Better in their words…

There is no such thing as a ‘free lunch’. The US needs to become self-sufficient in critical materials, period. mrossol.

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE
JUN 1, 2026

Every era gets the slogan it deserves. Ours, apparently, is :
“Great Powers 2.0.”
If you have not run across the phrase yet, you will. It is shorthand for a now-fashionable claim: that the long post-Cold War experiment in open markets and rules-based cooperation is finished, and that the world has reverted to an older, harder logic of rival great powers fighting over territory, technology, and above all raw materials. The United States, China, and Russia are said to be circling one another again, and the new currency of power is not just armies but supply chains, rare earth elements, and the chokepoints that connect them.
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This is the story that the current administration is telling itself, and it is being used to rewrite American policy and reorder the economy, and it deserves to be examined before we sign on to everything done in its name.
Where the slogan came from
The initial aspect to observe is the highly commercial nature of the branding. The original phrase “Great Powers Era 2.0” was popularized in early 2026 by Rare Earth Exchanges, a critical-minerals industry outlet that openly claims to have coined it. That is not a knock on the underlying idea, but it should set the right expectation. An organization that profits from elevating the strategic importance of minerals in the world order then coins a phrase that promotes minerals as the master key to world order. Branding is a business.
The deeper idea is genuinely old, and the “2.0” is mostly marketing. The phrase “Great power” goes back to the Concert of Europe after 1815. The modern “return of great power competition” has been a fixture of American defense documents since 2017 and 2018, developed by serious scholars long before anyone thought to attach a software version number to it. The new slogan dresses up a decade-old thesis in fresh clothes, and adds a resource-and-supply-chain spin that happens to suit the people selling the slogan.
It is also worth noting that many serious analysts do not agree that the premise is even true. Read the Munich Security Conference, and you will find no consensus on whether the world today is unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, or on which countries count as poles at all. One school argues that America remains dominant and that “multipolarity” talk mistakes potential for realized power. A more pointed critique holds that “the return of great power competition” is partly a way for Washington to describe its own relative decline. The point is not that the slogan is wrong. The point is that it is contested, and a contested idea treated as destiny is one to watch closely, because somebody always benefits from that treatment.

From slogan to policy
Slogans would be harmless if they stayed slogans. This one has become set in policy, mostly aimed at critical minerals, and the policy machine behind it all is large.
The reality is both real and uncomfortable. China controls roughly 70 percent of global rare earth mining and nearly 90 percent of rare earth refining and magnet manufacturing. In 2024, the United States produced about 1 percent of the world’s critical minerals, and Congress shut down the Bureau of Mines in 1996. 
The Biden administration talked extensively about the importance of critical minerals and supply-chain resilience, but its response largely consisted of subsidies, grants, and government planning while continuing to support a regulatory environment that makes opening new mines and processing facilities in America extraordinarily difficult. Washington cannot simultaneously declare rare earths a national-security priority and then allow permitting delays, lawsuits, and bureaucratic obstacles to block domestic production. 
When Beijing responded to American tariffs by restricting rare earth exports, it exposed just how dependent the American defense and technology base had become on China. A country that cannot source the magnets for its own fighter jets without permission from a strategic rival has a genuine problem, and pretending otherwise is not realistic. It is denial.
The response from the Trump White House has been sweeping. In rapid succession, the administration rolled out a Section 232 national-security review of mineral imports, a 12-billion-dollar public-private stockpiling vehicle called Project Vault, and a new diplomatic bloc called FORGE, pitched as the successor to the Minerals Security Partnership. It signed bilateral mineral deals with Australia, Ukraine, Japan, Malaysia, and others. It floated minimum import prices, which is to say government-set price floors, to keep cheap Chinese material from undercutting Western miners.
These are big interventions, and they are exactly where the American right divides against itself. On one side are the America First conservatives, who view economic security, industrial capacity, and national sovereignty as inseparable. To them, rebuilding domestic manufacturing, securing critical supply chains, and reducing dependence on strategic rivals such as China are legitimate functions of government and long overdue acts of national self-preservation. 
On the other side are the country-club Republicans, old-school free-market conservatives, and traditional Chamber of Commerce Republicans who view such policies with deep suspicion. They see tariffs, industrial policy, and government-directed investment as market distortions that inevitably expand state power and invite political favoritism. 
To one camp, these measures are overdue statecraft, a country finally acting like it intends to survive. To the other, they are the state quietly seizing the commanding heights of the economy under the most elastic of political justifications. That split is the real argument beneath the slogan, and it is worth having out in the open. First, though, the part neither camp can wish away: the bill.
