Vietnam, Rare Earths, and the Evolving China Plus One Strategy

The article exposes a critical vulnerability in Australia's decoupling strategy: China's near-monopoly on rare-earth refining (and upstream processing of other critical minerals) persists even as manufacturing shifts to allies like Vietnam. This means Australia cannot achieve true supply-chain independence through geographic diversification alone without developing domestic refining capacity—a costly and years-long undertaking that the article implicitly shows is not yet happening at scale.