It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The fall of the Berlin Wall was to bring about one, integrated world market where goods and services freely traversed borders without the interference of meddling ideologues—where the agricultural, mineral and man-made treasures of one country would be available to anyone, anywhere who was willing to pay for them: oil, gold, diamonds, soybeans, palm oil, wheat, computers, software and myriad other products of the earth and of human endeavor. It’s not working out that way. Not every country completely bought into this idea of an almost frictionless international capitalist order overseen benignly by global organizations created by treaties adhered to by all the world’s nations. Among the most obvious is China. China has started to treat rare earth elements—which are critical to practically everything electronic these days—the way the Atreides family, a ruling family in the Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune […]