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That is energy expert Robert Bryce’s title for his depressing Substack piece:

On Monday, the Biden administration issued new restrictions on the export of key semiconductor equipment and software to China. On Tuesday, China retaliated by banning the export to the US of three strategic elements — antimony, gallium, and germanium — that have multiple military and civilian uses. It also restricted the export of graphite to the US.

The two countries are now locked in a trade war over key technologies and the strategic commodities used to fabricate everything from batteries to missile guidance systems.

Actually this war has been going on for a while, but only one side has been fighting.

As two analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Security put it, “critical mineral security is now intrinsically linked to the escalating trade war.”

This is a theme that policy fellows at Center of the American Experiment have been sounding for several years. See, for instance, this recent report.

If China is willing to cut off the flows of antimony, gallium, germanium, and graphite to the US, it could also ban, or reduce, the exports of other strategic metals, minerals, and magnets, and, in doing so, inflict significant damage to American industry and US security.

There is a great deal of detailed information at the link, and I recommend that you read it all. The bottom line is that, while our government has been twiddling its thumbs and suppressing mining in the U.S., the Chinese have steadily monopolized the mining and processing of many strategically vital minerals. Robert created this table of elements that shows which ones the Chinese Communist Party dominates:

The fact that we depend on China for minerals that are absolutely vital to our national security and our economic well-being is disgraceful. But the reality is even worse than that: the Biden Administration, and Democrats generally, are trying to shift our civilization from fossil fuel-based energy, which we have in abundance, to erratic, expensive wind and solar energy, for the production of which we are overwhelmingly dependent on the Chinese Communist Party. A stupider policy is almost impossible to imagine.

Despite the fact that he has taken millions of dollars in foreign bribes–$24 million that we know about, for sure–I don’t actually think that Joe Biden is the Manchurian Candidate. But Biden and his administration are so incompetent that they could hardly have endangered America more if they had been on the payroll of the Communist Chinese. One of the Trump Administration’s highest priorities should be to re-open mining in the U.S., and release us from potentially fatal reliance on China for materials that are vital to our national security.