America Urgently Needs to Bring Vital Supply Chains Home
The Trump administration's emphasis on making America self-sufficient in terms of critical products and industries is essential to prevent economic and military adversaries —China foremost — from weaponizing those dependencies against us.
Key among these current U.S. vulnerabilities are self-inflicted shortages of rare earth minerals used in advanced commercial and national defense industries, and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) used in generic drugs and biological products.
China Maintains a Rare Earth Chokehold
Regardless how current Washington-Beijing trade disputes conclude, their suspension of U.S. rare earth mineral and magnet exports used by auto manufacturers and military contractors should serve as a salient reminder that China similarly halted rare earth exports to Japan amid rising tensions in 2010.
Meanwhile, China’s Ministry of Commerce has also issued restrictions prohibiting rare earth exports to other countries including Germany, additionally prohibiting Chinese businesses from any engagement with U.S. firms, especially defense contractors.
As reported in The New York Times, although China has purportedly claimed to be temporarily delaying exports to provide time to create a new regulatory system requiring special export licenses, it could permanently stop exports "to certain companies, including U.S. military contractors."
Although China reportedly has barely begun on its new system, the process if drawn out could cause global supplies to dwindle, given its 90% monopoly on the world's supply of heavy rare earth metals and magnets.
Of special military concern are supply chain impacts on drones and robotics widely regarded as critical to the future of warfare.
Although America has an abundance of untapped rare earths, environmental opposition to mining them has resulted in a regulatory minefield of local, state, and federal rules that has turned permitting into a costly decadeslong process.
Consequentially, whereas China actually possesses only about an estimated one-third of global rare earth reserves, in 2017 it supplied 78% of the 17,000 tons of those materials imported to the U.S.
Until recently, the only remaining active U.S. rare earth mine, Mountain Pass in California, sent its materials to China for processing.
Immediately upon returning to office, President Trump signed an executive order to make the U.S. "the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals, including rare earth minerals."
Recognizing continued dependence on hostile foreign powers for critical materials won't end well for America, President Trump is also looking for additional friendly foreign sources, including Ukraine and Greenland, with Time reporting that Big Tech, inclusive of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have already invested in Arctic prospecting there.
Eliminating Pharmaceutical Dependence
The Trump administration argues that strong China trade tariffs are necessary to bring pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the U.S., which it classifies as "a matter of national security."
China has become the world’s factory for pharmaceutical raw materials, commanding a reported 20% share of global API production by volume, with approximately 40% of APIs exported worldwide extending across virtually all major therapeutic categories.
A report by API company Exiger titled "A Bitter Pill: America’s Dangerous Dependence on China-Made Pharmaceuticals" warns that China’s dominance puts American patients at risk of getting low-quality medication. . . or none at all
Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels told FOX Business, "We were very worried about the fact that after the pandemic, the strategic national stockpiling efforts and the sort of restoring, you know, United States independence when it came to both pharmaceuticals and medical devices had sort of lost its tailwinds."
According to Exiger, the U.S. currently imports 75% of its essential medicines, with most of them coming from China and India.
And while India produces about half of the generic drugs the U.S. imports, it relies heavily on China for 80% of its active pharmaceutical ingredients contained in more than 500 generic drugs including treatments for diabetes and heart conditions as well as antibiotics.
Daniels also points to drug quality safety hazards at many Chinese pharmaceutical sites which use forced labor with people literally walking around without shoes on in dirty facilities.
He also referenced an incident in which shipments of a medication contained hydrogen cyanide.
Last year, Food and Drug Administration inspectors issued a damning indictment of Chinese company Sichuan Deebio’s main production facility, which not only lacked basic quality control measures but also featured a leadership team that systematically misled safety investigators over the course of their review.
Meanwhile, Chinese firms scoop up personal information through a combination of overt and covert means.
For example, BGI, a major Chinese biotech operating a large-scale genomic biobank, a close partner with the People’s Liberation Army, also partnered with American institutions in a likely attempt to collect global genomic data streams for Chinese government use.
Making matters worse, Chinese national security law frequently compels businesses to share data with the government, creating a pre-existing backdoor to security and privacy nightmares.
On April 1, according to a Federal Register notice, the Trump Department of Commerce launched an investigation of the national security implications and medical countermeasures of pharmaceutical imports.
Reducing supply chain dependence on our country’s greatest geopolitical adversary for our most vital products and industries must be a top priority using all means possible, including domestic regulatory relief, homeshoring tax incentives, and export tariffs with stiff penalties on trade sanction violators.
Bitter economic pills now are far preferable to costly or futile emergency care later if we fail to heed urgent warnings.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.