Is this a consciously executed strategy on the part of the US, or just an emergent outcome of the economic and policy climate? I used to think the US was able to orchestrate such multi-decade strategies, but observing the country during the last few years, I've become skeptical.

Arguably the U.S. operates on persistent "consensus" e.g. containment, free-trade, isolationism etc. These aren't so much orchestrated strategies as they are operating principals.

The business consensus for the last 3 decades was to outsource the supply chain to the cheapest bidder. That the cheapest bidder had no environmental regulations was an ignored outcome. That the cheapest bidders were all closely related and existed within a new competing network of suppliers was likewise ignored.

I suspect the lack of direction that's been apparent for the last ~8 years is partially due to a general view that one or more of free-trade, free-enterprise, environmental protection, or national security/international posture needs to change.

The United States is really only a political mess where capital holders and workers have opposing interests. Exploitation of other countries benefits both, at least from a myopic view, so the US can prepare and implement long-term plans to do so despite the frequent changes in regime.

Perhaps more emergent-ish, but people have been commenting on this for ages, and the process continued. So post-hoc planned too.

> The US's strategy has been for someone else to have a lock on rare earth production.

Not quite though. The US's strategy has been for someone else to do the mining. That strategy works pretty well when it's two dozen other countries in competition with one another, because then you're not reliant on any one of them and there is no single point of failure.

The failure is in failing to prevent it from all being consolidated into a single authoritarian country.

This exactly. The idea that we want to become beholden to a single country is preposterous. The comment you replied to made it seem like because US doesn't want our landscape torn up we are OK with an anti-competitive trading partner, the reality couldn't be further from the truth. Americans are fine with rising cost of goods but ideally we don't want those extra profits to go to a single country. Globisation in the Krugman sense was supposed to pull people out of poverty all over the world, not just in China.

This hits the nail on the head. The problem with the DRC (Congo) is that it is basically the only viable source for certain resources on the planet. It is very easy for private entities to take control over the entire world's supply through a private military force. If there was a second country that could extract the same resources for a similar cost, the lack of stability would cause the DRC to fall behind in production which would dry up the revenue stream for the private military force.

The interesting fact about competition on the world market is that the easiest way to compete is by making the private and public sector work together. People complain about China subsidizing exports for unsustainable prices, sometimes below the cost of production, however this is only possible because the government is ensuring there is enough stability in the country for those companies to continue to exist and because the government is actively supporting these growing industries even if there is some inefficiency.

DRC basically has none of that, if anything the private sector may have an unreasonable degree of control over the government but the government has no control over the private sector.