conflict
China Poised To Cut Off US Military From Key Mineral As America’s Own Reserves Lay Buried Under Red Tape
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Nick Pope
China is planning to restrict exports of a key mineral needed to make weapons while a U.S. company that could be reducing America’s reliance on foreign suppliers is languishing in red tape, energy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Chinese government announced on August 15 that it will restrict exports of antimony, a critical mineral that dominates the production of weapons globally and is essential for producing equipment like munitions, night vision goggles and bullets that are essential to national security, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Perpetua Resources, an American mining company, has been navigating red tape for years to develop a mine in Valley County, Idaho, that could decrease reliance on the Chinese supply of antimony, but the slow permitting process is getting in the way, energy experts told the DCNF.
It can take years to secure all the necessary approvals and permits to develop a mine like the one Perpetua Resources is trying to operate. One of the key permitting laws in place is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which also applies to federal land management actions and the construction of certain public infrastructure projects like highways.
“After six years of planning and early engagement, we began the [NEPA] permitting process in 2016. We are now eight years into NEPA,” a Perpetua Resources spokesperson told the DCNF. The company is hoping to extract antimony from the largest known deposit in the U.S., and Perpetua Resources’ development could also produce millions of ounces of gold as well.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, argues that the Perpetua Resources mine poses real environmental considerations that should be addressed, but production in the U.S. is almost certainly cleaner than production that takes place in China. Moreover, depending on China for raw materials needed to produce key defense equipment poses a clear national security risk, Furchtgott-Roth said.
“The United States has the highest environmental standards in the world for its mines, as well as for some other things, too,” Furchtgott-Roth told the DCNF. “It’s a huge national security risk. Given what we’ve seen with Russia cutting off supplies of natural gas to Europe, we know that countries can cut off important supplies to other countries.”
“If the administration wants to pursue policies that push electric vehicles, green energy and other mineral-intensive technologies, it should look to streamline the permitting process across the board rather than selectively pursuing reform for some favored types of development and not for others,” Furchtgott-Roth added.
Steve Coonen, a former Department of Defense (DOD) official who focused on technology exports to China, agreed that relying on China for raw materials needed to produce crucial technologies presents a clear national security risk.
“The United States has all the rare earth elements it needs, not too dissimilar from its energy requirements,” Coonen told the DCNF. “However, Democrats have enchained U.S. industry by prohibiting the extraction of these materials for misplaced and ill-informed ecological reasons at a significant risk to national security and the United States’ long-term economic health.”
China is responsible for just under 50% of the world’s antimony production, and it is also the source of 63% of the U.S.’ current antimony imports, according to CSIS. The U.S., meanwhile, did not mine any “marketable” antimony in 2023, according to CNBC.
China’s recently announced export restrictions for antimony will take effect on Sept. 15, according to CNBC. To many in the industry, China moving to curb antimony exports would have come as a surprise just a few months ago, so the country’s decision to take action comes across as “quite confrontational in that regard,” Lewis Black, CEO of Canadian mining company Almonty Industries, told the outlet.
In addition to antimony, China has also flexed its muscles by restricting exports of other critical minerals that it dominates globally, like germanium and gallium, since 2023.
“The United States has some of the highest permitting standards in the world, and that’s something to be proud of. But NEPA gets criticism for being inefficient, and much of that criticism is justified,” the Perpetua Resources spokesperson told the DCNF. “When we are talking about minerals we need for America’s national and economic security — not to mention our clean energy future — we need an efficient regulatory process that still maintains robust protections for communities and the environment.”
The company is anticipating that the process — from initial deposit identification to the beginning of mineral extraction from the mine site — will take 18 years, the Perpetua Resources spokesperson told the DCNF. However, the spokesperson added that NEPA has been beneficial for transparency with the public and allowing stakeholder communities to weigh in about the project.
Nevertheless, Perpetua Resources “absolutely supports a commonsense, bipartisan approach to permitting reform” because “good projects should not wither in red tape.”
The antimony curbs may be even more pressing given existing concerns about the strength of America’s defense-industrial base amid wars in the Middle East and Europe, as well as rising tensions with China over Taiwan. Many experts have cautioned that the U.S. is allowing itself to become too dependent on an adversarial China’s mineral supplies at a time when those minerals are playing a much larger role in the American economy, thanks in part to the Biden administration’s massive green energy agenda.
“In the mid-twentieth century, domestic mining accounted for 90% of the U.S.’s antimony consumption. Today, the U.S. no longer mines antimony; instead, it relies on China, its chief geopolitical rival, for over 60% of its antimony imports,” Quill Robinson, an associate fellow in CSIS’ Energy Security and Climate Change Program, told the DCNF. “Effective China de-risking requires reducing reliance up and down the value chain.”
