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A new phase of the Cold War has begun

BEIJING, China—In a capital swathed in the gray chill of economic anxiety, the Mandarins of the Chinese Communist Party convened once again, their faces impassive, their words forceful. A new phase of the Cold War has begun.

By Skeeter Wesinger
April 9. 2025

China, though publicly resolved to “fight to the end,” remains exposed—strategically, industrially, and geopolitically—before the full weight of Washington’s economic arsenal. President Donald Trump, in a maneuver reminiscent of early Cold War brinkmanship, has levied a stunning 104 percent tariff on Chinese goods. The effect is already being felt across the Eastern hemisphere and in the darkened boardrooms of Beijing.

However, the game did not begin with the Trump tariffs.

Long before the world turned its attention to tariffs and trade imbalances, Beijing had already moved its pieces. Silently. Systematically. Rare Earth Elements—that vital arsenal of modern industry, the invisible sinews of everything from smartphones to submarines—became the first pawns on China’s grand chessboard.

The Elements of Power
It was a move the West scarcely registered—at first.

China, holding over 90% of global production, began tightening its grip:

Light Rare Earth Elements (LREEs):
Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium,

Promethium (radioactive, rare even in commerce),

Samarium

Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREEs):
Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium,

Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, Lutetium

Often grouped as well:
Scandium

Yttrium (considered a heavy REE)

These were not just minerals—they were the ore of empires.

The Timeline of Quiet Aggression
1990s–Early 2000s:
China outproduces the world. The West, disarmed by its own complacency, watches.

2006:
Export quotas are introduced. A whisper of resource conservation is offered. The real reason is leverage.

2009:
The screws tighten. Western firms are pushed to relocate operations to China or be cut off.

2010:
A chilling demonstration of power: after a maritime clash over the Senkaku Islands, China halts rare earth exports to Japan. Global prices skyrocket. Supply chains fracture.

2012:
The United States, Japan, and the EU awaken at last and file a case with the World Trade Organization.

2014:
The WTO rules against Beijing. A brief, Pyrrhic victory for the West.

2015:
China lifts quotas—but tightens internal production controls, maintaining dominance under the guise of environmental stewardship.

Strategic Impact: A Blade with No Sheath
The minerals most threatened:

Neodymium & Praseodymium – the iron sinew of high-strength magnets

Dysprosium & Terbium – the heart of heat-resistant alloys and phosphors

Yttrium & Europium – the bright blood of lasers, screens, and satellite optics

These are not raw materials; they are the nervous system of the modern state.

The New Front
Today, as Trump signals another 50% increase in tariffs, Beijing’s state media calls this confrontation a “strategic opportunity.” It may yet prove to be a grave miscalculation.

China’s Vice Premier Li Qiang has vowed that the nation is “fully confident” in its economic resilience. But confidence is not strength, and rhetoric is not steel. As Henry Gao, an expert in international trade law, notes grimly, “The Chinese economy has been significantly weakened since Trump’s first term.”

Last year, exports to the U.S. were $440 billion—nearly three times what flowed the other way. Much of it machinery, electronics, and consumer goods. Now, a glut looms in domestic markets already saturated.

“Certain products are specifically designed for American or European markets,”
says Tang Yao of Peking University.
“Redirecting them for domestic use will have only a limited effect.”

Even within the pages of the People’s Daily, one reads veiled admissions beneath the nationalist fervor: strategic opportunity is another word for forced pivot.

This is not merely a trade war.
It is the first cold salvo of a new global conflict, a technological standoff not unlike the arms races of the 20th century. This time, the launch codes are in silicon, not silos. The battleground is mineral, digital, and psychological.

And while Washington eyes the Indo-Pacific and Beijing rallies its internal engines, one truth echoes from the last great Cold War:

“He who controls the resources controls the future. He who controls the story controls the war.”

The minerals may be rare, but the struggle for power is not just a meme war on Trump’s tariffs today. There is a larger bolder strategy to this new Cold War.

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DeepSeek’s Mind-Blowing AI Solution Caught in a Cover-Up?

DeepSeek, a rising CCP AI company, was under siege. The company’s official statement, issued in careful, bureaucratic phrasing, spoke of an orchestrated “distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack” aimed at crippling its systems. A grave and urgent matter, to be sure. Yet, for those who had followed the firm’s meteoric rise, there was reason for skepticism

DeepSeek had, until this moment, presented itself as a leader in artificial intelligence, one of the few entities capable of standing alongside Western firms in the increasingly cutthroat race for dominance in machine learning. It was a firm backed, either openly or in whispered speculation, by the unseen hand of the Chinese state. The company’s servers, housed in mainland China, were reportedly fueled by NVIDIA H800 GPUs, their interconnections optimized through NVLink and InfiniBand. A formidable setup, at least on paper

But then came the curious measures. Whole swaths of IP addresses, particularly from the United States, were unceremoniously blocked. The platform’s registration doors were slammed shut. And in the vague, elliptical style of official Chinese pronouncements, the public was assured that these were emergency steps to preserve service stability. What the company did not say—what they could not say—was that these actions bore all the hallmarks of a hasty retreat, rather than a tactical defense

For a true DDoS attack—one launched by sophisticated adversaries—there were measures to mitigate it. Content delivery networks. Traffic filtering. Rate-limiting techniques refined over decades by those who had fought in the trenches of cybersecurity. Yet DeepSeek’s response was not one of resilience, but of restriction. They were not filtering the bad actors; they were sealing themselves off from the world

A theory began to take shape among industry watchers. If DeepSeek had overestimated its own technological prowess, if its infrastructure was ill-prepared for rapid growth, the sudden influx of new users might have looked, to their own internal systems, like an attack. And if the company was not merely a commercial enterprise but an entity with deeper ties—perhaps to sectors of the Chinese government—it would not do to admit such failings publicly. To confess that their AI could not scale, that their systems could not bear the weight of global interest, would be an unpardonable humiliation.

