China’s decision on 9 October to restrict the export of rare earths—essential elements for making all kinds of modern equipment from mobile phones to electric cars to jet fighters—has sent Western capitals into a tailspin. The immediate reaction from President Trump was to threaten 100% tariffs on China in response. Then, he walked that back after a sharp market sell-off. Now, the White House is holding calls with the UK, Japan, Canada and the EU to try to orchestrate a coordinated response from the G7 when it meets in Toronto next week. And though the G7 will obediently fall in line, there is a blatant hypocrisy on display here. Over the past eight months, as Trump has used extortion to disrupt global trade, the UK, Japan, Canada and the EU have meekly accepted it (though at least Canada made an initial show of self-respect, unlike the other three). Now, when China does the same thing, the G7 wants to pretend this is unprecedented.
“China has pointed a bazooka at the supply chains and the industrial base of the entire free world,” US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business last week. But as Simon Nixon from the Wealth of Nations Substack observed on Sunday, “Bessent’s complaints are obviously laughable coming from an administration that has been weaponising the global trading system since the day it took office.”
“The new Chinese rare earth curbs are modelled on America’s own Foreign Direct Product Rule restrictions that US government’s have been using to try to hold back China’s technological development for years. Indeed, the new curbs were only introduced in response to a massive expansion by the Trump administration days earlier of its ‘entity list’, which restricts US companies from exporting to designated Chinese companies.”
This was always the risk of the surrender deals that the UK, Japan, Canada and the EU all signed with the Trump regime over the summer. They have made themselves willing collaborators in MAGA’s destruction of the global trade order, and in so doing they have sabotaged any legitimacy when they claim to be upholding that order—as they will do at the G7 summit next week. Each of the G7 countries has demonstrated to the world in the past months that they are US vassals. Why should the world take them seriously now when they complain about China doing the exact same thing that their overlord is doing?
Europeans brought this on themselves
This isn’t just about the one big beautiful act of surrender in July. This is also about the many little decisions over the past eight months that European governments have taken which have sold out their own citizens and shot themselves in the foot because they rushed to do as the US commanded without thinking of the consequences. What happened with the Dutch government and the semiconductor manufacturer Nexperia, one of the factors which led to this rare earths restriction by China, is a prime example. The Dutch have shot themselves in the foot because they very foolishly obeyed a Trump demand.