[XorNot]

You can't plausibly wage a destructive war to seize industrial facilities likely to be disrupted or destroyed in said war. Factories and their workers are intellectual resources.

Whereas with raw materials, like rare earths: China has a lock on rare earth's because they're willing to completely destroy their own land's to get them, not because they're actually "rare".

We are arguably in a local minima with regards to rare earth extraction because nothing has pushed us to automate the human element out of it and they're not needed in sufficient quantity yet.