We live in a world where the lines between geopolitics and trade and security and finance are increasingly blurred.
Reports that the US Department of War has established a critical minerals team made up of former bankers, commodity traders and financial wheeler-dealers underscores this point.
This intriguing news story also highlights how the weaponisation of critical minerals and rare earth elements is now central to US-China great power competition.
Beijing has a multi-decade head start over Washington in this race.
Take the case of rare earths. In the 1980s, California was the epicentre of rare earth production and the US dominated the sector globally.
During the 1990s, China captured market share by heavily subsidising the refining process that makes rare earths suitable for industrial production.
The US and other western producers could no longer compete on cost or price and started to import their processed rare earth needs from China.
As recently as 2024, the US only bought around $170mn of unprocessed rare earth elements. The rest came from companies inside the Chinese-controlled processing supply chain.
This is the outcome of a long-term Chinese global strategy to dominate the entire mineral value chain.
China has invested hundreds of billions of dollars, by some estimates up to $15bn annually, on this project and the results speak for themselves.
Chinese state-owned companies run mines across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. China currently controls approxminatley 85% of the global rare earth refinining process.
Chinese dominance of this sector first came to prominence with the rising importance of clean tech as part of the fourth energy transition.
EV batteries need lithium, cobalt, and nickel; solar panels need copper, gallium and tellurium; offshore wind turbines require large amounts of manganese, nickel, and chromium.
The rise of AI, cloud computing and data centres fuelled further concerns over Chinese dominace of these raw materials. Semi-conductors require 17 different critical minerals and rare earths. The power systems and cooling networks of data centres require copper, gallium and indium.
This situation became even more intolerable once politicians realised that cutting-edge defense technology is also dependant on the China-dominated supply chain.
The US Department of War has listed over 300 supply chain vulnerabilities in its weapons programs and platforms due to reliance on externally sourced raw materials.
Night-vision equipment, radar systems, and precision-guided munitions all need rare earth elements. So do fighter-jets and submarines. Each F-35 figher, the most costly weapons-system in history, uses around 420 kilos of rare earth materials.
This explains why, after years of negelect, reversing Chinese dominance of the critical mineral/rare earth supply chain now tops the US national security agenda.
The issue can even claim bipartisan support across the American political divide.
Democrats welcomed President Trump’s January 2025 Executive Order (14156) that declared the “lack of diversified critical minerals an imminent threat to prosperity and national security”.
In response to this threat, the Trump Adminsitration has launched Project Vault to build up a massive strategic reseve of key critical minerals and rare earths.
The Pentagon office of ex-bankers doing financial deals to secure mineral rights is only a very minor part of this project.
The White House has also signed around 30 bilateral agreements with countries across the world to counter Chinese influence on the regional level.
These deals have been with traditional US partners including Australia, Japan, the UK and the Phillipines. But they have also been with countries primarily of interest to the US because of their mineral resources.
Loathe to provide humanitarian aid to the developing world, the Trump administration is instead offering high levels of development finance funding for countries in Africa and Latin America willing to partner on critical mineral projects.
In other cases, the US has taken advantage of local conflicts to leverage critical mineral deals.
Ukraine is home to over one hundred types of strategic minerals including Europe’s largest untapped lithium deposits and large amounts of titanium— a key component in defense tech.
In 2025, the US signed a strategic minerals partnership with Ukraine, holding out the hope of protection and even security guarantees in return for long-term access to these precious resources. For its part, Ukraine attempted to leverage its minerals to bind the Trump administration to its side in its war with Russia.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has taken a similar approach. It holds an estimated $24tn in mineral wealth, including the world’s largest cobalt reserves. It has offered the US preferential access to its resources to counterbalance Chinese influence and to gain American military assistance and political support in the contested east of the country.
In a move uncharacteristic of the Trump administration more generally, it is also building a series of multilteral frameworks intended to challenge Chinese global dominance of minerals and related products. These include the Minerals Security Partnership made up of 14-members plus the EU, and the Pax Sillica Alliance which includes Qatar and the UAE among its 15 members.
Here the US is copying China’s use of multilateralism to secure its critical mineral needs. For years, Beijing has taken advantage of frameworks like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to do mineral deals.
The US also has plans to explore deep sea international waters, which are believed to hold vast reserves of critical minerals including nickel, copper, and cobalt.
These plans pose significant technical and legal challenges. But they also risk opening up a new front of geopolitical tension with China and Russia, who are both also looking to exploit the maritime domain for these resources.
It is too early to tell whether the US can close the gap with China on this vital issue.
If Washington fails to do so, critical minerals and rare earth elements will play a major part in tilting the geopolitical balance of power in favour of Beijing in years to come.
- The writer is Professor of International Politics and Director of the Small States and Energy Studies Programs at Georgetown Univeristy in Qatar@RoryDavidMiller