I pretty sure our general strategy is to buy as much resources as we can from other countries before tapping into our own. By forcing people to buy lithium from elsewhere, we are increasing our domestic reserve. Since lithium can be reprocessed, even car and phone batteries have value in this regard.

We took a similar strategy to fossil fuels, but I think we are figuring out that the world will be fried by time we are the last people with oil left. We are fighting wars over oil right now, but wars will eventually be fought to keep it in the ground. It's good to have a domestic supply on hand for when shit goes fubar.