What were we thinking starting a trade war without figuring out the rare earth issue: Jim Cramer

If we've learned one thing during the president's recent negotiations with China, it's that we don't have the cards. We can disrupt their entire manufacturing economy. We can threaten them with a level of unemployment, specifically youth unemployment, that they didn't see coming.But in the end, we got rules because of one thing, our well-known dependence on China for rare earth minerals. They got them. We need them.Although, it does make you wonder what the heck were we thinking when we started a trade war ...