The 21st-century economy — from our smartphones and F-35 fighter jets to wind turbines and electric vehicles — runs on 17 obscure metals known as rare earth elements. Control their supply, and you control the technological high ground. For decades, America ceded this control, a strategic blunder that left our security perilously dependent on China, which now dominates over 80% of the global supply chain.
The Trump administration, to its credit, correctly identifies this vulnerability as a five-alarm fire. Its diagnosis is accurate and plans for a $12 billion dollar strategic stockpile heartening. Its other proposed solutions, however, have been a series of bizarre and coercive foreign policy gambits that betray a fundamental misunderstanding of American strength.
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Los Angeles school superintendent placed on paid leave during federal probeWe have witnessed the administration thrash about, seeking a quick fix in all the wrong places. Iran, a war targeting regime change and the destruction of its nuclear capacities — laudable goals — also has the suspicious taint of being all about oil. In fact, Trump has leveraged America’s might in frantic pursuit of a neo-colonial bid to purchase Greenland and reportedly tying Ukrainian security aid to its resource base.
When China, in retaliation for tariffs, threatened to weaponize its rare earth monopoly — a move tested on Japan in 2010 — the administration’s desperation only intensified. This approach, predicated on blackmail and strong-arming, is not a strategy; it is a lurch from one crisis to the next.
The irony is stark: The most viable, scalable and secure solution to this dependency lies not in Arctic islands or conflict-ridden territories, but right here at home, buried in the soil of a state the administration relentlessly attacks — California.
There is no more important state for securing America’s resource independence. The linchpin is the Mountain Pass mine in the Mojave Desert. Once the world’s leading producer, it was bankrupted by China’s price dumping. Today, under new ownership as MP Materials, it has roared back to life as the only large-scale rare earth operation in the Western Hemisphere, responsible for 15% of the world’s production.
The administration even recognizes this asset as vital, awarding MP Materials Defense Department funding for domestic processing. This is a crucial step. Currently, all concentrate from Mountain Pass is shipped to China for separation, perpetuating our dependency. Breaking that link is a national security imperative.
But Mountain Pass is only the beginning. Further south, at the Salton Sea, lies “Lithium Valley.” Here, vast reserves of lithium — essential for the batteries powering our electric future — are available via a more sustainable geothermal brine extraction. California is poised not just to solve our rare earth problem but to become the domestic epicenter for the green energy transition.
Herein lies the administration’s profound and self-defeating contradiction.
Its most concrete act of sabotage is its war on California’s authority to set its own vehicle emissions standards. These standards are the primary driver of the electric vehicle market — the largest future consumer for both the lithium from the Salton Sea and the rare earth magnets from Mountain Pass.
By seeking to nullify them, the administration is actively working to suppress the future domestic demand for the very minerals it deems vital.
Further, the Trump administration’s own erratic trade policy could trigger a retaliatory Chinese tariff on the very concentrate MP Materials sells them, choking off the mine’s sole revenue stream before a US-based processing plant can be built.
Politics plays a role, too.
No sane CEO will sink billions into a two-decade project to build a domestic processing plant in a state the president treats as a political enemy, creating massive investment uncertainty.
This policy schizophrenia extends to talent; the administration asks for a high-tech solution while its restrictive immigration policies starve California’s industry of the world-class engineers and metallurgists needed to build it.
In short, it is giving a grant to the mine with one hand while systematically dismantling the market, investment climate and human capital required for it to succeed with the other.
A coherent national security strategy requires a holistic view of national strength. American power is not forged through coercive foreign adventures but is built on the economic dynamism of its states.
The path to breaking China’s chokehold on the future does not run through Nuuk or Kyiv. It runs through the Mojave Desert and the Imperial Valley.
True American leadership would recognize California not as a political adversary, but as the nation’s single greatest asset in the geopolitical competition of the 21st century.
To champion a mine in its desert while seeking to cripple the state around it is to secure a single castle while flooding the kingdom.
Markos Kounalakis is a Hoover Institution visiting fellow and California’s Second Gentleman.
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