“rare earths” are not really rare
What about Cobalt?
The Chinese have got dozens of little African children manually digging in the cave dirt to find it.
What is rare is the neighbors who want to tolerate the strip mining and refining operations with the attendant water pollution and poisoning of arable land.
A nice empty desert mountain area is a good place from which to obtain these metals.
Better yet may be some new desalination techniques that can extract these elements from seawater.
However it is done, it still is going to leave a mess somewhere that needs to be disposed.
“rare earths are not really rare”
Indeed. The issue is that they are rarely used, but crucial in small quantities. It’s the economics of mining them that is the problem.
If USA mandated local supplies, that problem would be solved tomorrow.