What? The usg did exactly this. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/10/01/trump-executive-order-on-rare-earths-puts-material-risk-in-spotlight/#:~:text=

What? The usg did exactly this. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/10/01/trump-executive-order-on-rare-earths-puts-material-risk-in-spotlight/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20%E2%80%94%20U.S.%20President%20Donald%20Trump,the%20country's%20dependence%20on%20China https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/10/01/trump-execut.... Despite how it sounds, the chief difficulty with rare earths is 1) how much of a pain in the ass isolation is, and 2) how much you're willing to tolerate water pollution in the process (or how much $ you're willing to pay to clean up the effluvium). In the short term a Chinese ban on rare earths just means a hit to the pocketbooks,not a regression to the industrial age. In the long term, it's just accelerating science -> engineering, as there are very good rare earth alternatives in the "late research" phases and even if none of them pan out the methodology to scale up extraction is publically known, and solvable.