The bill comes due
The most underappreciated feature of Great Powers 2.0 is the one that shows up at the grocery store and the car lot, rather than in the foreign-policy section.
For roughly three decades, globalization was a quiet disinflationary engine. Bringing China and other low-cost producers into world trade pushed down the prices of manufactured goods year after year. While headline inflation hovered around 2 percent, goods prices were often flat or falling, and the cost of a television, a tool, or a toy drifted lower in real terms for an entire generation of American families. That benefit was real. 
So was its underbelly, the dark side of globalism, which the cheap-goods accounting always left out: the same decades hollowed out factory towns, broke up communities built around making things, and told a generation of workers that their livelihoods were an acceptable price for everyone else’s lower checkout total. The dividends went disproportionately to the bi-coastal capitals and to Beijing. A good deal of the loss landed on the American interior, the “flyover states.”
Great Powers 2.0 deliberately reverses many of the policies that drove globalization and lower consumer prices over the last several decades. The objective is to reduce dependence on strategic rivals by moving production, supply chains, and critical industries to politically reliable countries or back to the United States itself. The tradeoff is simple. Security costs more than efficiency. Producing goods domestically, maintaining excess industrial capacity, and sourcing from trusted partners instead of the cheapest supplier all raise costs. Higher prices are not a policy failure. They are the price of greater economic and national security.
So tariffs directly raise the cost of imported goods. Reshoring, the process of moving manufacturing and critical supply chains back to the United States from overseas, raises costs again because domestic production is often more expensive than production in lower-wage countries. In many cases, that is precisely why subsidies, tax incentives, and other government support are needed to make such investments economically viable. Domestic-content requirements, procurement preferences, and other policies designed to favor American production raise costs a third time, intentionally. The goal is not to maximize efficiency or minimize prices. The goal is to build a more secure and resilient industrial base.
Analysts have taken to calling the result “stagflation light,” a combination of slower growth and persistently higher prices, and the International Monetary Fund has trimmed its global growth forecasts accordingly. Central banks that once benefited from globalization’s downward pressure on prices may now find themselves keeping monetary policy tighter than they otherwise would.
The public deserves to be told plainly why costs have been increasing and why policymakers believe those costs are necessary for the nation’s long-term economic health. A government that won partly on the cost-of-living issue is pursuing a course whose near-term effect is to raise the cost of living in exchange for greater industrial capacity, economic independence, and national security. That can be a defensible trade. But Americans should not be told that prosperity can be built on dependence. For decades, the United States accepted lower prices in exchange for outsourcing production, surrendering industrial capacity, and becoming reliant on strategic competitors. The bill for that decision has now come due. The policies of Great Powers 2.0 are a strategy to pay for it.
The Great Divide on the Right
The most consequential debate over Great Powers 2.0 is not occurring between Democrats and Republicans. It is occurring within the American right. Both America First conservatives and traditional free-market Republicans recognize that dependence on China for critical goods, minerals, and manufacturing poses a serious strategic risk. The divide concerns what should be done about it. America First conservatives view tariffs, industrial policy, and strategic government intervention as necessary tools to restore American industrial strength. Traditional Republicans see many of those same tools as threats to economic freedom and limited government. In short, both camps agree on the vulnerability. They disagree on whether dependence on China or expansion of state power poses the greater long-term danger.
The populist-nationalist case
For America First, the stockpile is the whole point, and it is not really about money. A country that cannot forge its own magnets, fill its own prescriptions, or arm its own soldiers without a rival’s permission is not sovereign. It is a client. Cheap televisions are poor compensation for that kind of dependence, and the bill for those cheap televisions was never as low as the price tag suggested. The disinflation of the globalized decades was real, but so were the shuttered plants, the gutted towns, and the communities informed that their way of life was a rounding error in someone else’s efficiency calculation. The gains flowed to capital and to Beijing. Many of the losses landed on working Americans who were told to learn to code and get over it.
From this perspective, tariffs and reshoring are not simply taxes on consumers. They are an attempt to reverse decades of industrial decline and rebuild the productive capacity that once underpinned American prosperity, national security, and a strong middle class. Paying somewhat more for goods made by fellow Americans, in factories that cannot be shut down by a hostile government or disrupted by a foreign crisis, is viewed not as an unnecessary expense but as an investment in national resilience. The objective is not merely economic growth. It is economic independence.
Nor is the state’s role in this viewed as something to apologize for. Every major power uses policy to protect and develop industries it considers strategically important. China does it. Japan does it. South Korea does it. Even many European nations do it. The United States is unusual in having spent decades assuming that market forces alone would preserve its industrial strength, even as competitors used state-directed policies to build their own.
