With the Busan rare earth truce set to expire on November 10, 2026, the Trump administration heads to Beijing for a make-or-break summit while G7 partners struggle to paper over deep divisions in Paris. A landmark OECD report quantifies what everyone already fears: export restrictions now cover seventy percent of global cobalt and manganese trade, and the architecture meant to fix this problem is being built on fractured diplomatic ground.
Introduction
The town of Lacq sits in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, better known for the natural gas fields that powered postwar French industry than for anything to do with magnets or electric vehicles. But on a grey morning in late April 2026, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure stood in a cavernous industrial hangar there and announced something that would have seemed improbable a decade ago: France intended to rebuild a rare earth processing industry from scratch, targeting enough heavy rare earth oxide output by 2030 to cover the entirety of European demand.
Lescure chose his analogy carefully. The International Energy Agency, he reminded reporters, had been born in the 1970s not out of optimism but out of crisis, when OPEC's production monopoly revealed how catastrophically dependent Western economies had become on a single bloc of suppliers. What he did not say, but what every trade official in the room understood, was that the analogy was only partially reassuring. The IEA took years to construct the legal and financial architecture for coordinated oil reserves. The rare earth clock, by contrast, is already running. It stops on November 10, 2026.
That date, when China's suspension of its sweeping October 2025 rare earth export controls expires under the terms of the Busan truce, is now functioning as the organizing deadline for an extraordinary convergence of diplomatic activity. In the space of a single week in early May 2026, G7 trade ministers gathered in Paris to argue about mineral supply chain strategy while simultaneously trading threats over car tariffs. The OECD published an inventory showing that export restrictions on critical raw materials have increased fivefold since 2009, now covering up to seventy percent of global cobalt and manganese exports. And Donald Trump prepared to board Air Force One for Beijing, the first American presidential visit to China in nearly a decade, with rare earth access formally identified as a top summit priority. The question connecting all three moments is the same: can the West construct a durable framework for mineral supply security before the truce runs out, or is it simply buying time while the underlying structural problem deepens?
The Truce That Wasn't
When Trump and Xi shook hands in Busan last October, the White House was quick to frame the outcome as a strategic win. China had agreed to pause the sweeping export controls it had announced on October 9, 2025, controls that had sent manufacturers from Detroit to Stuttgart scrambling for alternative supply. The suspension, formalized through China's Ministry of Commerce Announcement No. 70, covered six prior regulatory measures and extended to gallium, germanium, antimony, and a range of rare earth processing technologies. In Washington, officials pointed to the reprieve as evidence that American leverage was working.
The picture that has emerged in the months since is considerably more complicated. As I noted in my April analysis of how Beijing has used the Busan framework to trade short-term concessions for lasting leverage, the suspension was never a policy rollback. China's April 4, 2025 licensing regime, which requires case-by-case government approval for exports of seven rare earth elements and their permanent magnets, remained fully operational throughout the truce. Since December 1, 2025, export of those materials for military applications has been effectively banned. Western defense manufacturers, and the European countries trying to supply Ukraine with arms, have been living with that constraint ever since.
Analysts at Piper Sandler were blunt in their assessment at the time: Xi had come prepared for Trump's second term, and the rare earth card was precisely the kind of asymmetric leverage that Beijing had been cultivating for years. The structural reality is stark. China accounts for roughly seventy percent of global rare earth mining, ninety percent of processing, and ninety-three percent of permanent magnet manufacturing. A mine that begins the permitting process in the United States today faces an average journey of twenty-nine years before it produces a single tonne of ore, a timeline that makes every short-term diplomatic agreement feel like a holding action against geology and bureaucracy.
Then, in late March 2026, Premier Li Qiang signed State Council Order No. 834, promulgating China's first dedicated administrative regulation on industrial and supply chain security. The new provisions grant Chinese authorities sweeping powers to investigate foreign firms, governments, and individuals that seek to shift supply chains away from China, imposing potential retaliatory measures including export and import bans. A senior U.S. official, speaking on background, described the regulations as "a clear attempt to stop derisking." Cameron Johnson of consultancy Tidalwave Solutions put it more plainly: "This formalizes China's shift from seeing supply chains as only economic to treating them as a national security asset." The message to any company contemplating diversification away from Chinese processing was unambiguous.
