

It can be under certain circumstances, its generally desireable for a country to be able to feed itself for example, and being able to produce products yourself is useful when negotiating trade agreements. The problem is when autarky becomes conflated with isolationism.
Iirc the dirty secret of rare earth metals is that every country has them in at least some capacity even if there’s variability in how easy to access those deposits are. The dirty part is that the countries that produce them less so have a particular abundance and more so have a lack of environmental regulations.