The deal has the veneer of gilded promises laid upon Iraq (war will pay fer itself!) and Afghanistan (3T of vast untapped resources!).If Afghanistan was worth its salt, China would probably belt n road the **** out of it in the last years... I doubt western companies will get 500B of revenue for the duration of the deal. This is a face saving measure to continue/leverage the war and while Europeans decide what to do when they finally realize talk and money can not replace hard concentrated work and a determined (multi)national ethic. A lot of the vast treasure we critically want is supposedly in the contested eastern parts, so good luck sending private industries into DMZs. Might be more profitable freezing your nuts off with the homeless polar bears in Greenland
Dammit. I was told we were getting rare earth elements. Natural gas is rare, right? well worth 1 million deaths
Whether 1M deaths is worth it is now on Putin's side of the court, Gallium and titanium sources are a big deal with China's export bans. It would be even more ghoulish if the final peace deal allowed us to mine in the newly Independent Russian territories. Natty gas was Europe's initial cut and likely one of the reasons behind the war. Losing Crimea and Black Sea access is a big hit if only for the pipelines elsewhere. There's still other spots to drill. There was some tweet posted here where we wanted Europe to buy hundreds of billions worth of energy from us. Haven't looked up on rumors and fluid talks. That can still happen while Ukraine finds stability for reinvestment. This is all dollars and numbers. Not sure if US will get back the dollar we lent and sent Ukraine. I think we should liquidate Russia's frozen assets as the cat is already out of the bag. It's still a bargaining chip and reparations still have to be hashed out in a peace negotiation.
Will the Critical Minerals Deal be a Windfall for the US? Rare Earths Reality: Ukraine's Nonexistent Deposits | IEEE Spectrum What are Ukraine's critical minerals and what do we know about the deal with US? | Reuters China’s rare earths dominance and policy responses - Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Here is the brutal reality. The evidence for Ukraine having rare earths at all is derived from Soviet reports that are at least 50 years old. There are no deposits of rare-earth ore in Ukraine known to be minable in an economically viable way. According to estimates by Ukrainian think-tanks, 40% of Ukraine's mineral resources are now under Russian occupation. Developing lithium resources in Ukraine is also a puzzle since lithium is not even in the top 20 in terms of Ukraine’s resources or reserves. Rare-earth ores are actually quite common globally. The truly valuable thing is the sophisticated refinery technology that extracts essential elements from ores and transforms them into certain usable forms for manufacturing. China even imported ores from the US for processing before this April. The few companies possessing alternative rare-earth refinery technology outside China produce end products at several times the cost of Chinese alternatives, leaving minimal market opportunity for these higher-priced options.
Yeah... I mentioned elsewhere that the entire West needs to play catchup in all stages of sourcing, extraction, refinement and processing for each of the restricted resources including RE. Each stage will not take a mere couple years or some magical Congressional pen stroke to change or accelerate. Tungsten and gallium aren't RE and have known and proven resources in their contested eastern regions though. So the deal won't mythically solve our issues dealing with Chinese resource bans but it does play a role in Trump's frantic resource grab like his ugly play for Greenland. BRI really scooped up the good spots in the last decade. It'll be costly to make China's partners reconsider because of debt, goodwill, political unsavoryness (undemocratic regimes), and the sheer amount of cheaper but high value products China offers to modernize trade with their partners. Like you stated, even if they defect, there's still the refining and processing bottleneck to consider but I'll take more raw resources to deal with than less.
The first article that I referenced in my previous post mentioned that there is a key difference between a reserve and a resource, which are often conflated in the media. A mineral resource is the amount that some entity indicates might be available within the earth of a national body. But a reserve is an amount that is known and can be accessed. The mere presence of mineral resources underground does not guarantee their economically viable extraction and processing. Meanwhile, gallium is one specific example that exemplifies how China’s near-monopoly in critical minerals stems not just from technological capability. Gallium is a byproduct of aluminum or zinc refining. While Western countries have (less-advanced) refinery methods for gallium extraction, production remains unprofitable due to insufficient aluminum / zinc refining volumes and high retrofitting costs of existing aluminum / zinc refineries.
I don't disagree. If you read all of my replies on this page, there's doubt and skepticism we'd get full or break-even value of the deal and likened it to Afghanistan which still has "up to" 3T in yet untapped mineral wealth despite other countries not having moral or political reservations about making a deal with the Taliban or tribal leaders. There's a reason why we haven't "looked locally" or "just recycled" for the past 2 decades and handed off the hard dirty work to China and other Asian countries to a lesser extent. These "experts" are straight up b****ing and moaning when a mic is held up to their faces and pretending it's a new answer when it ignores the OG original problem where the answer our Captains of Industry responded decades ago was essentially giving away the entire supply chain of 20+ critical resources to China. There. I bolded some lines to point out what I already wrote.
China certainly took notes on the 50 years of US policy in the middle east. Both China and Russia do not want to end up completely beholden to US policy. China has opted to subsidize huge swaths of global demand, particularly for the United States. The kicker is not found in the cheap end product, but extends through the entire supply chain. If China can offer raw materials that are difficult to refine at half the price while subsidizing the initial startup capital and price, the remainder of the world can not compete in an open market. This naturally gives China significant leverage. The antidote to this problem for the US is selective tariffs. Ideally the revenue generated from these tariffs would go towards subsidizing the startup for these industries to bring price parity. However with the current political environment in the US, the entire political system is infested with politicians and an active voter base who are placing ideological beliefs over the well being of the country. (party over country) MAGA is just another puppet like the CHIPS act, the SAVE act, Affordable Care Act.
Two Russian Su-30 Flankers Downed By AIM-9s Fired From Drone Boats: Ukrainian Intel Boss The event marks the first time drone boats downed fighters and the first successful use of AIM-9 missiles to take down any aircraft via drone boat. https://www.twz.com/news-features/t...s-fired-from-drone-boats-ukrainian-intel-boss Spoiler big, if true.
Do you think Putin would not follow through on his threat? Do you think we should continue sending weapons to Ukraine?
This is that arrogant American 'exceptionalism' coming out in you. Right up there with spreading American democracy so you can have your cheap shitty goods at the detriment of hundreds of millions of people. So why is it only America is allow to make threats in which they may or may not act upon but other sovereign countries can't? Because pgabriel says so? You do realize America does not own the world? We can't even fix our own problems much less everywhere else.
This - "See, I didn't **** around and waste everyone's time and fail to solve the wart in Ukraine - I got this very most important and valuable deal done for mineral rights in Ukraine. See, I - I mean we, we win!" Those magic beans that Trump got from Ukraine will keep the hucksters and shucksters both happy for awhile. As far as the USA - Europe and I will even include PRC in this group -- War, real war, not sending in a token amount of soldiers into a war zone that you blast with munitions first - takes a lot of dedication and none of the these regions have shown that type of dedication in 80 years. Doesn't mean that if forced into it that they wouldn't adjust, but all of the regions now think they can buy off their problems..... the PRC is vastly softer than it was even two decades ago. The USA is never going to change short of a ground invasion and Europe would watch as all their neighbors fell first. I'm too old for conscription and war and I love my son too much to want him see it happen - but it sure feels like the level of leadership across the globe has gone to **** since those that lived through WWII have died, and that is coming from someone that really didn't believe in "the greatest generation".
