And some number of years ago, the government restarted a rare earth ore processing plant (somewhere in the west, like CO... I forget). Of course, after a year or two, the will to maintain it (because it was operating at a loss) evaporated and it went under.

Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China because of an extortion incident between the two... they process the ore in far off places (Australia and other places), before importing the final products.

The issue is that the US is (and has been for some time) mired in short-term thinking. The short term being how to win the next election, not how to solve problems. Of course, now, the problems being solved aren't really ones that people want, unless you are rich already.

Part of the trouble with refining "rare earths" [1] is that the undesired residue (commonly called "slag") is radioactive and toxic. Smokestack emissions are also toxic enough that countries with pollution controls don't want them inside their borders. In the US, that means that every rare earth refinery becomes a SuperFund site [2].

China doesn't want to keep refining the metals - they want to move up the value chain by making things out of these metals. Instead of selling the refined neodymium & dysprosium for $50, they want to sell the electric motors that sell for $1,000.

Notes:

1 - They aren't rare at all, they're the bottom 2 strips/rows of the periodic table (of how it is most commonly displayed). Chemically, they're rather similar so the separation process is more complicated and annoying than, say, refining iron ore. Many people like to specifically exclude the actinides (the bottom row which includes uranium & plutonium) from the category "rare earth" because scary! radioactive! nuke! stuff! tends to divert discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

2 - A major problem with SuperFund sites is that every person/corporation who owned that land at any time is responsible for cleaning up the toxic waste. Just like asbestos waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

> Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China

Nope. They are still dependent on transshipment via Thailand or processing in 3rd countries like India or Vietnam.

Heck, Toyota's India JV has been halted [0] from exporting processed rare earths to Japan from India right now because China has blockaded Indian access [1] to rare earths which China promised to remove recently but still hasn't [2], which lead to India blocking it's export of REEs.

And people wonder why countries have continued to engage with the US despite Trump.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-moves-conserve-its...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...

[2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250916VL202/tata-group-rar...

If the US were to engage in long-term thinking, we might come to dangerous conclusions like, "Having a permanent racial underclass of perpetually-exploited and dissatisfied residents is a bad thing, and maybe we should train/pay the ones that are already here, inculcating them the righteousness of the American project, rather than constantly importing workers because their lack of direct experience with our country's institutions as they currently exist makes them easier marks." It would devastate the poverty-retail-financial-service complex.

The funniest part is our current admin's inadvertent exposure of this situation. Tinfoil hats on, but I hear tell of difficulties in the subprime auto-lending space because so many of immigrants who were targeted for those loans either stopped making payments because they're too afraid to go to work, or else self-deported with their cars. Lender bankruptcies are in-process, which is probably not good for all of the derivatives that are about to go to zero in sympathy. So much for consumer strength, and completely avoidable if not for our insistence on squeezing our least for every last cent.