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Osaka, 23 (February 2, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EST, Shannon Osaka, “Minerals are crucial for electric cars and wind turbines. Some worry whether we have enough; Minerals are crucial for electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels. Some worry whether the future supply can meet the rising demand,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/02/critical-minerals-run-out-shortage/, JMP)) ***Note --- Seaver Wang is the co-director of climate and energy at the energy think tank the Breakthrough Institute

Wang said that there will probably be enough minerals — and that the environmental impacts of mining them should pale in comparison to the damages of fossil fuels. (Humanity “mines” billions of tons of fossil fuels from the ground every year; even a huge increase in mineral mining will only be millions of tons.)

Recent research has also shown that the amount of minerals required for the shift to renewable energy is significant — but falls well within the amount of reserves available. A study released recently by scientists at the University of California at Irvine and MIT found that current reserves of minerals like aluminum, copper, manganese, silver and more should support building enough wind and solar power to meet climate targets.

What’s more, the mining from those operations would not have an outsize impact on global warming. (One repeated critique of renewable energy is that the intensity of mining might counteract the emissions benefits of wind and solar.) According to the study, the materials required for the transition to low-carbon electricity would take up somewhere between 1 and 9 percent of the remaining carbon budget: a significant amount but one that wouldn’t undercut overall climate goals.

Meanwhile, those who posit the decline of America, and by extension the liberal world order, often get key metrics wrong. For instance, it has been argued that as the unipolar moment fades, so will the dollar’s international reserve currency status. Writing in UnHerd, Thomas Fazi recently argued that Western sanctions on Russia have “enhanced the yuan’s reserve currency status”, while Bloomberg reported that the dollar has reached a “critical inflection point”. Even the IMF has signalled alarm.

However, the use of the dollar is based as much on geopolitics as it is on economics. Foreign investors will continue to use the currency not just because of its incredible liquidity as a store of value and medium of global exchange, but because of the US’s legal and governance infrastructure. It remains, after all, the currency of choice in foreign-exchange swap transactions, accounting for nearly half of the $6.6 trillion daily foreign-exchange turnover. Of allocated foreign-exchange reserves in late 2022, the dollar accounted for 60% of the world’s total. The Euro, by contrast, stood at 20%. The Chinese Renminbi? 3%.

One of the most repeated ideas in international affairs discourse today is that after World War II the United States created a “free and open international order” and that this order has been responsible for keeping the Indo-Pacific “largely peaceful” for the last 80 years.4 China is then typically said to be promoting a vision “incompatible” with this order—something that should make us worry, as it may herald the return of violent power politics.5

Michael Lind has summarized the perspective:“in my experience, most members of the U.S. foreign policy elite sincerely believe that the alternative to perpetual U.S. world domination is chaos and war.”6 It is indeed true that the years since World War II have been peaceful when compared with most of European history and that violence of all kinds has declined.7 This phenomenon has been dubbed the “New Peace,” and the United States certainly played some role in bringing it about.8

