Months of fraught U.S.-China trade talks have laid bare just how reliant the United States is on China for rare earths, the powerful raw materials that underpin technology from fighter jets to wind turbines. ...

China’s dominance of the global supply chain is starting to hurt automakers....

Beijing has been stepping up controls on rare earth exports, triggering global shortages and exposing industries’ dependence on Chinese supply chains. ...

Japan has been quietly blazing a trail for supply chain resilience....

When, in December 1953, Dragnet became the first American television show to broadcast in color, few fans knew they had a dusty nook on the California-Nevada border to thank for bringing it to polychromatic life. But every early cathode-ray tube color television owed its screen’s red hue to europium, a rare earth element excavated and processed exclusively at the Mountain Pass Mine in San Bernardino County....

Israel launched a series of airstrikes in Iran early Friday local time, escalating the simmering conflict between the two nations. Israel said that it was targeting locations related to Iran’s nuclear program. Shortly after the strikes began, the country’s Defense Minister Israel Katz declared a state of emergency. Iran’s state-run media has reported multiple fatalities in the capital city, Tehran, including the death of the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami....

India, like many countries, is grappling with Beijing’s restrictions on rare earth element (REE) exports — and it wants to develop its own domestic supplies. Experts say it could become an important alternative to China in the sector, but will require much more public and private investment....

From about the 1960s to the mid-1980s, the United States was a leader in uranium mining. But domestic production of the mineral, which is primarily used as fuel for nuclear reactors, has since fallen off a cliff....

China’s chokehold on supplies of minerals essential to high-tech goods from electric vehicles to jet fighters has become a formidable advantage in trade negotiations with the U.S. ...

The draft trade agreement with China announced by Donald Trump on Wednesday would ease concerns from top US military suppliers about rare-earth metals and magnets that, if cut off permanently, could hobble production of everything from smart bombs to fighter jets to submarines and other weapons in the US arsenal....

That’s how one expert told CNN the auto industry is describing a possible shortage of rare-earth elements — minerals that are now center stage in the global trade war. Running low on those minerals could recall the pandemic-era chip shortage that jacked up car prices, used and new, across America....

The automotive and robotics industries have been hit particularly hard by China’s rare earth export restrictions in recent weeks, but analysts warn Western defense giants will also feel the heat....