It’s not the rare earth thing that China used - they literally talked about it in their media a few times.

They simply paraded a economic atomic bomb around wallstreet enough that these guys got scared enough and called Donnie (might even be the real reason Musk and him had a fallout) - who in term tried to persuade the Arabs to help him out if the PRC would pull the trigger.

Whaf economic bomb? The bonds and, to a far lesser degree, shares. The PRC owns around 682 billion dollars in US bonds. Combined with currency reserves (around 1.5-2 Trillion USD) and other similar things it is expected to wield a total market power of around 3 trillion USD. Even putting 20% of these on the market with a “we don’t care about the losses,motherfucker” directive would ruin the US econmy for a decade in possible domino effects.

The funny things? In terms of bonds China is not even that big - Japan has almost twice that, the UK has 888 Billion. Even Belgium has around 400 billion of US bonds.

In other words: If Europe would finally get their shit together and parade it’s own,much larger, economic H-bomb ready AND would make it clear that they would be willing to use it Donnie would still pout,but do much less. But of course…we don’t. Germany has a wallstreet manager as a chancellor, Macron is on it’s way out, Meloni is in bed with him, etc.

This will literally lead to European lifes being lost at some point.

Tbh, it could also be an option for the EU to speed up the membership process for Moldavia to protect it from Russian interference (or even invasion if the situation in the Ukraine goes to shit): Let Moldavia join Romania as an autonomous province and pay the bill for Romania. And in the meantime the membership rules would not be compromised and fucking Orban couldn’t do shit.

I like this solution,tbh, but I also fully understand Moldavians wanting to preserve their independence.

And of course there is also the transnistria-Issue.

Have a look at open cloud.