The warning signs seem to be everywhere. A resurgent Russia is exerting its power in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A rising China is extending its reach across its periphery. ISIS has taken control of large parts of Iraq and Syria. Establishment Democrats and Republicans couldn’t even stop Donald Trump from becoming the president of the United States. For the foreign policy establishment in Washington, it all raises a very troubling question: is the United States an empire in decline? Some insist that the answer is yes — that the period of US global dominance that has reigned since the end of the Cold War is coming to an end. As things now stand, “the post–Cold War, unipolar moment has passed,” the National Intelligence Council reported earlier this year. Former CIA officials John E. McLaughlin and Gen. David H. Petraeus made a similar assessment before the House Armed Services Committee this past February. In the years ahead, McLaughlin argued, “the world will be without a hegemonic power — that is, without a country so powerful as to exert dominant influence and advance policy with little reference to others.” Petraeus agreed, saying that the post–Cold War era of “US domination of the world” is ending. Still, there are some reasons to think otherwise. As former US diplomat R. Nicholas Burns recently observed, the United States maintains “alliances in Europe and Asia, and the Russians and Chinese do not.” In addition, the American military has begun to wipe out ISIS, killing more than sixty thousand fighters over the past two and a half years. So do a resurgent Russia, an ascendant China, and the emergence of the Islamic State suggest that US power is ebbing, or are these challenges exaggerated? What do US officials really think about these matters? If we take stock of their public statements as a whole, the foreign policy establishment certainly appears concerned about the latest challenges to US empire, especially the uncertainty that Trump’s election has introduced. But they also remain quite confident in their power to shape the world and steer the United States into a new age of global hegemony. The World’s Superpower Over the past few years, a number of high-level officials have expressed great confidence in the durability of US hegemony. Not only have they insisted that the declinist thesis is wrong, but they have argued that the United States will remain the world’s dominant power well into the future. In May 2016, two former high-level officials laid out the more confident view for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In a statement to the panel, former Secretary of State James Baker said that the United States would continue to lead the international system. Certainly, “much of the rest of the world — countries like China, Brazil and India — are catching up with us,” Baker conceded. “Still, we should remain the world’s preeminent leader for the foreseeable future.” Former National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon agreed. As long as the United States takes the proper precautions, he said, it “will continue to be the world’s leading and most powerful nation for a long time to come.” Donilon also rejected the declinist thesis, calling it a “myth” that should not be taken seriously: “The idea that America is in decline does not stand up to a rigorous analysis of our national balance sheet of strategic assets and liabilities,” Donilon asserted. “The truth is that no nation can match our comprehensive set of enduring strengths.” Other Obama administration officials offered similar views. Last October, for example, Secretary of State John Kerry noted that the United States maintains tremendous economic advantages. “We’re the richest country on the face of the planet,” Kerry said. In fact, the Obama administration made great strides in expanding US economic power across the globe. President Obama, who acknowledged during his final months in office that he had “made it a priority to open up new markets overseas,” boasted that his administration had “increased US exports to the world by more than 40 percent — to record levels.” At the same time, administration officials also pointed to their other great advantage in world affairs: American military power. As Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter noted in April 2015, “it will take decades — and let me repeat thAT decades — for anyone to build the kind of military capability the United States possesses today.” Obama expressed similar sentiments during his farewell tour. The United States possesses “the greatest military in the history of the world,” Obama declared. “Make no mistake,” he continued, “even with the challenges of recent years — and there have been challenges — our allies and adversaries alike understand America’s military remains, by far, the most capable fighting force on the face of the Earth.” In short, contrary to those who warn of waning US hegemony, high-ranking officials insist that the United States remains the most powerful country in the world. “We are, without a doubt, the world’s superpower,” CIA Director John Brennan said this past September. The Challenges Of course, every great power faces challengers. Not even the mighty United States is immune from pushback. As Carter noted last November, the United States faces enemies that are “extremely competitive,” ranging from terrorists to “high-end opponents.” Facing such a broad range of adversaries, foreign policy elites have tried to assess how seriously to treat each, weighing whether current and potential enemies can significantly weaken the United States’ hold over the world. For the most part, they agree on the issue of terrorism. Although American leaders regularly denounce terrorism as the modern world’s greatest plague, most don’t see it as a major challenge. Last November, former State Department official Daniel Serwer warned, “We shouldn’t blow up terrorism into an existential threat. It’s not.” A month later, Obama agreed that ISIS and other groups stand no real chance of defeating the United States. “Today’s terrorists can kill innocent people,” Obama stated, “but they don’t pose an existential threat to our nation.” Instead, officials have grown more concerned about other challenges. Taking a more traditional view of the world, they have largely concluded that rising powers in the international system now pose the most serious threat to US hegemony. Early last year, Carter articulated this basic rationale, describing the latest trends as “a return, in some ways, to great power competition.” Without