Wed February, 2021, Age: 3 years
U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order to bolster efforts to build or improve supply chains for chips and other strategically important products like semi-conductors in order to be less reliant on China. The U.S. will look to key partners in the Asian region like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea for increased chip production and will most likely lean on ally Australia for rare earth materials. The U.S. currently imports 80% of its rare earths from China, while some 90% of certain medical products are sourced from China. This imposed certain hurdles early on in the U.S.’s pandemic response and resulted in an acute shortage of masks early on. According to an unnamed Japanese government source, “I’ve heard that for now, the U.S. will do an intensive review of its supply chains to sort out how much it depends on which countries for semiconductors and rare earths. It will hash out countermeasures with allies after that.”