The consequences of such a revelation would be severe. The markets had already felt the tremors of cyberattacks; the global economy had bled $1.5 trillion due to disruptions of this nature. If DeepSeek, a firm hailed as the vanguard of China’s AI ambitions, was faltering under its own weight, the financial and political repercussions would extend far beyond the walls of its server farms. The illusion of invulnerability had to be maintained

Thus, the narrative of a “DDoS attack” was not merely convenient—it was necessary. It allowed DeepSeek to take drastic action while obscuring the truth. Blocking foreign IPs? A countermeasure against cyber threats. Suspending new users? A precaution against infiltration. A firm whose technological backbone was more fragile than its reputation suggested had suddenly found an excuse to withdraw from scrutiny under the guise of self-defense

It is in such moments that history leaves its telltale fingerprints. The annals of technological development are filled with entities that stumbled not due to sabotage, but due to their own shortcomings, concealed under layers of propaganda and misdirection. One wonders if, years from now, when the documents are unsealed and the real story emerges, historians will look back at DeepSeek’s so-called DDoS crisis not as an act of foreign aggression—but as a moment of revelation, when the cracks in the edifice became too great to hide

Also, the DeepSeek app has been removed from both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store in Italy. This action occurred after Italy’s data protection authority, known as the Garante, requested information from DeepSeek regarding its handling of personal data. Users attempting to access the app in Italy received messages indicating that it was “currently not available in the country or area you are in” on Apple’s App Store and that the download “was not supported” on Google’s platform. As reported by REUTERS.CO

Regarding Ireland, the Irish Data Protection Commission has also reached out to DeepSeek, seeking details about how it processes data related to Irish users. However, as of now, there is no confirmation that the app has been removed from app stores in Ireland. As reported by THEGUARDIAN.COM

Currently there is no publicly available information indicating that DeepSeek has specifically blocked access from Apple, Google, or individual reporters’ servers. It’s possible that access issues could be related to the broader measures DeepSeek has implemented in response to recent events, but without specific details, it’s difficult to determine the exact cause.

For now, the truth remains elusive, hidden behind digital firewalls and the careful hand of censorship. But as in all such cases, history is patient. It waits for those who will dig deeper, who will look beyond the official statements and ask: Was it an attack? Or was it something else entirely?

Story By Skeeter Wesinger

January 30, 2025

 

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Salt Typhoon: The Cyberattack That Threatens Global Stability

In response, U.S. officials have urged the public to switch to encrypted messaging services such as Signal and WhatsApp. These platforms offer the only reliable defense against unauthorized access to private communications. Meanwhile, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are working alongside affected companies to contain the breach, fortify networks, and prevent future incursions. Yet, this incident raises a troubling question: Are we witnessing the dawn of a new era in cyber conflict, where the lines between espionage and outright warfare blur beyond recognition?

The Salt Typhoon attack is more than a wake-up call—it’s a stark reminder that robust cybersecurity measures are no longer optional. The consequences of this breach extend far beyond the immediate damage, rippling through geopolitics and economics in ways that could reshape global power dynamics.

One might wonder, “What could the PRC achieve with fragments of seemingly innocuous data?” The answer lies in artificial intelligence. With its vast technological resources, China could use AI to transform this scattered information into a strategic treasure trove—a detailed map of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure, user behavior, and exploitable vulnerabilities.

AI could analyze metadata from call records to uncover social networks, frequent contacts, and key communication hubs. Even unencrypted text messages, often dismissed as trivial, could reveal personal and professional insights. Metadata, enriched with location stamps, offers the ability to track movements and map behavioral patterns over time.

By merging this data with publicly available information—social media profiles, public records, and more—AI could create enriched profiles, cross-referencing datasets to identify trends, anomalies, and relationships. Entire organizational structures could be unearthed, revealing critical roles and influential figures in government and industry.

AI’s capabilities go further. Sentiment analysis could gauge public opinion and detect dissatisfaction with remarkable precision. Machine learning models could anticipate vulnerabilities and identify high-value targets, while graph-based algorithms could map communication networks, pinpointing leaders and insiders for potential exploitation.

The implications are both vast and chilling. Armed with such insights, the PRC could target individuals in sensitive positions, exploiting personal vulnerabilities for recruitment or coercion. It could chart the layout of critical infrastructure, identifying nodes for future sabotage. Even regulatory agencies and subcontractors could be analyzed, creating leverage points for broader influence.

This is the terrifying reality of Salt Typhoon: a cyberattack that strikes not just at data but at the very trust and integrity of a nation’s systems. It is a silent assault on the confidence in infrastructure, security, and the resilience of a connected society. Such a breach should alarm lawmakers and citizens alike, as the true implications of an attack of this magnitude are difficult to grasp.

The PRC, with its calculated precision, has demonstrated how advanced AI and exhaustive data analysis can be weaponized to gain an edge in cyber and information warfare. What appear today as isolated breaches could coalesce into a strategic advantage of staggering proportions. The stakes are clear: the potential to reshape the global balance of power, not through military might, but through the quiet, pervasive influence of digital dominance.

By Skeeter Wesinger

December 5, 2024

 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/salt-typhoon-cyberattack-threatens-global-stability-skeeter-wesinger-iwoye

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