diminishing the US’s capacity to fight terrorism, he contended that the nation should prepare for new confrontations with Russia and China. These countries, he argued, “are our most stressing competitors, as they’ve both developed and are continuing to advance military systems that threaten our advantages in specific areas.” Throughout Washington, many officials are worried that China will replace the United States as the dominant power in the Pacific. Last June, Brennan delivered this warning: “China is a growing power of great economic, political, and increasingly military influence and presence.” China, he noted, has continued expanding its presence in the South China Sea, an area American officials have identified as a strategically important transit route. “There is a reason for the United States to pay attention to what China is doing on a number of fronts, which we are,” Brennan said. A few months later, two high-level officials put the matter more directly. Appearing before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Secretary of Defense Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford claimed that the United States and China are now arrayed against each other. Alabama senator Tom Cotton asked, “Gen. Dunford, are we in great-power competition with China?” “We are, senator,” Dunford replied. Carter agreed, saying, “absolutely right.” In early January, Secretary of State John Kerry even suggested that China would eventually surpass the United States as the world’s leading economic power. “We’re the most powerful country on the planet, yes, and we’re the biggest economy in the world, yes,” Kerry stated. “But China will be eventually just by virtue of its size.” Nevertheless, US officials have also expressed certitude about their ability to deal with China. While they may identify China as a great-power competitor that is destined to grow more powerful, they have also argued the US maintains the upper hand in bilateral relations. In July 2016, Vice President Joe Biden provided one example. He recounted that after the Chinese government had tried to create an air defense identification zone over disputed territory in the East China Sea, the United States had asserted its dominance. According to Biden, President Xi had asked him, “What do you expect me to do?” In response, Biden had said, “I don’t expect you to do much, but just so you know, we’re flying B-52s through it. We’re coming.” In other words, Biden told the Chinese president that regardless of any newly declared air rights, the United States would continue to use that area. Since then, officials have only grown more confident in their capacity to manage China. Kerry himself bragged last September that China has not been able to alter the strategic calculus in the South China Sea. “In the South China Sea, we have been able to make it clear, freedom of navigation,” Kerry commented. “We’ve been able to deal with China.” In fact, the United States has maintained the dominant position throughout the entire Asia Pacific area. The United States “is the strongest military and the power of the region and will remain so for a long time,” Carter said last December. Officials in the Trump administration have indicated they may use that military power to confront China. In January, Rex Tillerson said during his confirmation hearing for secretary of state that the US will no longer tolerate China’s attempts to gain control of the South China Sea. “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed,” Tillerson said. In short, US officials are relatively unperturbed by China’s power. Although they still fear that China may one day emerge to challenge American hegemony, they have largely ensured that China will remain a secondary power in the region for the immediate future. Russia: A Closer Look Meanwhile, state officials face another significant challenge to their plans: Russia. Last June, Brennan captured their trepidation in a statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: “Russia is threatening its neighbors and aggressively reasserting itself on the global stage,” he stated. The following month, diplomat Alexander Vershbow provided a more direct assessment, explaining that the United States and Russia are once again competing for influence in Europe. “We now sadly recognize that we’re in a long — what I’d call a long-term strategic competition with Russia,” Vershbow said. Earlier this year, Mattis issued the strongest warning, saying that Russia represented the main hazard to the world order. “I would consider the principal threats to start with Russia,” Mattis said. At the same time, US officials assert that the rivalry with Russia remains largely one-sided. While they see Russia as a competitor, they simultaneously insist that the country has much less power than the United States. In April 2016, US ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute argued that Russia — not the United States — has entered a period of declension. “There’s a sense that, yes, there’s a new, more assertive, maybe even more aggressive Russia,” he explained, “but fundamentally Russia is a state in decline.” A few months later, Defense Department official Elissa Slotkin made a similar argument. The Russians are “acting from a position of weakness,” she stated, before going on to note that the Kremlin faces many constraints. “I think the combination of the economic sanctions after Crimea and Eastern Ukraine plus the low price of oil has really hurt them,” she said. The United States should not “overestimate the competitor,” she continued, suggesting that her predecessors had done just that with the Soviet Union. The Russians “are not unbeatable,” she insisted. “They are not operating from a position of strength.” The highest ranking officials in the Obama administration shared her view. This past October, Secretary of State John Kerry said that very little about Russia scared him. “I don’t sit around quaking about Russia,” Kerry commented. Obama also waved away the notion that Russia posed a serious challenge, even after allegations of election interference surfaced. “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us,” he stated. “They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country.” Essentially, foreign policy elites seem content in the knowledge that while Russia has emerged as a competitor on a variety of issues, it is acting from a position of weakness. As former US ambassador to Russia William Burns noted earlier this year, “I’ve learned that we have a much better hand to play with Mr. Putin than he does with us.”

