Oklahoma U.S. Sen. James Lankford stands behind President Trump and his latest threats to put an additional 100 percent tariff on products from China in the fight over rare earth minerals.
“Yes, we should be playing hardball. We’re the biggest economy in the world,” explained the Republican Senator during a Wednesday morning interview with Stuart Varney on Fox Business News. He said China’s been strategically buying operations and the world and doing it for years “dominating the critical earth and rare earth, minerals, production and processing” and mining as well.
“They’ve been very strategic about it while the United States has said we’re not gonna after our own,” continued the Senator. But now with China at odds with Trump, he says it’s time to wake up.
“We have these same minerals in the United States. we’ve just been apathetic about going to get them. That should change right now. And this should be a warning shot we should have paid attention to a long time ago,” added Lankford.
“I was one of those folks when China cut off Japan 15 years ago from rare earth and said we’re mad at Japan and so we’re gonna cut ’em off, I reminded everyone a long time ago, that should be a warning to us. This is now China doing this not just Japan but now the rest of the world. So let’s produce our own rare earth and critical earths and stop being dependent on a Communist nation.”
While Sen. Lankford was making his call to develop U.S. rare earth mining, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday told a forum on investing in America sponsored by CNBC that China’s dominance of rare earths calls for a more assertive American industrial policy.
“When we get an announcement like this week with China on the rare earths, you realize we have to be self-sufficient, or we have to be sufficient with our allies,” Mr. Bessent said.
The New York Times reported “Mr. Bessent and Jamieson Greer, the United States Trade Representative, appeared to escalate trade tensions with China by publicly rebuking their new controls as economic coercion. They accused China of violating the terms of a trade truce reached this year and said that Mr. Trump would not back down from the 100 percent tariffs that he threatened in retaliation even if the trade dispute causes the stock market to tumble.”