Six months ago staunch allies like Canada and Australia would have loved to help, although they couldn’t replace China overnight. But the same tariffs that led to China’s new licenses for critical minerals are hitting the former allies Trump is treating like enemies.
One of the ways that people now interpret WW2 was that armored tanks , ships and planes became critical in combat, and every actor in the conflict was going out and trying to secure oil supply lines. Places like Europe, Africa, the middle east and the pacific were all involved due to reliance on fossil fuel resources… Whoever could capture the resources or secure the flow of the supply lines had huge advantages. You could bring down the enemy by indirectly starving them of oil just as quickly as attacking them head on. The allied forces directly targeted the axis oil infrastructure like refineries as their highest priority targets.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/How-Oil-Defeated-The-Nazis.html
Surely that can’t be happening again with new types of critical resources?