Struggles for power don’t always play out on the battlefield. The United States and China are locked in a struggle for global superiority on land, sea, and air, but the center of the fight is closer to the core of the Earth.
Possibly more important are the states of their economies. Both countries are critical importers and exporters of goods and technology that power the means of shoring up the hard power that is used as a gauge to determine what the strongest country in the world is.
But as the Washington Examiner has explored this week with our New Frontier series, the number of soldiers deployed or weapons produced isn’t always the most important metric. Satellites are telling soldiers in tanks and weapons in the skies where they are headed. Occupying frozen wastelands gives militaries quick and easy access to far corners of the globe.
And right now, China is in the driver’s seat when it comes to producing the rare earth minerals and materials needed to power every other national security development, Energy and Environment Reporter Callie Patteson wrote for us this morning.
“A new administration has handed the United States the opportunity to catch up in its ever-intensifying trade war with China over critical earth minerals such as lithium, graphite, and cobalt that are foundational for the energy industry and national security,” she wrote.
“China has long dominated control over processing these critical minerals for various products such as batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, semiconductors, and more. In large part thanks to the country’s large domestic reserves of these minerals, the country has held a position at the center of the global supply chain as it supplies a large percentage of critical minerals used worldwide,” she wrote.
Though there are concerns China and the U.S. could find themselves in a hot war in the South China Sea or with Taiwan at the center, there is a slow-burning fight playing out now to find out how to pare back the world’s reliance on China to procure these critical materials.
Unlike physical goods, there is no amount of building the U.S. can do to increase its output of rare earth minerals. Either they are in the ground, or they aren’t.
Fortunately, there have been discoveries of some deposits here at home.
“McDermitt Caldera, along the Nevada-Oregon border, is home to what is thought to be the largest lithium deposit in North America — possibly even larger than the one in Bolivia,” Callie wrote. “Research has estimated that the deposit could be holding between 20 million and 40 million tons of lithium, a game changer for geopolitics and domestic production of critical minerals.”
There are also other countries that are sitting on their own deposits that have better relationships with the U.S. than China, primarily in Latin America.
Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Peru are all sitting on substantial lithium reserves, and Australia is rich in cobalt, manganese, and tungsten.
President-elect Donald Trump will have the twofold task of cutting trade deals with these countries as well as determining how the materials will be used once they’ve been procured.
The Trump administration’s shift away from boosting the production and use of electric vehicles could free up more uses for defense, Jason Isaac, the founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute, told Callie.
“That would free up a lot of the global supply of these minerals for national security, for computers, other things that people really want and want to feel safe,” he said.
Click here to read more about rare earth minerals and what they mean for national security.
Not fake news
Trump is taking a page out of his opponents’ playbook and is trying to use the legal system to escalate his fights with the media.
Though he has fought with reporters and outlets for most of the last decade, using his bully pulpit or his social media feeds to lambaste any reporting or commentary that is critical of him, he is taking a more muscular approach heading into his second term, White House Reporter Naomi Lim wrote this morning.
“Invigorated by winning the popular vote in November and putting most of his criminal legal challenges behind him, Trump is ramping up his litigious media strategy by suggesting Justice Department attorneys should act as his personal lawyers,” Naomi wrote.
The new strategy has been a success, possibly inspiring him to keep pushing it forward.
Last weekend, ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit he filed against host George Stephanopoulos, paying out $15 million.
When he complained to NBC about not getting equal air time with Vice President Kamala Harris after she appeared on an episode of Saturday Night Live, he was granted appearances during a NASCAR event and Sunday Night Football.
On Tuesday, he said he was suing the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer for a last-minute poll that showed Harris beating Trump in Iowa. The outlier was incorrect as Trump won the state by double digits, but he said the poll forced him to route resources away from other parts of the country to shore up his chances in a state that had been considered noncompetitive.
“I feel I have to do this,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I shouldn’t really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else, but I have to do it. Costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press. Our press is very corrupt.”
Lawsuits do cost a lot of money. However, the DOJ has much deeper pockets than news outlets, which might be able to win cases on the merits, though they will have to expend huge amounts of time and money to do so — which might be the point of the threat, some legal experts say.
“Trump doesn’t have to be able to win these lawsuits to succeed in his goal,” attorney Susan Simpson wrote on social media. “Which is to make it economically unviable for most people and organizations to publish news, polls, or opinions that are unfavorable to him.”
Click here to read more about Trump’s legal fights with the media.
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For your radar
President Joe Biden is in Delaware and has nothing on his public schedule.
Harris is in Washington, D.C., and has nothing on her public schedule.
The Federal Reserve is expected to cut interest rates again today. The announcement will come at 2 p.m., and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will hold a press conference discussing the decision at 2:30 p.m.