Independent West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Republican Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso teamed up to introduce a major permitting reform bill in July, designing the package to simplify the regulatory hurdles that major infrastructure and development projects must clear and expedite timelines without totally defanging regulators’ ability to ensure that environmental concerns and considerations are addressed. That bill has not yet come up for a vote in the Senate.
“There are legitimate environmental challenges that need to be mitigated for projects like this,” Arnab Datta, the Institute for Progress’ director of infrastructure policy, told the DCNF. However, government agencies are more strongly incentivized to avoid legal challenges of their reviews from third parties than they are to thoroughly review the more significant environmental concerns, meaning that regulators tend to chew up lots of time on those minor points and ultimately extend the timelines for permitting, Datta explained.
“The uncertainty from permitting and litigation compounds the challenge of reaching production in what’s often a volatile and uncertain market environment for these commodities,” Datta, who also works for Employ America as a managing director of policy implementation, continued. “These companies need a process with certainty and reasonable timelines and also support that helps mitigate the volatility that arises from China’s actions in the market.”
Featured Image: Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash
conflict
How the Biden-Harris admin pushed Russia into war with Ukraine
From LifeSiteNews
By Bob Marshall
I was … bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.… Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
In September, Vice President Kamala Harris stated several points at the White House as to how she would handle the Ukraine-Russia war: “I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.… Putin started this war, and … Putin could set his sights on Poland, the Baltic states, and other NATO Allies.… [S]ome in my country … demand that Ukraine accept neutrality, and would require Ukraine to forego security relationships with other nations. These proposals are the same of those of Putin.”
But these are the same Biden-Harris tactics and policies that provoked war.
Harris blames Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war. But the proximate source of the Russia-Ukraine conflict goes back beyond Putin to the breakup of the Soviet Empire and even earlier.
End of the Cold War
In late October 1989, the famed Berlin Wall as a dividing line between Socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and West Germany, called a “wall of mistrust” by then former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, was crumbling.
Obviously, Gorbachev, with almost 400,000 troops in East Germany could have stopped the reunification. But Western officials gave Russian leaders assurances there was nothing to worry about. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev that NATO expansion would proceed, “not one inch eastward.” The next day, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl assured Gorbachev, “NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity.”
The Los Angeles Times noted, “Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.… NATO’S widening umbrella doesn’t justify Putin’s … incursions in Ukraine or Georgia. Still, the evidence suggests that Russia’s protests have merit and that U.S. policy has contributed to current tensions in Europe.”
Documents at George Washington University testify to agreements made between Western leaders and Russian officials at this time – that western nations would not expand NATO to the East.
Boris Yeltsin was the first president of the Russian Federation from 1991 to 1999, coming to office immediately after Premier Gorbachev’s resignation with the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. In 1995, President Yeltsin met with President Clinton in St. Catherine’s Hall at the Kremlin.
Yeltsin said to Clinton, “I want to get a clear understanding of your idea of NATO expansion, because now I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed. How do you think it looks to us if one bloc continues to exist while the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands right up to the borders of Russia. Many Russians have a sense of fear. What do you want to achieve with this if Russia is your partner, they ask. I ask it too. Why do you want to do this?”
When Clinton spoke to Yeltsin in 1995, there were 15 NATO member countries. When Clinton left office, there were 18.
Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion
In 2016, President Clinton’s former Defense Secretary Bill Perry said, “In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at the actions that Putin has taken. But in the early years … the United States deserves much of the blame.… Our first action … in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia.”
Former CIA Director Robert Gates, who also served as Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, opposed the policy of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”
In June 1997, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats, and foreign policy academics wrote to President Clinton about the problems and ill consequences of NATO expansion:
[T]he current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions.… NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability …
In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition … [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.
In 1998, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asked George Kennan, who devised the successful “containment” policy to prevent the Soviet Union from achieving its goal of world domination through open warfare, what he thought of the U.S. Senate ratifying NATO expansion even up to Russia’s border. Kennan replied:
[I]t is the beginning of a new Cold War.… There was no reason for this.… No one was threatening anybody else.… We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so.
I was … bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.… Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
In 2007, Putin noted, “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders … and what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact … NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on May 17, 1990 … said … ‘The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?”
Fiona Hill points to 2007 when Putin “put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO.… In 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine.… Four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the [Russian] invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership.”
William Burns, now President Biden’s Central Intelligence director and former U.S. ambassador to Russia, wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players … I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Putin told Burns in 2008: “No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia. We would do all in our power to prevent it.”
