China controls nearly all heavy rare earth processing and most of the refining that turns raw ore into magnets for jets, submarines, and electric vehicles. New mines alone will not loosen that grip if the ore still flows back to Chinese separation plants. This long-form analysis argues that the United States and its partners must organise their efforts around a small number of large, internationally networked processing hubs, rather than a scatter of isolated projects. It examines where those hubs should be, what makes them commercially viable, and how to combine domestic capacity with allied strengths in Australia, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Brazil, and beyond to build a genuine mine to magnet ecosystem outside Beijing’s shadow.