With China's Busan export-control suspension set to expire in November and a permanent licensing architecture quietly expanding beneath the truce, the G7's Paris ministerial produced its strongest-ever language on mineral weaponisation but no binding mechanism to act on it. Meanwhile, a growing cohort of nations is bypassing both Washington and Beijing entirely, building a patchwork of bilateral deals that reflects a simple, uncomfortable truth: the credibility crisis afflicting US-led frameworks is as damaging to Western supply chain resilience as anything Beijing has engineered.
Introduction
The room at the Palais des Congrès in Paris smelled of fresh diplomacy and old anxiety. On the morning of May 5, as G7 trade ministers settled into their chairs for two days of talks under France's rotating presidency, Nicolas Forissier, France's Foreign Trade Minister, offered a characteristically direct framing of what was at stake. "I believe we will make very concrete progress on rare earths and critical minerals," he told reporters upon arrival. "Ensuring we are not held hostage by certain countries." No one in the room needed him to name the country he had in mind.
The language that emerged from the ministerial two days later was, by the standards of G7 communiqués, striking. Ministers expressed "grave concerns regarding economic coercion, including coercion through arbitrary export restrictions that may lead to supply chain disruptions," and pledged to "deter and stand ready to take actions, where necessary, against economic coercion." For a bloc that has historically preferred the diplomatic fog of process language, the directness was notable. Supply chain security had, at least rhetorically, been moved from an economic policy category into a collective security framing.
But beneath the shared language, the seams were showing. Two competing implementation frameworks had been on the table throughout the talks, and neither had carried the day. Concrete timelines and enforcement mechanisms were conspicuously absent from the final communiqué. And on the same day that EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic sat across the table from US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Paris, he was also heading to the European Parliament for continued negotiations over the bloc's own internal legislative divisions. Unity, it turned out, was easier to declare than to operationalise.
What Paris illustrated, in sharper relief than perhaps intended, is that the West's minerals strategy is simultaneously more ambitious and more fragile than its public architecture suggests. Three distinct but deeply connected developments in the first weeks of May tell that story together: the G7's rhetorical breakthrough shadowed by its institutional paralysis; the quiet expansion of China's permanent export-control architecture even as the Busan truce holds; and the accelerating defection of allied nations into a minerals diplomacy that deliberately excludes both superpowers. Read separately, each is a significant policy development. Read together, they describe a system under structural strain.
The Architecture of Agreement, and Its Holes
The Paris communiqué's most consequential sentence may be its most opaque. When G7 ministers pledged to counter "non-market policies and practices (NMPPs)" including "pervasive, opaque and harmful industrial subsidies, market-distortive practices of state-owned enterprises, and all forms of forced technology transfer," they were describing, with careful precision, the mechanism by which China has constructed its processing dominance over decades. French Finance Minister Roland Lescure made the point even more plainly in discussions on the sidelines, observing that China's share of the market for minerals used across electric vehicles, wind turbines, electronics, and defence systems is so dominant that Beijing retains the capacity to set prices low enough to force competitors out of the market entirely.
That is the real leverage point, and it was well understood in the room. China controls roughly ninety percent of global rare-earth processing and between sixty and ninety percent of processing capacity for lithium, cobalt, and graphite, even where the raw materials are mined elsewhere. Finding a mineral deposit, as one senior official familiar with the discussions observed, is step one. Processing it without Chinese infrastructure is the genuinely difficult problem. The G7's challenge is that acknowledging this structural reality and doing something durable about it are very different propositions.
The divergence between the European and American camps in Paris reflects that difficulty in institutional form. The European side, broadly, favours mandatory diversification standards, supply chain audit obligations, and import restriction frameworks rooted in regulatory compulsion. The American side, consistent with the Trump administration's broader philosophy, favours bilateral investment partnerships, strategic reserve agreements, and market incentives. Neither side convinced the other. According to Reuters reporting from the ministerial, officials familiar with the discussions confirmed the two frameworks remained unresolved, and no binding implementation timeline attached to either.
This was not a peripheral disagreement. It cuts to the heart of whether a coordinated G7 minerals strategy can function at all. The EU is simultaneously running its own pilot stockpile, led by Italy, France, and Germany, and has explicitly rejected a US proposal for a single shared reserve, with European sources citing concerns about both governance and crisis-time access to supplies under American control. If the bloc cannot agree on the most basic unit of collective resilience, how it intends to "deter" Chinese economic coercion through collective action remains an open question. The June leaders' summit in Évian will need to answer that question with considerably more specificity than Paris provided.
The Truce That Is Not a Truce
Seventeen hundred kilometres to the east of Paris, and five months earlier, something else had been quietly set in motion. On October 31, 2025, following the Trump-Xi summit in Busan, South Korea, China's Ministry of Commerce and Customs announced the temporary suspension of export controls covering rare earth elements, lithium battery materials, gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten, and graphite until November 10, 2026. Supply chains exhaled. Markets stabilised. Commentators declared a reprieve.
