Key industries in the West were within weeks of shutting down last spring after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) levied export restrictions on seven heavy rare earths needed to manufacture magnets for everything from automobiles to F-35 fighter jets, according to United States Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.
“We were going tit-for-tat” in renegotiating trade pacts, he told “American Thought Leaders” host Jan Jekielek in an Oct. 7 interview.
Burgum recalled the CCP’s April 4 response to President Donald Trump’s April 2 executive actions that boosted tariffs on Chinese imports to 145 percent.
“They withheld shipping a certain type of magnet to all Western countries, not just the United States,” Burgum said. “We were facing, within weeks, every auto plant in the world being shut down.”…