Natalie Kittrow

You can't live without our rare earths.

Beijing may actually be spurring the world to look for ways to live without it, to find a way to reduce that reliance on China for just about everything.

But it seems equally possible, plausible even, that the U.S.

actually overplayed its hand because it's forced China into this point of no return where now it's pulling out the big guns, where now it's using its biggest point of leverage and forcing everyone into a corner.

So are you saying it's possible that the U.S.

overplayed its hand, but it had no other option?

You're sort of saying it's like you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

If you don't go hard enough to try to combat China's dominance in manufacturing, nothing actually gets done about it.

But if you do go too hard, you risk eliciting this kind of really potentially damaging retaliation.

But has all this poking of the bear that the Trump administration's done actually done anything to slow China's progression toward the most dominant superpower manufacturing country that we've ever seen?

The situation you've described is one where the stakes are just incredibly high for both sides.

So at this meeting between Trump and Xi this week, what should we expect to see?

Do you expect a dramatic announcement or just the continuation of what we've seen before, which is incremental agreements, temporary pauses, etc.

?

So, a narrow deal, perhaps announced with great fanfare.

Well, Keith, thank you.

Thanks for making us all smarter in anticipation of it.

We'll be right back.

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