[AnthonyMouse]

> The US's strategy has been for someone else to have a lock on rare earth production.

Not quite though. The US's strategy has been for someone else to do the mining. That strategy works pretty well when it's two dozen other countries in competition with one another, because then you're not reliant on any one of them and there is no single point of failure.

The failure is in failing to prevent it from all being consolidated into a single authoritarian country.

[economusty]

This exactly. The idea that we want to become beholden to a single country is preposterous. The comment you replied to made it seem like because US doesn't want our landscape torn up we are OK with an anti-competitive trading partner, the reality couldn't be further from the truth. Americans are fine with rising cost of goods but ideally we don't want those extra profits to go to a single country. Globisation in the Krugman sense was supposed to pull people out of poverty all over the world, not just in China.

[imtringued]

This hits the nail on the head. The problem with the DRC (Congo) is that it is basically the only viable source for certain resources on the planet. It is very easy for private entities to take control over the entire world's supply through a private military force. If there was a second country that could extract the same resources for a similar cost, the lack of stability would cause the DRC to fall behind in production which would dry up the revenue stream for the private military force.

The interesting fact about competition on the world market is that the easiest way to compete is by making the private and public sector work together. People complain about China subsidizing exports for unsustainable prices, sometimes below the cost of production, however this is only possible because the government is ensuring there is enough stability in the country for those companies to continue to exist and because the government is actively supporting these growing industries even if there is some inefficiency.

DRC basically has none of that, if anything the private sector may have an unreasonable degree of control over the government but the government has no control over the private sector.