The Periodic Table of Political Pressure
The OECD's 2026 inventory of export restrictions on critical raw materials, released in late April to coincide almost precisely with the Paris ministerial, provides the most comprehensive empirical map yet of a world in which minerals have become instruments of statecraft. The report's headline finding is one that should be laminated and pinned above the desk of every trade negotiator in the G7: approximately sixteen percent of all global trade in critical raw materials now faces at least one export restriction, up from twelve percent in 2009 to 2011. For cobalt and manganese, the figure reaches seventy percent. For graphite, it is forty-seven percent. For rare earth elements, forty-five percent.
Those numbers represent a fivefold increase in export restrictions since the OECD began systematically tracking the data. The acceleration began in earnest around 2022 and 2023, when the energy price shock following Russia's invasion of Ukraine pushed resource-rich governments toward protective nationalism. But the 2024 data reveal a more troubling evolution: the geographic spread of restrictions is widening. While China and India together account for more than a third of all measures introduced since 2009, new restrictions introduced in 2024 came from a more diverse set of countries, particularly in Africa and Asia. Myanmar introduced price-contingent tax rates on manganese, nickel, and rare earths. Sierra Leone applied fiscal taxes targeting titanium, zirconium, and germanium. Nigeria introduced licensing requirements covering niobium, tantalum, and vanadium. Rwanda imposed export taxes on tin and tungsten.
What this pattern suggests is that the resource nationalism pioneered by China is becoming a model. OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann, speaking at the Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul, framed the concern in measured institutional language: export restrictions can increase supply chain vulnerabilities in highly concentrated supply chains by limiting volumes and driving up prices. But the data beneath his careful phrasing describes something more systemic. Export prohibitions, the most severe category of restriction, now account for more than one quarter of all measures introduced in 2024. Revenue generation, rather than strategic industrial policy, has become the single most cited rationale, reflecting a broader turn among developing economies toward using mineral endowments as fiscal instruments. The upstream is tightening fastest: restrictions on ores and raw minerals grew tenfold between 2009 and 2024, nearly twice as fast as restrictions on more refined forms of critical raw materials.
For downstream manufacturers in the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea, this accumulation of restrictions represents a structural supply risk that no single bilateral deal can address. The OECD inventory was always designed to be a policy instrument, and its timing in May 2026 is not incidental. The data directly informs the U.S. Section 232 process, where Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative face a July 13 deadline to report on negotiated agreements covering processed critical minerals and their derivatives. It also provides the empirical grounding for the G7 joint language on economic coercion, language that sounded strong in the Paris communiqué but that concealed a deeper argument about how to respond.
Paris: Diagnosis Without Prescription
The G7 trade ministers who gathered in Paris on May 5 and 6 represented governments that have never agreed more completely on the nature of the problem and never found it harder to agree on the solution. The joint communiqué was unambiguous in its diagnosis: ministers expressed "grave concerns regarding economic coercion, including coercion through arbitrary export restrictions," and pledged to ensure that "attempts or threats to weaponize economic dependencies will fail." French Foreign Trade Minister Nicolas Forissier struck an optimistic tone on arrival, promising "very concrete progress on rare earths and critical minerals." EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic attended alongside U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and German Economy Minister Katherina Reiche.
Behind the communiqué language, however, two distinct sets of proposals remained unresolved at the close of the meeting. The European approach favors mandatory diversification standards, supply chain audit obligations, and import restriction frameworks rooted in regulatory compliance, an approach that reflects Brussels' instinct, sharpened since the pandemic, to use rule-making as an instrument of industrial sovereignty. As I reported in May, the EU's Internal Market Emergency and Resilience Act, which came into force on May 29, embodies precisely that regulatory philosophy, granting the Commission sweeping emergency powers over critical raw material flows. The American approach, by contrast, centers on bilateral investment partnerships, strategic reserve agreements, and market incentives, with price floor mechanisms as the central structural tool.
