China is the world’s second biggest producer of silver and seventh largest producer of nickel. Bonus is that the biggest producer of nickel is Indonesia, which has a free trade agreement with China and the third biggest producer is Russia (lol, lmao).
Also love the example of Sorghum because China is producer #8 in the world and 4 of the top producers are global south countries that absolutely would not cut off trade with China. Also, lmao at the thought of the CPC just collapsing because people can’t get one specific type of liquor. Imagine Russia trying to undermine America by targeting its strategic vodka supply.
All this tells me is that the West doesn’t produce anything that is irreplaceable to China and that the think tankers and journalists are too delusional to recognize this.
I think I saw an engineer once describe the crane-and-blocks one as one of those models that demonstrates the theory really well, but is wildly impractical in most cases