[civilian]

You wrote some jingoist 19th-century bullshit. You're ready to fight in World War 1.

The idea that we need to protect strategic resources is outdated. We continue to do so, at our own detriment. Our sugar costs something like 5x what it costs in the rest of the world, because we place tariffs to keep it from coming in from the Caribbean. We are DESTROYING WEALTH CREATION with this market engineering. It is a tax that we see no benefit from and that is paid to no one.

Increased trade between countries increases stability. Some of my college classmates thought that we were due for a war with China just b/c they're the other huge power. What horseshit--- our mutual trade requires our politicians to play nice and not take any Crassian steps towards war.

If the US actually needed to make sure that we produced all of our strategic resources by ourselves then our economy would be tanked because we wouldn't be taking advantage of factories in BRIC. Do you think we make all the hard drives we would need to sustain a war against the rest of the world?

[eveningcoffee]

Loosing control over rare earth metals played out very well. For China.

Not being able to produce enough wood tanked Soviet Union.

[civilian]

I'm not familiar with the wood theory of the downfall of the Soviet Union. Link? I figured it was their centrally planned economy.

Yeah, so China has most rare earth metals. Are you advocating imperialism and occupation? Do we have evidence that they are managing their resource in an abusive way? (After a bit of reading, it appears that China does have large export restrictions. That market inefficiency is being solved by smuggling. :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China#Hi... )

[eveningcoffee]

Of course there are multiple factors for collapse of SU but from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_goods_in_the_Soviet_Un...

> By the time of the Soviet Union's collapse at the end of 1991, > nearly every kind of food was rationed. > Non-rationed foods and non-food consumer goods had virtually > disappeared from state owned stores.

Do you think that people were happy about this kind of situation?

China was not the only producer of rare earth metals but they used dumping and by that made production of rare earth metals unprofitable elsewhere. After other producers closed their plants, they started to heavily increase the rare earth metal prices.

[tekknik]

The problem here is that you expect history to indicate future performance. You expect each country to act morally instead of what's in their best (monetary) interest. How are wars fought these days? Sanctions, it has happened in recent history. Now what is a nation to do when a sanction against them on food imports? One thing is for sure, it'll help solve a population problem.