“China has already won the materials war.”

Andrew Barron, one of the top materials experts on the planet, didn’t mince words when I interviewed him for a documentary on the dangers of our civilization’s dependency on China’s quasi-monopoly of rare earth minerals. If the world does not stop depending on China’s supply of rare earths, he warned two years ago, we could face an economic collapse in just a few decades.

It sounds like a dystopian sci-fi movie, but this potentially catastrophic scenario began this week for the United States, when Xi Jinping’s government issued an immediate suspension of rare earth mineral and magnet exports, retaliating against President Trump’s trade policies.

This isn’t just a supply chain hiccup—it’s a geopolitical detonation with direct consequences to the economy and all of our lives. China controls 69% of global rare earth mining and a staggering 85–90% of refining and processing, the complex alchemy that transforms raw ore into the materials that make absolutely everything that is crucial to our everyday lives, from your electric toothbrush to phone to computer to your electric car to the servers that make everything run. If it beeps, it depends on these minerals. And without China’s processing dominance, even minerals mined elsewhere are functionally useless.