Resource extraction

He says the CIA functions as the enforcement arm of American multinationals and ties its role in Indonesia to corporate extraction of resources such as rubber.

Jiang says Chinese ships in Australian waters reflect a broader Chinese push to extract resources as fast as possible and dump goods globally out of desperation and anxiety.

Jiang argues that so-called rare earth scarcity is misleading because many countries have the minerals but avoid large-scale extraction due to its long-term environmental destruction, whereas China accepts those costs because it behaves like a colony or plantation economy oriented toward immediate output rather than long-term stewardship.

He argues that in the 1960s and 1970s the United States installed South American dictators who bankrupted their regimes while local elites transferred resources northward to America.

Jiang argues the strategy's real purpose is to leverage not only those power vectors but also allied wealth and capacity, especially from Europe, South Korea, and Japan, to relieve U.S. debt and advance American private interests.

He uses the line 'to be a friend to America is fatal' to argue that the United States now treats alliance as a mechanism for stripping partner states of resources.

Jiang rejects oil as the main explanation for attacking Venezuela, arguing that the United States could obtain Venezuelan oil more cheaply through elite capture and that Venezuela's oil is capital-intensive and expensive to extract.

Alexander says Russia has rare earths and once had a full rare-earth industry in Soviet times, but that industry was heavily degraded after the Soviet collapse and is now the subject of a revival program.