For well over a decade, the U.S. has made negligible progress on reducing its dependence on Chinese rare earths. With its rare earth export controls of April and October 2025, Beijing laid that dependency bare and catalyzed a major mobilization by the Trump administration to seek a secure supply.
In this case study prepared for the Task Force on the U.S.-China Policy, Sam Chetwin George explains how China built this leverage, how the U.S. system failed to mobilize, and assesses the Trump administration's latest moves to de-risk its minerals supply chain. For Washington, the bill for years of policy failure is coming due. The deployment of China's rare earths dominance has weakened Trump's negotiating posture in trade and other domains. While the White House has now mobilized with serious intent, its belated initiatives will not yield substantive results until the late 2020s and early 2030s. This leaves open a window of vulnerability.
No comments:
Post a Comment