Once upon a time in America, we could all argue about whether or not US global power was declining. Now, most observers have little doubt that the end is just a matter of timing and circumstance. Ten years ago, I  that, by 2025, it would be all over for American power, a then-controversial comment that’s commonplace today. Under President Donald Trump, the  that won World War II and built a new world order has become dispensable indeed. The decline and fall of American global power is, of course, nothing special in the great sweep of history. After all, in the 4,000 years since humanity’s first empire formed in the Fertile Crescent, at least  have risen, collided with other imperial powers, and in time collapsed. In the past century alone, two dozen modern imperial states have fallen and the world has managed just fine in the wake of their demise. The global order didn’t blink when the sprawling Soviet empire imploded in 1991, freeing its 15 “republics” and seven “satellites” to become 22 newly capitalist nations. Washington took that epochal event largely in stride. There were no triumphal demonstrations, in the tradition of ancient Rome, with manacled Russian captives and their plundered treasures paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, a Manhattan real-estate developer bought a 20-foot  of the Berlin Wall for display near Madison Avenue, a sight barely noticed by busy shoppers. For those trying to track global trends for the next decade or two, the real question is not the fate of American global hegemony, but the future of the world order it began building at the peak of its power, not in 1991, but right after World War II. For the past 75 years, Washington’s global dominion has rested on a “.” The raw realpolitik of US military bases, multinational corporations, CIA coups, and foreign military interventions has been balanced, even softened, by a surprisingly liberal world order—with sovereign states meeting as equals at the United Nations, an international rule of law that muted armed conflict, a World Health Organization that actually eradicated epidemic diseases which had plagued humanity for generations, and a developmental effort led by the World Bank  40% of humanity out of poverty. Some observers remain supremely confident that Washington’s world order can survive the inexorable erosion of its global power. Princeton political scientist G. John Ikenberry, for example, has essentially staked his reputation on that debatable proposition. As US decline first became apparent in 2011, he  that Washington’s ability to shape world politics would diminish, but “the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” preserving its core elements of multilateral governance, free trade, and human rights. Seven years later, amid a rise of anti-global nationalists across significant parts of the planet, he remains  that the American-made world order will endure because international issues such as climate change make its “protean vision of interdependence and cooperation… more important as the century unfolds.” This sense of guarded optimism is widely shared among foreign-policy elites in the New York-Washington corridor of power. The president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, has typically  that the “post-Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis.” Through deft diplomacy, Washington could still save the planet from “deeper disarray” or even “trends that spell catastrophe.” But is it true that the decline of the planet’s “sole superpower” (as it was once known) will no more shake the present world order than the Soviet collapse once did? To explore what it takes to produce just such an implosion of a world order, it’s necessary to turn to history—to the history, in fact, of collapsing imperial orders and a changing planet. Admittedly, such analogies are always imperfect, yet what other guide to the future do we have but the past? Among its many lessons: that world orders are far more fundamental than we might imagine and that their uprooting requires a perfect storm of history’s most powerful forces. Indeed, the question of the moment should be: Is climate change now gathering sufficient destructive force to cripple Washington’s liberal world order and create an opening for Beijing’s decidedly illiberal one or possibly even a new world in which such orders will be unrecognizable? Despite the aura of awe-inspiring power they give off, empires have often been the ephemeral creations of an individual conqueror like Alexander the Great or Napoleon that fade fast after his death or defeat. World orders are, by contrast, far more deeply rooted. They are resilient global systems created by a convergence of economic, technological, and ideological forces. On the surface, they entail a diplomatic entente among nations, while at a deeper level they entwine themselves within the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. World orders influence the languages people speak, the laws they live by, and the ways they work, worship, and even play. World orders are woven into the fabric of civilization itself. To uproot them takes an extraordinary event or set of events, even a global catastrophe. Looking back over the last millennium, old orders die and new ones arise when a cataclysm, marked by mass death or a maelstrom of destruction, coincides with some slower yet sweeping social transformation. Since the age of European exploration started in the 15th century, some , large and small, have come and gone. In those same centuries, however, there have been only three major world orders—the Iberian age (1494–1805), the British imperial era (1815-1914), and the Washington world system (1945–2025). Such global orders are not the mere imaginings of historians trying, so many decades or centuries later, to impose some logic upon a chaotic past. Those three powers—Spain, Britain, and the United States—consciously tried to re-order their worlds for, they hoped, generations to come through formal agreements—the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and the San Francisco conference that drafted the UN charter in 1945. Should Beijing succeed Washington as the world’s preeminent power, future historians will likely look back on its Belt and Road Forum, which brought 130 nations to Beijing in 2017, as the formal start of the Chinese era.

