Türkiye will not sell rare earth elements to the USA

Yep, this is about local politics. It is customary in Turkish politics to discover vast natural resources from time to time and promise that good times are ahead if you vote for Erdogan one more time(this field was discovered months before the 2023 elections).

They are often exaggerated, although resources exist. There's a meme from the previous election cycle about a pro-Erdogan TV personality celebrating the natural gas reserves discovered before elections instructing citizens to open the windows and run the boilers even if its a hot day because Turkey is now a natural gas boss.

The Turkish state isn't shy from selling access to these resources to foreign companies but this often leads to scandals and environmental disasters. Last year SSR mining, a Canadian company, had a huge mine collapse. Also, there are issues about cutting down forests to access mines that creates a lot of trouble for the government as it leads to widespread protests.

So what's the minister is actually saying is that Don't worry we are not going to sell it to foreign companies that will ruin the environment this time in response to rumours that they are going to sell it. But in Turkey, nobody remembers anything so anything can happen.

Yeah, I'm from Turkey and it's really annoying for me to use a keyboard shortcuts to select "Türkiye" from dropdowns using year old "T", "U", "R" keys. Now in some websites it's "Turkey" and in some websites it's "Türkiye" I need to switch keyboard layouts just to select my country name.

Even though, website doesn't let me use my actual name since my name has non ascii characters so I need to try many times.

"Following an official letter submitted to the United Nations by the Republic of Türkiye, the country's name has been officially changed to Türkiye at the UN.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that a letter had been received on June 1 from the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavuşoğlu addressed to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, requesting the use of “Türkiye” instead of “Turkey” for all affairs." [1]

"Foreign Minister Cavuşoğlu said in a tweet that the move would "increase our country's brand value".

The country’s English language public broadcaster TRT World said, the move would help to disassociate the country’s image from the large bird of the same name."[2]

[1] https://turkiye.un.org/en/184798-turkeys-name-changed-t%C3%B... [2] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/turkey-or-turkiye-why-th...

As a Turkish person I used to agree with you. Not anymore. My people don't want to be associated with an ugly bird and I respect that. Also we don't want an exception. We're ready to use Bharat, Deutschland or any other name in our language if those nations want that. Same for the city names. It's about respecting those countries and their people.

Fun fact: India is Hindistan in Turkish which literally means Land of Turkeys. Maybe we should really change. Bharat means spice which is a better name.

Not sure if it's a trend already that some countries are trying to exert more control over their own names, but I noticed the same with Belarus a few years ago. It used to be called "White Russia" in german, but at some point, the name vanished from both press articles and official publications and was replaced with Belarus. According to Wikipedia, there was a german government decision to change the official usage of the name, co-initiated by the Belarusian government. (This was before the war, so I assume the relations weren't yet as icy as they are today)

https://dgo-online.org/informieren/aktuelles/belarusisch-deu...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210924060241/https://geschicht... (in German)

Funnily, the actual pronunciation is easier now, and it (to me) sounds 99% close to Turkia. I don't get why they went with such complicated letter sequence for such a straightforward word. Though both languages are not native to me, so I may be wrong. But I was baffled this year, after discovering that incomprehensible Türkiye is actually Turkia.

PS: I'm going from this this video as a basis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYjVIaZA14c

Do we?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=T%C3%BCrki... (US)

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=T%C3%BCrkiye,Turk... (global)

Some noise in the global trend recently (any guesses?) but does not seem like a huge adjustment.

It's because Erdogan is in charge and he's throwing his weight around because he knows he holds the cards on a number of geopolitical issues.

We're laying the groundwork to globally search/replace "India" to "Bharat."

Not every country has economically extractable heavy rare earths, resource =/= reserve. X discovers rare earth is the same as X discovers plants, and then assume every country can build a robust biofuel economy. Reminder PRC has the MOST shale deposits in the world, they're just buried very deep and economically AND technically not productive to extract at scale.

PRC's main choke hold is HeavyREE, more specifically processing of ionic clays that is GEOGRAPHICALLY SCARCE like economically extractable oil deposits, which enables economic leeching of heavy strategic rare earth AT SCALE. Think hunting whales for blubber vs drilling oil, supports entirely different tiers of proliferation and use. At scale is key, west never used HREEs at scale until PRC commoditized them by exploiting specific geology mostly limited to south PRC, Myanmar, parts of Brazil but deposits now also found in Australia because Australia has everything. So the real question is can long will it take AU+co to discover and build the entire HREE infra based on deposit types only PRC has real experience with.

It's have nothing to do with "figuring it out". Both mining and processing been figured out decades ago. But rare earth mining is disaster for ecology and western countries just don't want to pay the tall and deal with political consequences. Countries like China and Russia have advantage the they can do whatever they want without caring about protests or long term effects on population of regions where mining occurs.

There quite few talks on the topic, but you can check this one by Dr. Julie Klinger of University of Delaware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGQeXrkCqM0

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The us has tons of rare earth ores, it's the refining the US lacks mostly because it's a nasty process that creates a lot of toxic waste.

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Is the land yours to give?

NATO is a defensive alliance, not a trade organization.

what's left of it after it's dismantlement you mean? it isn't much of an alliance now. and if it is going to be used to twist arms in trade disagreements, it is already dead.

You want to kick them out of NATO because the USA and Turkey currently do not have a trade agreement on rare earth elements? Because that's what you are claiming.

Türkiye is a highly effective arms manufacturer and is pretty aligned with NATO most of the time. They've been one of the more surprisingly strong supporters of Ukraine. They shot down a Russian jet a few years ago just to emphasize FAFO.

Yes they have their specific regional interests they will emphasize even when they offend NATO sensibilities, like giving Armenia the finger in their war with Azerbaijan, but that is not a major cost compared to what they give the US and EU strategically.

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