed everything from F-35s to Ford F-150 Lightnings. The arrow, when it finally came, went exactly where everyone had been told not to worry about.<\/p>\n

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Mining veteran Mick McMullen put it plainly to Fortune<\/em> from a critical-minerals forum in Singapore in March: \u201cClearly, China is the leader, and the U.S. is far behind. It\u2019s a bit unbelievable that it\u2019s taken so long for everyone to realize that maybe we should have some of these things in house.\u201d<\/p>\n

Achilles, at the end, tried to keep fighting.<\/p>\n

Washington has begun to move \u2014 aggressively, by its own standards. The Defense Department is now the largest shareholder in MP Materials, operator of the lone active U.S. rare earth mine at Mountain Pass \u2014 the same California site Molycorp abandoned. The administration inked an $8.5 billion rare-earths pact with Australia in October, struck deals with Malaysia and Thailand, and is reportedly weighing the redirection of $2 billion in CHIPS Act funds toward minerals. Trump expanded CHIPS Act tax credits from 25% to 35% and took equity stakes in private companies including Intel \u2014 a patchwork industrial strategy that Keynes and Bown describe as real, but late.<\/p>\n

The catch is what it always was: time. Mining the ore is the easy part. The supply chain runs mine to crusher to leaching tanks to solvent extraction columns to metal reduction furnaces to sintering presses \u2014 each a separate facility, a separate specialized workforce, a separate capital cycle. The U.S. is, at best, two or three steps in. \u201cWe don\u2019t live in a perfect world,\u201d Keynes said. Countries have to use \u201cimperfect tools\u201d to protect their interests and manage the consequences as best they can. The question is whether Washington will deploy them fast enough \u2014 or whether, as Keynes said, \u201cwe\u2019re going to be in this for a long, long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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McMullen told Fortune<\/em> he doubts the gap can be closed inside a single administration.
The myth, of course, ends on the battlefield. Achilles doesn\u2019t die because the arrow is powerful. He dies because the heel was always there, and eventually, someone with enough patience aimed at it.<\/p>\n

Beijing has been patient.<\/p>\n

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For this story,\u00a0<\/em>Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Read more Trendingnow<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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