Like many believers, proponents of hegemonic stability theory base their view on faith alone.41 There is precious little evidence to suggest that the United States is responsible for the pacific trends that have swept across the system. In fact, the world remained equally peaceful, relatively speaking, while the United States cut its forces throughout the 1990s, as well as while it doubled its military spending in the first decade of the new century.42 Complex statistical methods should not be needed to demonstrate that levels of U.S. military spending have been essentially unrelated to global stability.

Hegemonic stability theory’s flaws go way beyond the absence of simple correlations to support them, however. The theory’s supporters have never been able to explain adequately how precisely 5 percent of the world’s population could force peace on the other 95 percent, unless, of course, the rest of the world was simply not intent on fighting. Most states are quite free to go to war without U.S. involvement but choose not to. The United States can be counted on, especially after Iraq, to steer well clear of most civil wars and ethnic conflicts. It took years, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the use of chemical weapons to spur even limited interest in the events in Syria, for example; surely internal violence in, say, most of Africa would be unlikely to attract serious attention of the world’s policeman, much less intervention. The continent is, nevertheless, more peaceful today than at any other time in its history, something for which U.S. hegemony cannot take credit.43 Stability exists today in many such places to which U.S. hegemony simply does not extend.

We started this article asking whether the costs of a Taiwanese invasion would be worth it to China. All things considered, I believe the answer is no. My reasoning is based on military/strategic and economic factors.

If Beijing ever gave orders to invade, the PLA would obviously aim for a blitzkrieg-type attack, overwhelming the island before the US could mount a defense. Note this is the same strategy that Putin attempted in Ukraine, with disastrous results. One year in, Russia is no closer to victory.

All that said, the actual risk of imminent Chinese military action against Taiwan remains low. Beijing always flexes military muscle when highest-level U.S. and Taiwanese officials meet face to face. Yet, though Speaker McCarthy’s visit with Taiwan’s president marks the highest-level U.S.-Taiwan meeting on US soil since 1979, China’s latest response was less militarily threatening than its reaction to last summer’s visit to Taiwan by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi – and Beijing is well aware that Washington will notice that.

More importantly, Xi is spending considerable energy these days on playing a larger role on the global stage, particularly as a peacemaker. He has offered a 12-point peace plan for Ukraine he hopes will encourage others to see China as a global mediator, even if this particular plan has no chance of success. This past weekend, Xi welcomed French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission Chairman Ursula Von der Leyen to Beijing for discussion of the Ukraine war and the future of China’s relations with Europe more broadly. Though Xi didn’t promise his European guests to lean harder on Russia, the Chinese and French governments issued a joint statement pledging they would work together to bring Russian and Ukrainian negotiators to the bargaining table.

