The Rare Earth Trap: How China Outmaneuvered the Entire Western Defense Industry

In 1992, China’s political leader Deng Xiaoping made a comparison that should’ve set off alarms across the West: “There is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in China.” Instead, for the next 30 years, Western governments largely treated rare earth processing as low-value work — something they could hand off to whoever would do it cheapest. But then REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) came along with partners and started building domestic processing capability while most of the industry was still looking the other way.…