The Trump administration has fallen short in explaining this argument to the American people, including many of its own supporters. The public has been told that tariffs will strengthen America, but it has not been clearly told why prices may rise in the process. Rebuilding domestic manufacturing, restoring critical supply chains, and reducing dependence on China all carry costs. If the administration believes those costs are necessary to restore American industrial power, it should say so directly. Americans are more likely to accept a temporary sacrifice when they understand its purpose and can see the long-term national interest being served.
The libertarian case
The libertarian shares the worry about China but distrusts the cure more than the disease; that worry deserves a fair hearing, even from readers inclined to wave it off.
Tariffs and price floors are taxes that fall hardest on the very working families the Trump administration wants to lift, because lower-income households spend the largest share of their budgets on exactly the tradable goods that become more expensive. 
Then look at who collects. Subsidies and protected markets do not reliably build national strength. They reliably build lobbies. The firms that win tend to be the ones with the best lobbyists rather than the best mines, and “national security” is the most elastic phrase in Washington, expanding over the years from missiles to steel to sugar to whatever industry can afford the right consultant and lobbyist. History is unkind here: protection meant to be temporary and strategic has a habit of becoming permanent and political.
The deepest libertarian point is one that an America First advocate should not dismiss too quickly. Monopolies built on artificially low prices are fragile. The moment Beijing flexed its leverage, it summoned competitors, substitutes, and private capital that would, over time, erode its influence. The market is already moving. The real risk, on this view, is that a permanent industrial-policy apparatus, set up to meet an emergency, outlasts the emergency and quietly curdles into a racket that serves the connected rather than the country.
Where the two can meet
Notice that the camps are not actually arguing about the goal. Both want an America that cannot be strategically blackmailed. They are arguing about the means, and that argument has a workable middle.
Target the genuinely strategic and leave the rest alone. The case for guaranteeing a domestic supply of defense-grade magnets is strong. The case for protecting the national toaster industry behind a flag is not. Prefer the tools that grow capacity without permanently increasing the state. 
Those tools would include faster permitting, an end to the regulatory paralysis that makes it take a decade to open a mine, sound money, and an open door to allied and private capital. And put a clock on the interventions that cannot be avoided, so that subsidies and floors are emergency measures with sunset dates rather than entitlements with constituencies.
America First can champion strategic independence and still insist that the rebuilding be honest, time-limited, and aimed at the nation rather than at the well-connected. That is not a betrayal of the project. It is what keeps the project from being captured by the very interests it was meant to discipline.
What the timeline actually looks like
Strip away the urgency, and the realistic timeline is sobering for anyone hoping America “wins” the minerals race quickly.
By around 2028, expect very little to change at the structural level. Mines can be opened in a few years, but the hard part, refining rare earths and turning them into the magnets used in everything from fighter jets to electric motors, takes much longer to build. China also controls most of the technology and expertise needed for those processes. 
The one significant near-term change is a Pentagon rule that, beginning in 2027, prohibits the use of Chinese rare earths in many defense systems. That creates a guaranteed market for American producers, even if their products cost more. As a result, by 2028, the United States may have a small but secure domestic supply chain for military needs and a growing strategic stockpile. For most civilian industries, however, dependence on China is likely to remain largely unchanged.
By around 2032, if the subsidies and guaranteed demand hold for six straight years, a real parallel supply chain could mature for defense and some commercial uses. China’s pricing power would weaken at the margins. But Beijing would almost certainly still dominate refining and magnets, and it has a proven weapon: flood the market, crash prices, and bankrupt Western competitors before they reach scale. It did exactly that to lithium. Sustained American success, therefore, depends on sustained American resolve across multiple election cycles, which is a real question and not a rhetorical one. Hence, the 2028 election results are critical to this effort. 
The encouraging counterpoint is the libertarian’s, and it is worth holding alongside the rest. The very leverage Beijing flexed in 2025 is what woke the rest of the world up and set capital in motion. Private ventures, including mining startups backed by names like Bezos and Gates, are moving into the space because the prices now justify the risk. Some of the work of breaking the chokehold will be done by markets responding to those prices, not by Washington alone, and the cheapest thing the government can do is clear the permitting and regulatory underbrush so that capital can move faster than Beijing can retaliate.
Congo: where the story meets the world
If you want to see the limits of a worldview that treats resources as the master key to everything, look to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The DRC is the indispensable source of cobalt and a major supplier of copper, both essential to batteries and electronics. Washington, fully in Great Powers 2.0 mode, treated this as a geopolitical prize. It brokered a 2025 peace deal between the DRC and Rwanda explicitly tied to mineral access, signed a strategic partnership giving American firms preferential entry, and watched a billion-dollar private exploration deal follow. 