In 2015, the German Der Speigel magazine interviewed Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, regarding the status of Ukraine in response to the abrupt change in the presidential leadership and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Brzezinski suggested that “Ukraine should be free to choose its political identity.… But … Russia should be assured credibly that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.”
More recently in 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Pope Francis said that the ‘barking of NATO at the door of Russia’ might have led to the invasion of Ukraine.… The pope … deplored the brutality of the war.… Pope Francis … described Russia’s attitude to Ukraine as ‘an anger that I don’t know whether it was provoked but was perhaps facilitated’ by the presence in nearby countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.… ‘In Ukraine, it was other states that created the conflict.’”
The caution of these experienced statesmen and world leaders is lost on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
This article is reprinted with permission from the Family Research Council, publishers of The Washington Stand at washingtonstand.com.
conflict
Sec Def Austin Unveils $400 Million Arms Package For Ukraine — But One Thing Is Missing
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jake Smith
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Ukraine but isn’t bringing the good news Kyiv wants to hear, as the country continues to struggle to hold the front line amid Russian advances.
Austin has been intimately involved over the last two years in overseeing U.S. military aid to Ukraine, of which there has been approximately $70 billion. The Defense Secretary touched down in Ukraine on Sunday in a show of continued support and announced a new $400 million arms package, but won’t be giving Kyiv what it really wants — the ability to use U.S.-provided long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory, according to multiple reports.
The request to use the missiles for such a purpose has been something Ukraine has asked for for months; as Ukraine can’t produce such weapons, it is looking to the U.S. and Europe for help.
Austin arrived in Ukraine without signaling that the request would be filled, and that’s likely to leave Kyiv unsatisfied. The administration has been hesitant to allow Ukraine to use U.S. or European-provided missiles to conduct long-range attacks against Russia, in part because it could escalate the war and drag the U.S. further into the conflict.
“We think it is wrong that there are such steps,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in early September, according to The Washington Post. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the occupied territory of Ukraine but also on the Russian territory, so that Russia is motivated to seek peace.”
I’m back in Ukraine for the fourth time as Secretary of Defense, demonstrating that the United States, alongside the international community, continues to stand by Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/0gCwAqqEpK
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) October 21, 2024
The idea has been frequently discussed between U.S. and Ukrainian officials but nothing has come to fruition. Austin has also previously said that he doesn’t think it would significantly improve Ukraine’s odds of victory, noting in an early September press conference that “there’s no one capability that will in and of itself be decisive in this campaign.”
Ukraine is also pressing the administration for NATO membership, but Austin had no new updates to give on that request either, according to reports. The Biden-Harris administration has said that Ukraine’s fate is eventually to join NATO but hasn’t provided a timeline for when.
However, the U.S. is providing Ukraine with $400 million worth of weapons systems, Austin announced on Monday, including munitions, armored vehicles and tanks, according to reports. The aid will certainly meet some of the needs of Ukraine’s military but is not as large as some of the prior multi-billion dollar packages.
“The United States understands the stakes here, Mr. President,” Austin told Ukrainian Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Monday, Reuters reported.
President Joe Biden’s options to help Ukraine are starting to run out as he prepares to leave office in January. Even with U.S. and European-provided military aid, it has done little more than help Ukraine maintain a defensive position against Russia, which has shown no signs of stopping its invasion campaign.
Russia launched sweeping missile and drone strikes against targets in Eastern Ukraine over the weekend ahead of Austin’s visit, according to Reuters. Ukrainian forces staged a successful incursion into regions in Western Russia at the end of the summer but Russian forces have started to retake some of the territory in recent weeks, The New York Times reported.
The odds that Biden can secure substantially more funding from Congress to aid Ukraine are slim; it was already difficult for the president to secure the last $60 billion aid package in April, as the sentiment among some lawmakers is that the administration doesn’t seem to have a plan to end the war and move Ukraine toward victory.
It will be either presidential candidates Donald Trump or Kamala Harris who will have to pick up where Biden left off. Harris would likely mirror Biden’s approach to the war and continue strong U.S. support for Ukraine’s military campaign, but some critics fear that she lacks the needed foreign policy wisdom to properly maneuver the conflict.
Trump has vowed to end the war before January if he’s elected in November, touting his ability to negotiate with both Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has also signaled he may end military aid to Ukraine in favor of seeking a peaceful settlement between Kyiv and Moscow.
Austin on Monday dismissed ideas that U.S. support for Ukraine would end if Trump were elected in November.
“I’ve seen bipartisan support for Ukraine over the last 2-1/2 years, and I fully expect that we’ll continue to see the bipartisan support from Congress,” Austin said, according to Reuters.
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