The price floor concept deserves close attention, because it represents the clearest point of genuine policy convergence across the G7 debates and the Beijing summit agenda simultaneously. USTR Greer told Congress that plurilateral agreements to boost alternative critical mineral supplies require price floor mechanisms specifically to protect production from potential future predatory pricing by China. The concern is well-grounded: Chinese oversupply of lithium drove Albemarle to halt a U.S. expansion project in 2024, and Chinese competition pushed the Pentagon to become the top shareholder in MP Materials, America's only operating rare earth miner. The Trump administration raised price floors formally at the G7 finance ministers meeting in January 2026, and France's G7 presidency has positioned the question as a priority deliverable for the mid-June leaders' summit in Evian.
What Paris could not resolve was the foundational philosophical question beneath the price floor debate: who sets the floor, who enforces it, and through what institutional mechanism? Without convergence on those questions, the risk is that G7 nations build parallel supply chain architectures that compete rather than complement each other. The meeting also notably produced no binding timelines, no enforcement mechanisms, and no resolution of the two competing proposal sets. The mid-June leaders' summit in Evian inherits these unresolved questions with a considerably shorter runway than Paris provided.
And threading through every session was a live demonstration of the limits of G7 solidarity. On May 1, Trump had announced his intention to raise tariffs on EU-made cars and trucks from fifteen percent to twenty-five percent, citing European non-compliance with the Turnberry Agreement struck with Ursula von der Leyen in July 2025. MEP Bernd Lange, who has been negotiating the agreement's implementation, characterized the move as "clear unreliability" and accused the U.S. of repeatedly breaking its commitments. Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute noted that the administration would likely deploy Section 232 authority to make the increase legally viable, the same statutory mechanism being used simultaneously to negotiate mineral supply agreements. The irony was not subtle: the instrument designed to build allied mineral cooperation was being brandished as a threat against the allies themselves.
Beijing: The Summit That Iran Might Swallow
On May 14 and 15, Trump arrives in Beijing for a summit whose agenda is both precisely defined and deeply vulnerable to disruption. USTR Greer, testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee before departure, stated plainly that the president will discuss obtaining greater access to rare earth minerals controlled globally by China. Greer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng had already held minister-level discussions on rare earths in Paris in March, including the specific question of minerals that transit third countries before reaching the United States. Staff-level consultations have continued even as the summit was pushed back from March to May by the outbreak of the Iran war.
The war has introduced a complicating variable that no trade planner anticipated. China this week hosted Iran's foreign minister for the first time since hostilities began in late February, raising hopes in some capitals for a peace framework but simultaneously guaranteeing that Iran will compete with rare earths for agenda time at the leaders' level. Bessent has confirmed publicly that Iran will feature in the bilateral discussions. Company executives and analysts are not expecting major breakthroughs on minerals, though an extension of the Busan truce is widely seen as the most achievable near-term outcome.
Greer himself offered a notably calibrated statement of ambition before departing: "It would be nice not to have it come up at the leaders' meeting. It would be nice if we could resolve it at the ministers level and the staff level, and hopefully we are in a position to do that." The careful hedging reflects awareness that the summit's most visible outcomes are likely to be symbolic rather than structural. The White House's decision to decline China's invitation to organize industry-specific meetings between senior Chinese leaders and U.S. executives, reportedly to avoid the appearance of American business becoming too close to Beijing, signals a summit managed primarily for domestic political optics rather than for durable commercial architecture.
The clock beneath all of this diplomatic activity ticks with mechanical indifference. The Busan suspension expires on November 10, 2026. The Section 232 report is due July 13. The G7 leaders summit convenes in mid-June. November brings U.S. midterm elections, and China will be advancing its next Five-Year Plan, both of which could shift the political calculus on both sides. Xi told the CCP Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission as far back as April 2020 that China must "tighten the international industrial chain's dependence on China" to form a "strong capacity to counter and deter deliberate supply cutoffs by external parties." The rare earth controls, the anti-derisking regulations signed in March, the extraterritorial deemed-export regime covering foreign products made with Chinese minerals or technology: all of it represents the systematic execution of a strategy articulated six years ago. The West is trying to respond with a set of tools, price floors, strategic reserves, plurilateral agreements, that are still being designed as the deadline approaches.
