Chad Scott

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9,764 appearances 31 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard yesterday

Chad Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 31 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 8.

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American Power · American Power Extra: Trump, Xi and the Race to Control the Future · 18 Sep 2026 podcast

Now, these are the type of materials that are used in advanced weapons, semiconductors, artificial intelligence systems, electric vehicle batteries, aircraft, and a huge range of modern industrial products.

And according to the International Energy Agency, around six point five trillion in Western investments and businesses are exposed to this dependency on Chinese rare earths.

Now the United States has been trying to reduce that dependence.

Project Vault alone includes a ten billion dollar government loan combined with about two billion dollars in private investment to strengthen domestic critical mineral capacity.

And just this week, Elmet Group announced that one of its subsidiaries received a roughly two billion dollar defense logistics agency contract connected to rebuilding the national defense stockpile and strengthen American tungsten supply chains.

All of this is good, but mines and processing facilities do not appear overnight.

They can take years or even decades to develop, which means China has leverage right now that the United States cannot quickly replace.

And despite previous deals that Trump made on rare earths with China, it seems several Chinese rare earth suppliers have stopped some shipments to the US because they are worried about punishment coming from the Chinese Communist Party.

Now the Trump administration has expressed displeasure with the fact that China agreed to keep rare earth exports moving, but we are now seeing delays involving materials, including yttrium, indium phosphide, and tungsten.

Yttrium alone has become a major pressure point because it is used in aerospace systems, semiconductors, and thermal coatings on jet engines.

American companies are feeling the pain of these delays and are concerned about the

still larger deadline approaching with this rare earth deal that is currently in place expiring on November 10th.

This means that we could see the suspension of previous restrictions expire and once again be faced with a rare earth shortage in the US.

The concern for me here is the US and China have less than seven weeks to knock this out after the Trump Xi meeting.

So one of the things Trump might have as a goal is to get that deadline pushed back.

But China has an obvious reason to keep that deadline available as leverage to get better deals in the future.

This is a difficult situation for the US to be in because we need those restrictions suspended.

uh for at least a six months or a year in order to give US manufacturers the breathing room necessary to continue operating.

But again, that does not remove the overarching dependency because within that year, the US just cannot build out enough infrastructure to replace China.

That is going to be a decade long problem and a critical one at that.

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