Free Republic

Hitler thought the US was a mongrel country, but he pointed to how people had forgotten the US genocide of the Indians along with the Turkish Armenian genocide as examples to show that his proposed Jewish genocide would soon be forgotten by the world. He also saw an analogy to his proposed conquest of the USSR in the US conquest of the West (He sometimes referred to the Russians as “redskins”). In those two ways he saw the US as a good role model.

But how could a state prevent a company selling natural gas, for example, to a buyer in another state?

The Chinese are very adept at driving western rare earth mining operations out of business to eliminate competition. A good example of that is the now defunct Molycorp rare earth mine in Colorado. The Chinese drastically lowered the price of rare earths and drove Molycorp out of business, and then raised the price again. There is no way to beat them at that game unless we have state support for such ventures. Also the waste from these mines is normally radioactive so the pollution problem is very severe. The Chinese just bite the bullet and accept this, but here it would be problematic for us. Anyway, it would take many years to build up a production capacity to challenge the Chinese.
Rare earth metals per se may be a relatively small part of the trade balance, but they are extremely critical for our high-tech economy and this could be used to exert a great deal of leverage against us. If we were not able to build our military gear, and the necessary equipment to keep our economy going we would be in a world of hurt.

Maybe the tariffs will not be noticed by Americans, but especially next year if the they are raised to 25% and cover basically everything from China they may well cause a very noticeable inflationary effect for many of us. Then the question is how would our population react? There could very likely be a strong and popular push against Trump’s tariff policies. The Chinese people would also feel the effects of the tariff war. In this situation it would be a matter of which population has the greatest fortitude. Over here the will of the people matters, but in China the state is much more impervious to such pressures. My gut feeling is that we would fold first.

Many manufacturing parts used by US companies are sourced in China. This is especially true for parts containing rare earth metals and the metals themselves for which China is practically the sole source. If the trade war becomes very difficult for the Chinese they could basically cut the amount of these items supplied to the US which would have a crippling effect on US high-tech and our military. We have foolishly ignored this problem for many years which could come back to bite us.

The big question is why Trump hired her in the first place.