Iirc they go after both. Didnt they already pressure Ukraine by holding off support until they agreed to provide them with rights to rare earth metals?

Take the information with grain of salt, its just vague memory

Rare earth metals aren’t actually rare, the problem is extracting them from soils cost effectively. I understand it can be a messy process as well.

Oil and other minerals usually occur in one location as singular deposits. Rare earths need to be extracted from large amounts of soil. The US has always had viable reserves of oil, coal and gold.

China has dominated this market because they are prepared to spend non profitable time processing soil for these minerals whereas Americans aren’t.

I think there’s some US rare earth extraction in the mid west.

Rare earths are not actually that rare, they’re just… messy to extract. They require a ton of processing, infrastructure and create a lot of byproducts that cannot just be dumped, the byproducts need to be neutralized and disposed of properly. Very expensive, not very large margins.

Rare earths are important to making certain things, but, oil’s products are key for running things. You can go a few years without replacing a phone, you don’t get oil for a week and your transportation infrastructure ceases running.

You said we’re the strongest nation on Earth, what makes you say that? I’d say it’s one of America’s greatest propaganda feats, we have proven we’re incompetent at security / defense to a degree that is impossible to deny. Any country could easily win a war by simply socially engineering our uneducated masses who would be administrating our tools.

If worst comes to worst, I would bet that we’re going to see a collapse of federal systems which is magically saved by companies opting for privatization of public systems so we can start paying to be in these national databases that we’ve been evidently freeloading off of for decades...

I mean if we have fusion we don't need REE mines...