Why are we still keeping Ukraine on financial support when China is knocking at our door?

I'm increasingly convinced that our government is losing focus.

These billions could be used to strengthen our defense, boost our economy, or contain Beijing.

Putin's government?

Quote:

These billions could be used to strengthen our defense, boost our economy, or contain Beijing.

‘Shock to the system’: farmers hit by Trump’s tariffs and cuts say they need another bailout
With extreme weather and Trump’s looming trade war, US farmers are reeling and resigned to needing more cash help

Farmers across the United States say they could face financial ruin – unless there is a huge taxpayer-funded bail out to compensate for losses generated by Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts and chaotic tariffs.

Small- and medium-sized farms were already struggling amid worsening climate shocks and volatile commodities markets, on top of being squeezed by large corporations that dominate the supply chain.

In recent weeks, farmers in Texas and across the midwest have suffered millions of dollars of crop losses due to unprecedented heavy rainfall and flooding.

The climate crisis-fueled extreme weather is compounded by the US president’s looming trade war and the administration targeting popular federal programs and staff, leaving farmers reeling and resigned to needing another bailout.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty around and I hate to be used as a bargaining chip. I am definitely worried,” said Travis Johnson, who lost more than 1,000 acres of cotton, sorghum and corn after a year’s rain fell within 48 hours in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) in southern Texas last month, turning parched fields into lakes.

RGV farmers sell sorghum, wheat, corn and vegetables to Mexico among other crops, while buying fertilizer and equipment – and relying on Mexican farmhands for cheap labor. Mexico is the US’s largest trading partner, while China is the main buyer of American sorghum and cotton. All US products destined for China face a 125% tax thanks to Trump’s tariff war, and could cut farmers off from core markets.

Rural counties rallied behind Trump in 2024, giving him a majority in all but 11 of the 444 farming-dependent counties last year, averaging 78% support, according to analysis by Investigate Midwest.

Trump’s vote share rose among farming communities, despite his last trade war which required a $23bn taxpayer bailout for farmers in 2018-19.

Yet anxiety is mounting among the agricultural base.

First came widespread cuts to oversubscribed and chronically underfunded federal climate and conservation schemes designed to reduce costs and greenhouse gases, and improve yields and environmental health.

Trump is also shuttering local food programs which provide farmers with stable domestic markets like public school districts and food banks, helping make farms more resilient to global economic shocks. The USAID, which purchased about $2bn every year in agricultural products particularly wheat, sorghum and lentils for humanitarian aid programs, has been dismantled.

The loss in federal programs alone would have been tough to cope with, but then came the trade chaos. Trump’s tariff announcements began when most farmers already had spring crops in the ground – or at the very least had prepared the land and purchased inputs such as seeds and pesticides, making it impossible to switch to crops that could potentially find a market domestically.

China trade war poses threat to US arms firms’ rare earths supply, analysts warn
Chinese restrictions could affect more than a dozen defence and aerospace firms and give Beijing ‘crucial advantage’

America’s advanced weapons manufacturers are likely to face a critical shortfall of key rare-earth minerals that they import from China as a consequence of Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with Beijing.

New export licensing restrictions imposed by China on seven rare earths are like to cause disruptions in supply to more than a dozen US defence and aerospace companies involved in the production of everything from fighter jets to submarines and drones, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a commentary.

The warning from CSIS was echoed in an expert opinion from the UK thinktank Chatham House, which said any further tightening of Chinese restrictions “has the potential to do serious damage to the US defence industry and undermine the Trump administration’s wider re-industrialisation ambitions”.

Chatham House said: “Ultimately, this could give Beijing a crucial strategic advantage in long-term US-China competition for military and technological supremacy and add to its existing manufacturing lead.”

The issue of rare earths has rapidly emerged as a significant achilles heel in Trump’s trade war with Beijing. The minerals covered by Chinese restrictions – samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium – are seven of the 17 rare earths in the periodic table.

While China has not outright banned export of the minerals, it has pointedly imposed licensing restrictions, in an echo of a similar dispute with Japan in 2012 when the price of rare earths increased tenfold.

The rare earths have a variety of industrial uses, including military uses, not least in the production of hi-tech magnets used in modern motors including electric vehicles.

China mines 70% of the world’s rare earths and processes 90% of the global supply, a situation that had long suited western customers because of the environmental issues associated with production – with no rare earth production taking place in the US at present.

The US has sought alternative supplies, including from Ukraine and potentially Greenland, driving two of the Trump administration’s most ham-fisted foreign policies: seeking to trade rare earths for an end to the war in Ukraine, and to control the Danish autonomous territory.

The minerals are used in a number of key US defence systems including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs.

The CSIS said the Chinese moves should have been entirely predictable amid warnings over US vulnerability to restrictions on supplies.

It said: “A number of policies have foreshadowed that export restrictions were on the horizon. China first weaponised rare earths in 2010 when it banned exports to Japan over a fishing trawler dispute. Between 2023 and 2025, China began imposing export restrictions of strategic materials to the United States, including gallium, germanium, antimony, graphite and tungsten.”

Commenting on China’s leverage over the issue of rare earths, William Matthews, a research fellow in Chatham House’s Asia Pacific programme, said: “This gives China a stranglehold over inputs into supply chains that are crucial to American primacy, from semiconductors to aircraft.

“China is leveraging its core role in supply chains from which the US has sought to exclude it, most notably semiconductors. The move sends a message: while the US might attempt to cut China off from the most advanced chips and other cutting-edge technologies, China could go one step further by cutting off the supply chain upstream.”

Matthews said one long-term risk for the US in a protracted trade war was that America and China were in the midst of a race to produce “sixth-generation” fighter aircraft, including the proposed US F-47 recently unveiled by Trump, giving China the advantage as it pursued its own production.

Any Chinese advantage in advanced military aircraft production, which the US has historically dominated, would be likely to feed into military tensions.

Vulnerabilities in rare-earth minerals supply have also long been acknowledged in civilian manufacturing, with Elon Musk’s Tesla aiming to reduce the rare earths used in its electric vehicles by 25% in recent years.

“This is not new, it’s been known about for over a decade,” Patrick Schröder, a researcher in global trade and the environment at Chatham House, said. “It has been flagged repeatedly. Lots of hi-tech industries can’t really manufacture much without rare earths.

“The reason China [has cornered the market in rare earths] is that production is often a very polluting and destructive process. For other countries it was fine for China to have that pollution. Which is fine as long as trade works and geopolitics doesn’t get in the way. Now all that’s changed.”