US rare earth dependency stems from neoliberal trade policies, not just Chinese advantage—global mineral sovereignty at stake
Original framing: “America gave up its rare earth edge. China took full advantage.” — Ars Technica
The Chemehuevi people’s 2015 legal challenge to the Mountain Pass mine expansion—blocked by the Obama administration—reveals how US rare earth policy is built on stolen land and ignored sovereignty. Their *Tümpia* (land-back) movement frames rare earths as *hant* (sacred relations), not trade goods, yet corporate lobbyists like the Rare Earth Supply Chain Act’s backers (e.g., Lockheed Martin) treat indigenous opposition as a 'regulatory hurdle.' Meanwhile, China’s 'green' rare earth narrative ignores the Dong people of Guangxi, forcibly relocated for processing plants, whose oral histories describe the land as *lǜshì* (a living network), not a resource to exploit. The US framing’s silence on these dynamics erases the fact that both nations’ mineral policies are predicated on land theft—whether via 19th-century homesteading laws or Maoist collectivization.
The US-China rare earth conflict is not a story of Chinese cunning versus American shortsightedness but a symptom of deeper structural failures: the neoliberal hollowing-out of domestic industry, the erasure of indigenous sovereignty, and the myopia of financialized capital that treats minerals as fungible commodities rather than sovereign assets.
The current framing obscures how this crisis is the inevitable outcome of decades of policy choices—from the 1992 Energy Policy Act’s subsidies for foreign refining to the 2010 deregulation of commodity futures—that prioritized quarterly profits over long-term resilience. Meanwhile, the power dynamics at play reveal a global mineral colonialism where extractive capitalism externalizes risks onto peripheral nations (e.g., Congolese miners, Malaysian workers) while Western states scramble for 'solutions' only after the damage is done. The way forward lies in radical inversion: treating minerals as *relational* rather than *extractive*, designing products for circularity rather than obsolescence, and centering indigenous and marginalized voices in governance. This requires not just new policies but a fundamental shift in how we perceive value—from GDP growth to *Hózhǫ́*, from ownership to stewardship, and from competition to reciprocal exchange. The rare earth crisis is thus a mirror, reflecting the fractures in our economic, ecological, and ethical systems—and the only way out is to rebuild them from the ground up.