It was the flamboyant and narcissistic Oscar Wilde who said that there’s only one thing worse in all the world than being talked about — which is not being talked about.
But it might just as well have been Xi Jinping.
I say this because nobody is talking about the Communist Chinese dictator these days. Instead, everybody’s talking about Donald Trump. And for a guy whose country is hell-bent on replacing the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower, this isn’t a good thing.
Which is why, late last week, Xi acted out in a fashion more befitting the attention-seeking little Rocket Man on the Korean peninsula. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “China tightened its control over sectors crucial to making high-tech products including electric vehicles and jet fighters, threatening to reignite trade tensions with the U.S. ahead of an expected meeting between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”
Specifically, China’s Commerce Ministry said that other nations “must obtain approval from Beijing to export some products with certain rare-earth materials originating from China if they account for 0.1% or more of the good’s total value.”
It was an outrageous bit of international bullying, and it roiled the international markets, at least temporarily. It also got the immediate attention of The Leader of the Free World™, who accused China of trying to “hold the world captive” and called the action “a rather sinister and hostile move, to say the least.” Trump then banged out a hard Truth:
It has just been learned that China has taken an extraordinarily aggressive position on Trade in sending an extremely hostile letter to the World, stating that they were going to, effective November 1st, 2025, impose large scale Export Controls on virtually every product they make, and some not even made by them. … It is absolutely unheard of in International Trade, and a moral disgrace in dealing with other Nations.
Based on the fact that China has taken this unprecedented position, and speaking only for the U.S.A. … the United States of America will impose a Tariff of 100% on China, over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying. Also on November 1st, we will impose Export Controls on any and all critical software.
It didn’t take long for the ChiComs to realize that they’d overplayed their hand, and they quickly began to walk back their earlier bluster. “We do not want a tariff war,” said China’s Commerce Ministry in response, “but we are not afraid of one.”
Uh-huh. China is deathly afraid of a tariff war with the U.S. because everybody knows that the surplus country suffers the worst in a trade war. The ministry also encouraged Trump to address differences “through dialogue,” calling his tariff threats “not the correct way to get along with China.”
Vice President JD Vance called out the ChiComs on Fox News yesterday. “It’s going to be a delicate dance and a lot of it is going to depend on how the Chinese respond,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “If they respond in a highly aggressive manner, I guarantee you the president of the United States has far more cards than the People’s Republic of China.”
A few months back, I noted that China has practically cornered the market on rare earth materials and now controls somewhere between 60% and 90% of the globe’s mined and processed rare earths. This puts us over a strategic barrel because these materials underpin our modern world through the manufacture of everything from consumer electronics to medical equipment to jet engines to missiles and radar systems.
Perhaps even more important, these materials are an essential ingredient in Artificial Intelligence. “It’s an economic equivalent of nuclear war,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank, “an intent to destroy the American AI industry.” Alperovitch also called it a “blackmail tactic.”
The term “rare earths,” though, is something of a misnomer. They aren’t exactly rare; it’s just that we’ve allowed their production to be farmed out to our nation’s number one geopolitical foe. This is why the U.S. has begun to build its own rare earths supply chain — no thanks to the prior American administration — at an industrial site in Texas. There, a company called MP Materials is doing the necessary work. “MP has invested more than $1 billion in new infrastructure and equipment,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “A mine it controls in California has become the largest source of rare-earth minerals in the Western Hemisphere. Now, with its expanding Texas facility and fresh investment from the Pentagon, the company is racing to complete the supply chain so it can start converting large quantities of its minerals into high-grade magnets.”
Recently, MP announced a $500 million deal with Apple to supply the tech colossus with rare earth magnets made from recycled materials.
In any case, Donald Trump gave Xi Jinping the necessary off-ramp in a subsequent post. “Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine!” Trump Truthed.
And then he gave the Chinese leader a little pat on the head: “Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!!”
Perhaps all this is merely Chinese checkers, i.e. Beijing’s attempt to work the refs and flex its muscles ahead of an upcoming trade meeting — a meeting now on hold — between Xi and Trump in South Korea.
Regardless, though, it’s pretty clear that they, er, fooled around with Trump, and promptly found out it was a bad idea.
