China Controls Stuff Life Runs On. Breaking Free Will Cost You

If you have not run across the phrase yet, you will. It is shorthand for a now-fashionable claim: that the long post-Cold War experiment in open markets and rules-based cooperation is finished, and that the world has reverted to an older, harder logic of rival great powers fighting over territory, technology, and above all, raw materials. The United States, China, and Russia are said to be circling one another again, and the new currency of power is not just armies but supply chains, rare earth elements, and the chokepoints that connect them.