The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, surveys international relations (IR) scholars at U.S. colleges and universities on some of the most important foreign-policy issues facing the United States. The latest survey took place between October 2022 and this January, and the results reported below are based on answers from the 979 respondents who participated in the survey. (Complete results can be found here.)

Despite recent escalatory rhetoric and behavior, the survey’s respondents believe the chances of a Chinese attack on Taiwan or a war between the United States and China remain low. Furthermore, the experts’ estimates of the likelihood of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait have not increased much in the last year. Nonetheless, if China did attack Taiwan, IR scholars support a few strong U.S. policy responses, including sanctions, increased military supplies to Taiwan, cyberattacks against Chinese assets, and increased U.S. troop deployment to the region.

However, seven months earlier in March 2022 during the annual “Two Sessions,” namely the simultaneous convening of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), Taiwan was mentioned only briefly, in reference to the “one China” policy.

Both in the government work report presented by the outgoing Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to the NPC on March 5 and in the CPPCC work report presented by its chairman Wang Yang the previous day, the Taiwan issue, including unification, was downplayed in a surprisingly uncharacteristic manner. This deemphasizing was particularly significant when viewed in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which had started just a week before the convening of the Two Sessions.

Chinese officials are highly conscious of the geopolitical advantage they derive from their REE dominance. The 2010 incident over REE shipments to Japan was a wake-up call to import-dependent customers. Almost a decade later in 2019, threats of restricted supply returned.[65] Xi’s visit to a REE magnet production facility in Ganzhou in 2019 was widely regarded as a sign that restricting REE supply is on the table.[66] A week later, the People’s Daily posted an article explicitly threatening that if “the U.S. side wants to use the products made by China’s exported rare earths to counter and suppress China’s development,” the U.S. should not “underestimate the Chinese side’s ability to safeguard its development rights and interests.”[67] The more recent MIIT draft controls list proposed in January 2021 also suggests that international policy responses significantly influence Chinese domestic policies toward rare earths.[68] Officials in Beijing are particularly focused on how quickly the U.S. would secure alternatives if REE were included on the control list.

Therein lies a paradox: China’s state-supported rare earth enterprises remain at the behest of international market dynamics. Overburdening policy changes and perceived supply insecurity would push buyers away from Chinese suppliers. Any restrictive moves would likely spur proactive value chain restructuring away from Chinese REE. Therefore, Chinese officials would be unlikely to directly restrict trade for political reasons and calls for such are primarily just sword rattling to disguise domestic policies and production controls that bear a more long-term effect on supply coming out of China.

Demand signals for rare earths are projected to rise as the world electrifies with machines that require highly specialized rare earth magnets.

According to a report by independent research firm Adamas Intelligence, the global demand for rare earth oxides is forecasted to triple from $15 billion in 2022 to $46 billion in 2035.

Rare earth elements have reemerged in the news as U.S. anxieties over economic interdependence with China grow. New revelations about social and environmental violence in supply chains, most recently in Myanmar, surface under headlines that have circulated since 2009. They often suggest that rare earth elements are only used for green energy and, thus, that green energy is solely responsible for the devastation wrought by rare earth mining.

Over the past decade, this narrative has profoundly shaped the debate around renewable energy infrastructure and our prospects for mitigating the climate emergency in line with Paris climate goals or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines. At the same time, massive efforts are underway globally to diversify rare earth supply chains and movements against green colonialism accelerate apace with movements to remove regulatory checks on industry and fast-track mining operations. The debate over where and how the rare earth mining and refining industry is built outside of China is contentious and polarizing, but the intensity of the debate is a sign of progress. We are now confronting the tough questions around mineral acquisition, no longer content to merely decry the injustice of offshoring environmental harm. To reach a brighter, greener future, communities in the Global North are exploring what it means to be more responsible for their mineral needs.

