Rush Doshi

Let's avoid anything confrontational.

Let's just steady as she goes, which actually meant in practice some American economic interests weren't being protected because there was a risk.

That's right.

I think President Trump had a number of options available to him.

And they were risky, let's be clear.

They would have been escalatory.

But one was perhaps cutting off more advanced AI chips to China.

Another was cutting off less advanced AI chips to China, which China relies on U.S.

technology to manufacture.

Another possibility was going after certain Chinese banks with financial sanctions.

And a fourth one might have been to go after China's dependence on certain American software.

At the end of the day, all those options I think were considered, but none of them were used.

And part of the reason why is the president didn't want to have more instability.

He didn't want to have a really negative market reaction anymore.

And there was concern.

China still had the rare earths tool, and it was a very powerful tool.

Maybe this wouldn't be enough to fix that problem.

I think it's worth taking a second here just to say how wild the Chinese action was, because we really haven't seen anything like it.

What China said in April, but then especially in October, the second time they forced us to back down, was that any good anywhere in the world,

that had 0.1% of its value come from a rare earth mineral or magnet made in China.