The trouble is that the peace has not held. Rwandan-backed M23 fighters kept advancing and seized the eastern cities of Goma and Bukavu. American sanctions on the Rwandan military were widely judged symbolic. Congolese citizens and lawyers, far from grateful, filed a constitutional challenge and voiced a familiar complaint about outsiders arriving to extract their wealth. A foreign policy built on transactional resource grabs tends to generate exactly this kind of resentment, and resentment is not a stable foundation for supply security.
Then geography complicates the story further, in a way the headlines blur. The strategic cobalt and copper sit in the relatively stable south, in the old Copperbelt, where Chinese firms are deeply and quietly entrenched. The war is in the east, where artisanal mining of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold finances armed groups. And as of May 2026, the east is also where a fresh Ebola outbreak erupted. The World Health Organization declared it a public health emergency of international concern, and it has been especially dangerous because it is caused by a strain for which no approved vaccine or treatment exists. The disease tore through the very provinces, Ituri and the two Kivus, where the fighting has left clinics non-functional and millions hungry. A grim summary of the situation is that hunger and disease are old companions.
The lesson is straightforward. You cannot build a supply chain on a battlefield. You cannot secure strategic minerals in a region controlled by armed groups. And you cannot turn resource wealth into economic strength when disease, hunger, and political instability are overwhelming basic civil society. 
Washington can negotiate agreements, sign memoranda, and announce strategic partnerships, but none of those documents can make a failed province function. The assumption behind Great Powers 2.0 is that access to resources determines power. The Congo reminds us that security, governance, and public health come first. Without them, the minerals stay in the ground.
Where This Leaves the Citizen
So where does this leave those of us who want a strong America, but who are also wary of the endless spending, bureaucracy, and foreign entanglements that Washington so often wraps in the language of national security?
First, recognize that the core America First argument is correct.
A nation that cannot manufacture critical goods, produce essential medicines, refine strategic minerals, or build the components needed for its own defense is not truly independent or sovereign. For decades, America’s political and corporate elites shipped factories overseas, hollowed out industrial towns, and became dependent on foreign supply chains in pursuit of lower costs and higher profits. The result was predictable: greater dependence on China, a weakened industrial base, and growing vulnerability in areas vital to national security. The problem is real. Ignoring it is not a serious option.
But neither is giving Washington a blank check.
The challenge is to rebuild American strength without recreating the very system of government dependence, cronyism, and corporate favoritism that helped create the problem in the first place. Every dollar spent, every subsidy granted, every regulation written, and every emergency power claimed should be judged by a simple standard: Does it make America stronger, or does it merely make a politically connected interest group richer?
Where possible, the answer should be to remove obstacles rather than create new programs. Reform permitting. Cut unnecessary regulations. Open access to domestic resources. Encourage investment. Build things again. A nation becomes stronger when its citizens and businesses are free to create wealth and produce what the country needs, not when they become dependent on government support.
Most importantly, Americans deserve honesty. Rebuilding an industrial base after decades of neglect will not be free. Some prices will rise. Some adjustments will be painful. If policymakers believe those sacrifices are necessary, they should explain why and make the case directly to the public rather than pretending there are no tradeoffs.
The question facing America is not whether we should become stronger. We should. The question is whether we can rebuild our industrial strength, secure our supply chains, and restore economic independence without creating a permanent system of subsidies, bureaucracy, and special interests along the way.
That is the test.
America First should mean making America stronger, more productive, more self-reliant, and more prosperous. It should not become another excuse for Washington to grow larger, spend more money, and reward its friends. The difference between those two paths may determine whether Great Powers 2.0 becomes a national renewal or just another chapter in the long history of government promises that enriched the insiders while leaving ordinary Americans to pay the bill.