Finally, the intense debate around where to open new mines can create the impression that mining is the only option. This is another major blind spot. Yes, the data for the renewable energy transition and building a circular economy indicates that mining must be part of any pathway forward, but it should be second to recycling and reduced wastefulness. Mining in a climate-smart way requires care and democratic deliberation, not haste and authoritarianism. This requires more time than the climate emergency would seem to allow, but we can buy ourselves greater resource security as well as some more time and space to think carefully about mining in socially and environmentally responsible ways if we instead focus on dramatically and immediately scaling up recycling rare earths from electronic waste and current mine tailings. Yes, these are complex and costly propositions, but so too is mining. The difference is that rare earth rich “waste” is abundant; places that can be mined without major climate compromise are not.

One solution for the West is to improve and develop technologies that require fewer rare earths, to better shrink any dependence on China. For example, Tesla recently announced that its next-generation motors will use rare earths-free magnets, although technical details are sparse.

Some industry analysts believe that Tesla’s move will have minimal effect on the market for neodymium and dysprosium, the key rare earths in the most common EV magnets. But Stan Trout, founder of the rare earths and magnetic materials consultancy Spontaneous Materials, thinks that Tesla’s decision can lead to ripple effects.

MOUNTAIN PASS, California — From the smartphone in your pocket to magnets powering a growing number of electric vehicles on the road, rare earth elements are the foundational components for some of the most commonly used technologies today.

But over the last three decades, Beijing has held an iron grip on the world’s supply chain for rare earth elements such that nearly all materials — no matter where in the world they are mined — travel to China for refinement before they can be used in technologies.

Over 20 years ago, two geologists made a stark prediction in Scientific American: “Probably within 10 years,” they wrote, “global production of conventional oil will begin to decline.” This argument, which became known as “peak oil,” captured public attention for well over a decade, sparking worries that abundant reserves of oil would give way to scarcity, runs on gas stations and sky-high inflation.

Peak oil, however, never came to pass. U.S. oil production increased far beyond the peak oil predictions, thanks to the increased use of “fracking” and other production methods. The term faded out of use, and concerns about oil shifted from a fear of running out of oil to fears of runaway global warming.

In the spring of 2022, the competent financial managers at Russia’s central bank and finance ministry, forced to deal with unprecedented Western sanctions and a capital flight at almost three times the 2021 rate, drove down the exchange rate with temporary capital controls. An even bigger help was a jump in energy prices caused by Europe’s war-driven fears of a cold winter. Russia reaped its benefits until the actual cold season, which showed Europe could survive almost without Russian gas and with much less Russian oil than it had been using. The second quarter of 2022 saw the third highest exports since 1994, when the central bank started publishing trade balance statistics, but only the 60th highest imports: The massive sanctions hit left Russia’s private and state-owned companies struggling to keep their supply chains going.

Since that first shock, energy prices stabilized and a $60 price cap on Russian oil supplies came into force in December. Russia has found ways to keep oil exports stable and even increase seaborne deliveries despite a Western embargo: More than 70% of Russian crude supplies now go to India and China, compared with less than 20% before the invasion. But the price cap has weakened Russia’s negotiating position in Asia, and the fears of a fuel crisis have subsided. At the same time, exporters found ways to bypass the sanctions, switching to suppliers in China and South Asia and moving Western goods via Turkey and some former Soviet republics. In the first quarter of 2023, Russia’s balance of goods and services trade shrank to $22.6 billion from $91.4 billion in the second quarter of 2022.

The rupture of the Russian Federation will be the third phase of imperial collapse after the unravelling of the Soviet bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. It’s driven by elite power struggles and intensifying rivalries between the central government and disaffected regions, which in some parts of the country, could lead to civil wars and border disputes. However, it will also embolden the emergence of new states and inter-regional federations, which will control their own resources and no longer send their men to die for Moscow’s empire.

As Moscow turns inward, its capacity for foreign aggression will diminish. And as a rump state, under intense international sanctions and shorn of its resource base in Siberia, it will have severely reduced capabilities to attack neighbors. From the Arctic to the Black Sea, NATO’s eastern front will become more secure; while Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova will regain their occupied territories, and petition for European Union and NATO integration without fear of Russia’s reaction.