More importantly, absolutely none of this has anything to do with China’s near monopoly on rare earth refinement. Rare earth minerals, even high density regions of them, exist all over the world. Digging them up is easy, but separating the actual minerals from the rest of the soil and rock is really hard. That’s the part that China is highly specialized in. No one needs to invade Greenland or fucking whatever to get access to rare earth minerals. The US can dig them up right there at home. What they need is to build out the refinement infrastructure. But they would prefer to outsource the extraction to other countries if they can because it involves strip mining vast swathes of land that could be used for other things.