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"Next Year's News This Week" MEDIUM RARE II: Critical Minerals, Rare Earths, and the Trade War By Evan Anderson _______ Why Read: Along with oil, critical minerals and rare earth elements are the backbone of all modern technology. Without access to both, every nation is a vassal state. This week, we review the PRC's monopoly on the industry, what has happened in the trade war, and why the only thing that can address the problem is international cooperation between the United States and its allies. - era _______ The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths. - Deng Xiaoping, 1992 35 tons of rare earth elements go into a single F-35. We don't know exactly what the distribution of that is, but we do know that we have to import a lot of these rare earth elements already refined or processed to some degree from China. So there is a worry that China is going to use this as leverage against the United States, as Sino-American relations and great power rivalry and great power politics go global and possibly go green. - Wesley A. Hill, Assistant Director of the Energy, Growth, and Security Program, International Tax and Investment Center
In September 2025, we published MEDIUM RARE: How to Break the Rare Earth Element Chokehold. The point of the piece was relatively straightforward: as with other global economic chokepoints (*cough cough* the Strait of Hormuz), the critical minerals and rare earth element (REE) markets were in a complete chokehold, and the People's Republic of China held the cards. This was prescient, but not that prescient. The issue had been studied for years, as the PRC built out massive reserves of these key elements and their refining. Given their critical role in most modern technology, renewables, and military applications, the entire planet is now dependent on them. Simply stated, our armies and our energy essentially come from two main things, as so aptly described in the quote from Deng Xiaoping above: oil and critical minerals/REEs. Below is the 2025 USGS list of which minerals and REEs are relevant:
The United States has been focusing lately on developing more comprehensive control over the world's oil reserves, from Venezuela to Iran. But without a reliable source of the critical minerals listed above, oil alone does not a secure nation make. An adversary nation that controls the entire global market is a downright disaster. Hence, our September article was focused on the need to fix that very issue. The recommendations for what could be done (outside of China) were as follows:
In other words, break the stranglehold by making more stuff. Not exactly rocket science. So ... how have things gone since last fall?
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