Cope never ceases.

Reminder heavy REE i.e. the strategic stuff that goes into sensors (what modern US MIC is built around) is geologically rare - economically extracted from limited ionic clay deposits, which is much in fact rarer than... making magnets by smashing rocks for light ree.

That and the entire HREE economic extraction pipeline is Chinese, who build out the foundation tech over last 30+ years aka capability US/west has ever had. The physical reality = agglomerated Chinese mining cities of millions with vertically integrated industrial chains sustained tertiary mining/engineering pipeline larger than RoW combined.

Let's be real this not scale US capable of replicating even if it had ionic clays, and even if US manage to sort out LREE (mountain pass etc)... it still basically built its entire strategic MIC (i.e. sensors) on HREE that only PRC can process at scale. Which is kind of dumb, but here we are. But that's not going away for a long time, i.e. PRC will likely scale EUV to western levels well before US/west can scale HREE to Chinese levels, maybe F35s getting real radars before that.