Victor Davis Hanson lists many advantages US already has over China for critical rare earth materials

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson said Monday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” that the United States already has the oil production, coal, and nuclear energy it needs to not rely on China for rare earth minerals.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, China has significantly reduced its supply of critical minerals to the U.S. in recent months. While discussing how the U.S. industrial sector has long depended on China, Fox’s Laura Ingraham asked Hanson how important it is for America’s “future and independence” to take “leverage back” from China.

“It’s very important, and we can do it very easily. This was all done by design, not by accident or fate. We have plentiful rare earth materials in California, Wyoming. We just opened a mine in Montana,” Hanson said. “We produce twice the nuclear energy that China does.”

“We have three times the production of oil, three times or four times the production of gas. They brag about their coal plants. We have twice the coal reserves that China does, and we’re the leading producer of nuclear energy,” Hanson added. “They’re dependent on everything, and we’re really, if we wanted to, to be dependent on nothing. We’re autonomous. We could be self-sufficient in all of our natural resources.”

WATCH:

A group of 17 metallic elements known as rare earth minerals has become essential to the production of vehicles, weapons systems, wind turbines, smartphones, medical devices, and other advanced technologies. With the U.S. importing 80% of the rare minerals it uses — primarily from China — the Pentagon has required defense companies to wean off Chinese-sourced materials by 2027.

Hanson went on to say how China’s actions could cause a backlash on the country’s foreign exchange students studying in the U.S.

“We don’t need to have 300,000 Chinese students here in the United States, and a lot of them deprive opportunities of Americans from the heartland,” Hanson said. “There’s no reason we have to have this enormous investment in China.”

“It’s just a choice we’ve made for our corporate class, and our investor class found it very profitable to build up China, and the result is we’re not self-sufficient and we’re vulnerable, and we could easily rectify it if we made some changes at the very top,” Hanson said.

Effects from China shorting the U.S. on rare earth minerals have left defense industry leaders reportedly struggling to find alternative sources for critical materials, with some components seeing price increases by a factor of 60, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In July, the Department of Defense announced it would purchase $400 million in stock from MP Materials, a company operating a rare earth minerals mine in the U.S.

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