Indiana Senator Jim Banks has just published an op-ed at Commonplace, the magazine of American Compass, titled “Bringing Rare Earths Back.”

Both the topic and the placement of the op-ed are interesting.

Banks’s central contention is straightforward and, at this point, non-controversial. The United States cannot sustain a strong defense industrial base while relying on China for critical minerals that make modern weapons possible. Rare earths are embedded in fighter jet engines, precision-guided munitions, microchips, and advanced electronics. Yet China today produces roughly 60% of global rare earth output and controls 85% of its high-tech processing. In effect, America’s defense industry is dependent on the goodwill of its chief adversary.

Infuriatingly, the situation is not accidental but the fruit of decades of bipartisan neglect. As Banks reminds us, the US was once the global leader in rare earth production. Indiana-based Magnequench, founded in the 1980s, supplied 85% of the magnets used in Pentagon weapons systems. But in 1995, Chinese state-linked investors acquired the company, pledged to keep jobs in Indiana, and then promptly shuttered the plants once the know-how was transferred. By 2004, Magnequench’s last US facility was gone. Deng Xiaoping eventually boasted: “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths.”

Naturally, Senator Banks praises President Trump's efforts to remedy this situation. Trump’s Pentagon partnership with MP Materials, which restarted mining at Mountain Pass in California, showed how public-private cooperation could begin reversing industrial decay.

Banks used the op-ed to preview upcoming legislation. His bill would grant the Department of War expanded powers to establish new rare earth extraction and processing facilities, build larger national stockpiles, and provide incentives for private-sector participation in domestic production. In essense, it would make rare earth supply security a defense function, treating these materials as strategic assets rather than commodities. By linking military readiness to industrial capacity, it would push the Pentagon into an active role in rebuilding the supply chain.

It seems like a good way to break most of the logjams and increase implementation speed. Domestically, it would stimulate mining and processing investment, revive technical expertise lost after Magnequench and similar firms were offshored, and create high-value industrial employment. Strategically, it would insulate defense procurement from Chinese leverage and signal to allies that the United States is reasserting industrial sovereignty. In broader economic terms, it would mark a decisive break from post-Cold War laissez-faire trade orthodoxy, re-establishing national production capacity as an explicit object of state policy.

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