The amount of raw ore is not actually the problem. The US is already the second largest producer of rare earths after China. They can’t process all of the ore though so it gets shipped to China for that. The other thing is all of the US rare earths basically come from one mine, which is partially owned by a Chinese company. No amount of blackmailing random countries for mining rights will fix this.
If I want to use my main bank account with wero I have to link my mobile number to it and can’t use it for wero with my other account anymore, because that’s the only way my bank supports it. Only a small number of banks actually let you use the wero app with multiple sources. Makes it completely useless for me. Paypal isn’t the only one that can do that either. Basically everything not made by companies that primarily want to be banks can do this. E.g. Klarna.
The other thing is that I need something that works outside the EU. That’s where replacing paypal and credit cards is actually difficult. In my own country or in the EU, I have plenty of options.
I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody just “suddenly remembered” that we never recognized it as a separate country in the first place.
Neither lithium nor cobalt are rare earths, and China isn’t particularly dominating their production either. The leading producers are other countries. These are completely unrelated to the rare earths problem.
With rare earths the situation is that China isn’t only leading in production of the ores, but also in processing capacity, and the technology needed for it. The US already is the second largest producer of rare earth ores, but they still have to send them to China for processing because they can’t do all of it in the US. For the same reason, China produces ~90% of the world’s permanent magnets (these use rare earths like neodymium or samarium). Basically it’s not about developing sources for the ores. Rare earths are not that rare in the first place. It’s about the technology and capacity to do anything with them.
I do agree that the impact might not last long. They’re just forcing the competition to work faster. But maybe the explanation is that they think that making everybody speed up their rare earths development doesn’t change much in the long run anyway, while throwing a wrench into the US industry right now is a pretty good deal.