The US, Japan and the European Union have filed a case against China at the World Trade Organization, challenging its restrictions on rare earth exports.
US President Barack Obama accused China of breaking agreed trade rules as he announced the case at the White House.
Beijing has set quotas for exports of rare earths, which are critical to the manufacture of high-tech products from hybrid cars to flat-screen TVs.
A number of critical extractible natural resources are held by a few countries.
The question that begs is whether the few holders of a more or less universally needed raw material have the right to ‘extort’ money from the non-holders or to use those reources to geo-politicially ‘leverage’ the non-holders.
A simple analogy would be a watershed at the head of a long and broad and agriculturally fertile valley along which, in linear or distributary array, are several countries depending on the water in a river that flows from a watershed which exists in only one country at the head of the valley.
Does that one country at the head of the valley have the right to dam up or to divert that river so that it can deny that water to the countries downstream in order to extort higher prices from them or to exercise geo-political control over them?
Do the other countries have the right, militarily or otherwise, to take coercive against that one country at the head of the valley to stop its extortive practices?
Who is right, who is wrong?
What is right, what is wrong?
They are both right.