Malaysia plans to ban exports of rare earth minerals

Misleading headline. They still want to export it, but they want to process the minerals locally, and then export the processed rare earth material.

They got a bunch of a valuable resource, and they're going to maximize its value by... not selling it...? So they've been taking lessons from debeers I guess?

Here's how that plays out when it's a critical resource and not a frivolity... the people who critically need it will establish the resource somewhere else. Lets say you own 50% of the current output. That 50% will be made available somewhere else somehow, because it's critical. Now your 50% is only 33%, and it's criticality is significantly less, and you can't sell it for as much as you used to be able to, IF you can even sell it at all, because you were a dick when people needed it and didn't have it, and the world remembers that kinda shit for a while.

And of course, if it's critical enough, there are some pretty big militaries out there that might come knocking...