Your Preferred T2K Timeline

[Rainbow Six]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

So, give some remote area of Russia a significant deposit of REEs and they will be rolling in the cash. It might even be a causus belli for war with China.

That sounds pretty plausible to me. I could be wrong - it's been a long time since I read it - but IIRC Tom Clancy's Bear and Dragon used something along those lines to posit a conflict between what was by then the Russian Federation and China - I think the premise was that the Russians discovered large deposits of gold and oil in Siberia.