America has been consuming more than it produces for decades now, so Washington may appear on the surface to hold the stronger cards in a tariff war with China. But decades of deindustrialisation have left the US dependent on trading partners for everything from cars and electronic gadgets to toys and cheap garments. Nowhere is that dependency more acute than in the case of critical raw materials – a problem shared by the EU.
Just two after the US president declared Liberation Day and presented his list of ‘reciprocal’ trade tariffs in the rose garden of the White House, Beijing quietly imposed export controls on seven rare earth metals. Readers may not be familiar with samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium, but if you are reading this on a phone, you’re holding several of them in your hand.
