2. Trading with China is not optional—the U.S. has to do it for...

2. Trading with China is not optional—the U.S. has to do it for EVs.“Keeping China out would fracture the U.S. from the rest of the world,” said Mary Lovely, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Access to the Chinese market still remains important for American companies.”Even when the U.S. restricts trade with China, China provides components for suppliers in countries that are U.S. free-trading partners. China also has a foothold in Mexico and Asian countries that the U.S. trades freely with, building ports and providing manufacturing and logistics services at those ports.“All of our friends in the Indo-Pacific, except Fiji and Japan, are actually deepening their relationship with China,” said Leila Aridi Afas, Toyota North America’s director of global public policy.Lovely added that requirements for EV credits in the Inflation Reduction Act give automakers too little time for to move away from China in terms of critical minerals. Even critical minerals mined in the U.S. are sent to China for processing. “So far the U.S. government doesn’t have a clear strategy,” she said.The U.S. needs to prioritize expanding its critical-mineral processing capacity, said Luisa Moreno, president and director of Defense Metal Corp, a rare earths mining project in the Canadian province of British Columbia. By 2030, as EV demand grows, there will be “a tenfold increase in demand for critical minerals,” she said. “The U.S. produces about 16% of rare-earth minerals They have not been able to process them. So they export 40,000 tons to China to refine.”Moreno noted that even the machines used to make chips for EVs require rare-earth minerals to function. “Put export restrictions on that, and you can’t make the machines.”