Photograph Source: Peggy Greb, US department of agriculture – Public Domain
China may have paused its rare earth ban in November, but such a sanction remains a sword of Damocles over U.S. arms manufacturers. Nor is it China’s only high-tech weapon. Quite apart from its ability to tank the U.S. economy by – first step – ditching U.S. debt, Beijing can easily overcome Washington in three technological arenas: rare earths, jamming Starlink, which is so critical on any western battlefield, and, as geo-political researcher Brian Berletic has convincingly argued on X on January 15, by securing its and its allies’ information space. This trio of challenges has many implications, for instance: on January 12, the Trump regime slapped tariffs on anyone buying Iranian oil, so India stopped much of this trade pronto – but China picked up the slack and now purchases almost ALL Iranian oil. Is Beijing being tariffed by the geniuses in Washington? No way. It trades with Iran with impunity and not in dollars, because at the first whiff of trouble from the U.S., the 5000-year-old civilization can slam export controls back on Gallium, Germanium, Graphite, Antinomy and other rare earths and bingo! It zaps most American weapons production to a halt.
How can China do this? Because it’s home to 60 percent of the world’s rare earths, and the other 40 percent are nearly inaccessible. Even more unassailably, 90 percent of all rare earth processing occurs in China. So Beijing literally sells Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other U.S. arms makers the materials, without which they cannot produce modern weapons. That includes radar, submarines, F-35s, drones and missiles. In short, China has American defense contractors by the throat and knows this very well.
And not just weapons producers. Electric vehicles, wind turbines, laptops, data centers, smart-phones and AI infrastructure like semi-conductors and data storage all depend on rare earths only available from China. So if Donald “Over 100 Percent Tariffs on China” Trump threatens Xi Jinping with astronomical costs, as he did in October, life in the U.S. that depends on modern, computerized conveniences pretty much grinds to a halt. This is not news. It was reported in this space in July 2023. That’s when Joe “Bully Beijing” Biden so offended the Chinese nation that for the first time ever it announced export controls on Germanium and Gallium. It’s reassuring to know that Washington finally got the message, and we American consumers can still purchase laptops.
But it wasn’t easy, since our rulers are pretty dense when it comes to recognizing that anyone besides them has power. In 2025, it took China restricting such rare earths as Samarium, Lutetium, Terbium, Gadolinium, Dysprosium, Yttrium, Scandium, Holmium, Thulium, Erbium, Ytterbium and Europium for white house dunces to realize there was a gun to their heads. Back then, China said dual use (civilian/military) products required export controls. Beltway bigwigs woke up with a start: Washington no longer cornered the market on crippling international economic sanctions. And the rest is history.
But just because Beijing paused its rare earth export controls doesn’t mean anyone there’s asleep at the switch. Look at what’s going on with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which is absolutely vital to western wars and which relies on low earth orbit satellites for streaming and communications in essential spots like battlefields. Like in Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan. The Russkies figured out how to jam Starlink in Ukraine, while Chinese researches simulated “large scale electronic warfare against Elon Musk’s Starlink…jamming [it] across an area matching Taiwan,” according to 9Dashline on X on November 26.
Then came the idiotic Sturm und Drang over Iran, the week of January 15 – would the nitwits in the white house bomb the Persian Empire or no? They backed off for multiple reasons: Tehran has long-range missiles galore, very effective Russian and Chinese Air Defense, the capacity to put large holes in American navy ships and a clear shot at numerous U.S. military bases in the region, to say nothing of its ability to obliterate the postage-stamp-sized acreage of Israel. Also, it was reported on X that Moscow and Beijing showed Tehran how to zap the 40,000 Starlink terminals that the western Empire had smuggled into Iran, namely by totally blacking out the internet, so those terminals lit up like Christmas trees. Without Starlink, the Iranians began capturing the 1000s of commandos who’d infiltrated from Kurdistan, and the regime change op collapsed.
The third big technological field on which China has outplayed the U.S. Empire is securing its information space. This is a stupendous block against CIA-backed coups, regime change efforts and color revolutions, and both China and Russia have outstripped everyone else in the multipolar world in this regard. So they have blazed a trail that any non-U.S.-puppet government interested in survival must follow – looking at you, Iran and Brazil, just for starters. “Throughout the 21st century,” wrote Brian Berletic on X January 15, “the U.S. has deliberately and maliciously weaponized its domination over global information space, specifically through U.S.-based social media platforms like X (formerly twitter), Meta/Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram and many others.” But China and Russia, over years and with hard work, “secured their respective information space. This has – in turn – allowed both nations to secure and stabilize their political space, providing the social harmony required to not only survive ongoing attempts by the U.S. to encircle an contain both global powers, but in many instances to thrive.”
Berletic argues that China and Russia accomplished this by creating “domestic alternatives to the U.S.-based social media platforms.” They have “online networks that can be disconnected from Western-influenced information space when and if necessary.” And now, apparently, they have helped Iran achieve this, too, though unlike China and Russia, it probably has not yet created a reservoir of technicians and programmers “to maintain the physical infrastructure of this information space,” experts who are patriotic and trained in-country. Berletic compares all this to any sovereign nation’s physical infrastructure. He concludes that any country that surrenders this key aspect of national security to the U.S. pays the price of “political infiltration, capture and even complete collapse,” and urges Russia and China to export “turnkey domestic alternatives to U.S. social media platforms, physical infrastructure and gateways as well as electronic warfare equipment” for use against such assaults as the recent U.S. fiasco vis a vis Iran.
These three developments – with rare earths, Starlink and securing the information space – signify a crossroads for the western Empire. It can continue to hurl its bombs, artillery and other assets futilely against the multipolar powers that have achieved independence and, if it does, face devastating consequences, such as the massive battlefield losses in Ukraine, the aborted Iran assault and disrupted supply chains for U.S. defense contractors, disruptions that will in short order cripple American weapons making. Or the U.S., the European Union and other vassals like Australia, Canada, South Korea and Japan can accommodate the unbeatable new powers and relax in the knowledge that, apparently, neither Russia nor China nor Russia/China aspires to be a global hegemon. They appear content to rule in their immediate neighborhood. But of course, accepting that means that the U.S., too, must abandon the hallucination of global hegemony. Are the psychopaths in Washinton up to this task – or does it take reality, as it already has done in a small way, to smack them in the face in a much bigger way? I, for one, have no idea. You pick.