The Architecture of Urgency
What connects the Busan countdown, the Paris ministerial, and the OECD inventory is not simply a shared subject matter but a shared structural condition: a gap between the pace of diplomatic process and the pace of industrial reality. Downstream manufacturers in the automotive, aerospace, and defense sectors cannot pause production while governments negotiate. The supply disruptions that China's April 2025 rare earth licensing regime caused to U.S. automotive and aerospace manufacturing were not hypothetical exercises in geopolitical modeling; they were assembly lines stopping and procurement officers making emergency calls to brokers in Hong Kong.
The OECD's Cormann is right that improving transparency on export restrictions is essential to promoting more open and diversified markets. But transparency is a precondition, not a solution. What the inventory reveals is that the structural problem has been deepening steadily for fifteen years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, through periods of G7 unity and periods of transatlantic tension, through commodity booms and busts. The fivefold increase in export restrictions since 2009 did not happen because Western governments were not paying attention. It happened because the short-term economic logic of importing cheap Chinese-processed minerals consistently outweighed the long-term strategic logic of building alternative supply chains.
The price floor mechanism, for all its technical complexity, represents something philosophically new: an acknowledgment that market signals alone cannot solve a problem created by market distortion. If China can suppress lithium or rare earth prices whenever a Western alternative producer begins to look economically viable, then no amount of investment in Australian lithium or Canadian cobalt or French rare earth processing will produce durable supply security. A price floor backstops the investment case by guaranteeing that predatory pricing cannot simply wait out Western industrial ambition. But a price floor only works if the countries that need it most can agree on who administers it, at what level, funded how, and enforced against whom. Paris could not answer those questions. Evian will need to.
In the meantime, the Beijing summit will almost certainly produce a headline. Perhaps an extension of the Busan truce for another year. Perhaps a joint statement on balanced trade and managed mineral flows. Perhaps, as Greer suggested, a Board of Trade mechanism aimed at finding products that boost commerce without compromising national security. These are not nothing. A truce extension buys more time for the price floor architecture to take shape, for Project Vault's public-private reserve to deepen its industrial insurance function, for IMERA's emergency powers to mature into operational reality in Brussels. But extension is not resolution. The April 2025 licensing regime remains operational regardless of what is agreed in Beijing. The anti-derisking regulations signed by Premier Li in March remain on the books. The OECD data documenting the spread of resource nationalism from Yangon to Freetown to Lagos will not be reversed by a presidential handshake.
Billionaire mining investor Robert Friedland put the Western position with characteristic bluntness: the United States is "totally dependent on China for almost every critical mineral." The average wait for a new U.S. mine to reach production is twenty-nine years. The Busan truce expires in six months.
Conclusion
Back in Lacq, Roland Lescure's hangar now represents something more than a political announcement. It is a physical wager that the West can actually build what it says it needs, not in diplomatic communiqués or presidential proclamations but in steel and acid and processing equipment, before the structural leverage shifts further toward Beijing. France's plan to cover one hundred percent of European demand for heavy rare earth oxides by 2030 is ambitious to the point of audacity. It will require securing overseas mineral supplies, building refining capacity, developing alloy production, and establishing magnet manufacturing, the entire value chain, in a country that gave up its rare earth industry decades ago because Chinese competition made it uneconomical.
The IEA analogy that Lescure invoked in Lacq is instructive in ways he may not have intended. The agency was born in crisis, yes, but it took the 1973 oil shock, the actual experience of fuel shortages and economic disruption, to produce the political will for genuine institutional coordination. The West is trying to build its critical mineral equivalent before the analogous shock arrives, working from the evidence of the OECD inventory, the warnings of the G7 communiqué, and the ticking clock of the Busan suspension, rather than from the galvanizing reality of assembly lines stopped indefinitely and defense programs delayed by years.
Greer, boarding his plane for Beijing, knows the limitations of what the summit can deliver. He said as much to Congress: it would be nice to resolve the rare earths question before it reaches the leaders' table. That it has reached the leaders' table anyway, at a summit also crowded with a regional war and a bilateral economic relationship of staggering complexity, tells you something about how much ground remains uncovered. The question is whether the urgency of November 10 is finally enough to produce not just another tactical pause, but the durable framework that every summit since Busan has promised and none has yet delivered.