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Bibliography and key references
The narrative itself
• Rare Earth Exchanges, “Entering the Great Powers Era 2.0?” (January 2026). https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/entering-the-great-powers-era-2-0/
• Rare Earth Exchanges, “The Brilliance of Trump: The Man Who Forced the Great Powers Era 2.0” (the coinage claim). https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/the-brilliance-of-trump-the-man-who-forced-the-great-powers-era-2-0/
• The Diplomat, “Trump 2.0: Great Power Politics and the New World Order” (February 2025). https://thediplomat.com/2025/02/trump-2-0-great-power-politics-and-the-new-world-order/
The skeptics on polarity and the return of great power competition
• Munich Security Conference, Munich Security Report 2025, “Introduction: Multipolarization.” https://securityconference.org/en/publications/munich-security-report-2025/introduction/
• Second Line of Defense, “Beyond Great Power Competition: The Rise of Middle Powers in a Globalized World” (July 2025). https://sldinfo.com/2025/07/beyond-great-power-competition-the-rise-of-middle-powers-in-a-globalized-world/
Inflation and the cost of deglobalization
• The Asset, “Deglobalization, reshoring fuel inflation.” https://www.theasset.com/article/47205/deglobalization-reshoring-fuel-inflation
• Fiduciary Trust, “The World is Deglobalizing: Do Investors Need to Care?” https://www.fiduciary-trust.com/insights/the-world-is-deglobalizing-do-investors-need-to-care/
• BOK Financial, “Tariffs, trade realignments accelerating deglobalization” (the efficiency-to-security shift). https://thestatement.bokf.com/articles/2026/01/is-the-us-leading-the-dance-of-deglobalization
• AOL / BBC, “How tariff disruption will continue reshaping the global economy in 2026” (IMF growth revisions). https://www.aol.com/articles/tariff-disruption-continue-reshaping-global-000044040.html
The US critical-minerals policy machine
• CSIS, “New Executive Order Ties U.S. Critical Minerals Security to Global Partnerships” (the January 2026 Section 232 order). https://www.csis.org/analysis/new-executive-order-ties-us-critical-minerals-security-global-partnerships
• CSIS, “Critical Minerals Ministerial Introduces New International Cooperation Strategy” (FORGE and price floors). https://www.csis.org/analysis/critical-minerals-ministerial-introduces-new-international-cooperation-strategy
• Chatham House, “America needs partners to challenge China’s critical mineral chokehold” (Project Vault, the scale of dependence). https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2026-03/america-needs-partners-challenge-chinas-critical-mineral
China’s dominance, the timeline, and the market case
• NAI 500, “Can the U.S. Finally Break China’s Rare Earth Grip? Is Domestic Substitution a Solid Investment Bet?” (patents, cost gaps, capacity). https://nai500.com/blog/2026/05/can-the-u-s-finally-break-chinas-rare-earth-grip-is-domestic-substitution-a-solid-investment-bet/
• Fortune (via AOL), “Beijing’s dominance in rare earth processing leaves others scrambling to close the gap.” https://www.aol.com/articles/beijing-dominance-rare-earth-processing-072921074.html
• The Daily Economy, “China’s Rare Earth Monopoly and Why Markets Will Break It.” https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/chinas-rare-earth-monopoly-and-why-markets-will-break-it/
Congo: the deal, the conflict, and the human cost
• Human Rights Watch, “Minerals for peace? How to make the Rwanda-DRC deal stick.” https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/07/07/minerals-for-peace-how-to-make-the-rwanda-drc-deal-stick
• CSIS, “Critical Minerals, Fragile Peace: The DRC-Rwanda Deal and the Cost of Ignoring Root Causes.” https://www.csis.org/analysis/critical-minerals-fragile-peace-drc-rwanda-deal-and-cost-ignoring-root-causes
• Oakland Institute, “US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement Faces Constitutional Challenge in Court.” https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/press-release/us-drc-strategic-partnership-agreement-faces-constitutional-challenge-court
• Al Jazeera, “We are exploited: Congolese fear losing out as US makes minerals deals.” https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/4/we-are-exploited-congolese-fear-losing-out-as-us-makes-minerals-deals
• Yahoo / AFP, “DRC and M23 rebels sign US-brokered ceasefire” (the KoBold Metals private investment). https://www.yahoo.com/news/drc-m23-rebels-sign-us-103150243.html
The 2026 Ebola outbreak
• World Health Organization, “Epidemic of Ebola Disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the DRC and Uganda determined a public health emergency of international concern” (May 16, 2026). https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-disease-in-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-and-uganda-determined-a-public-health-emergency-of-international-concern
• UN News, “Ebola outbreak in DR Congo collides with conflict and hunger, WHO warns.” https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/05/1167592• Doctors Without Borders (MSF), “Ebola disease outbreak 2026: How MSF is responding.” https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/ebola-disease-outbreak-2026-how-msf-responding
Note on sourcing: several of the sharpest claims that China’s grip will not break come from rare-earth industry outlets, which are reliable on technical detail but have a commercial interest in emphasizing both the threat and the investment opportunity. Weigh their facts more heavily than their framing.
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Source: (14) China Controls the Stuff Your Life Runs On.