A procession of heavy-duty trucks rolls down the valley to waiting refineries, where shipments of gray ore are processed into a battery material vital to the world’s energy transition — lithium. The surging popularity of electric vehicles has transformed this once threadbare area into the country’s lithium mining capital.

The U.S. has already lost Donald Trump’s trade war. It’s now up to the president to decide how disastrous that loss will be. The best-case scenario for the U.S. economy right now is the Trump administration fully backing down and acknowledging this loss,

The Trump administration walked back its most aggressive tariffs on China last week, easing a trade war that had effectively halted the shipment of goods between the world's two largest economies. After talks in Geneva,