A newly published analysis from the Andersen Institute, released May 13, suggests that characterisation deserves significant qualification. The underlying licensing regime, including the whitelist system under which Chinese authorities grant case-by-case export permits, was never suspended. It remains permanently in place as a strategic lever. More significantly, Beijing has been expanding its permanent control architecture even during the truce period, not dismantling it. As of January 1, 2026, China's updated Export Licensing Catalogue added controls on rare-earth compounds including samarium, gadolinium, and lutetium, as well as silver, elevating the latter from an ordinary commodity to a strategic material on the same regulatory footing as rare earths.
The most consequential development, however, came on March 31, 2026, when Premier Li Qiang signed State Council Order No. 834, promulgating China's first dedicated administrative regulation on industrial and supply chain security. In eighteen articles, the instrument creates new investigation procedures, vests broad countermeasure authority over foreign states and private actors, restricts foreign entities from conducting supply-chain investigations or collecting data within Chinese territory, and integrates export controls, countermeasures, data security obligations, and investment screening under a single unified national security mandate. As the Andersen Institute analysis puts it, Order No. 834 completes an architectural buildout that began with China's Export Control Law in 2020, converted upstream mining dominance into targeted leverage through successive mineral controls, and now delivers seamless coordination across tools and domains.
For multinationals, the practical consequences are serious. Article 13 of Order No. 834 restricts foreign entities from conducting investigations or collecting data related to Chinese supply chains, creating a direct legal conflict with international due diligence mandates including the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Article 16 extends penalties to individuals, meaning expatriate managers and local personnel at China-based subsidiaries may face personal entry, exit, and residency restrictions where their employer has failed to execute a countermeasure that its home-jurisdiction law forbids. A widening compliance gap is emerging in which firms must simultaneously adhere to Western sanctions regimes and Chinese law that may require precisely the opposite.
Cory Combs, Head of Critical Minerals and Supply Chain Research at Trivium China, captures the strategic logic with precision: "We do not see licensing requirements themselves as negotiable. They are the means for Beijing to tighten or loosen control over particular countries', companies', and industries' supplies, not the actual damage to be done." The suspension, in other words, is a demonstration of flexibility, not a surrender of control. What expires in November is the temporary pause on the most aggressive measures. What does not expire is the architecture behind them.
The November Clock and the Costs of Waiting
The November 10 deadline functions less as a negotiating date than as a structural forcing function, and the numbers behind it help explain why. Post-suspension pricing for rare earths could spike thirty to fifty percent if controls escalate upon expiry. Alternative suppliers in Vietnam, Malaysia, and the United States are not projected to reach operational scale until late 2027, leaving at least eighteen months of supply-chain fragility regardless of what happens in any diplomatic negotiation. For individual firms, decoupling simulations project first-year operating-profit losses of fifteen to fifty percent, with switching costs running into the billions per company.
The three scenarios on the table for November are extension of the suspension, replacement by a more comprehensive trade agreement, or lapse and snap-back. The first kicks a structural problem down the road without resolving it. The second is widely regarded as unlikely given the political incentives on both sides. The third would trigger what one analyst describes as a "supply-chain scramble" in the fourth quarter of 2026, precisely as G7 economies are still debating whether their secretariat should be housed at the IEA or the OECD.
This timeline urgency is what makes the institutional gaps in Paris so consequential. The permanent secretariat that G7 nations are currently discussing, which could be housed at either the IEA or the OECD in Paris, has no confirmed establishment date. Key decisions are expected at the June leaders' summit, but five sources familiar with the discussions told Reuters only that the timeline remains unclear. The IEA is already running workshops on stockpiling design; a session in Brussels in April drew government representatives from the United States, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Spain, and the European Commission, alongside companies including General Motors, Glencore, Leonardo, and Umicore. But a workshop is not a secretariat, and a secretariat is not a functioning coordination mechanism. The gap between planning and execution has rarely looked wider against a harder deadline.
Building on my analysis of the Busan countdown in "Six Months to Midnight" earlier this month, the November expiry was always going to be a test not only of US-China diplomacy but of Western institutional readiness. What the subsequent weeks have revealed is that the institutional side of that test may be the harder one to pass.
The Patchwork Deepens
On May 4, one day before the Paris ministerial opened, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signed a joint declaration elevating critical minerals to a "core pillar" of their economic security relationship, with Australia committing up to A$1.3 billion, approximately US$937 million, to support critical mineral projects involving Japanese participation. The agreement covers gallium, nickel, graphite, rare earths, and fluorite. Neither Washington nor Beijing played a formal role.
The timing was not incidental. Takaichi had arrived in Canberra from Hanoi, where she had urged Southeast Asian nations to strengthen regional supply chains independent of dominant suppliers. The message threading through both visits was consistent: Japan is building redundancy into its mineral security through bilateral relationships that operate alongside, but are not anchored to, either superpower's preferred architecture. Australia's position is similarly layered. The Canberra-Tokyo deal builds on an existing Australia-US Critical Minerals and Rare Earths Framework signed by Albanese and Trump the previous year, meaning Canberra is simultaneously deepening its ties with Washington and building parallel structures that do not require Washington's involvement to function.
Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, describes the broader dynamic with characteristic directness. "Because of the political risk associated with aligning with China or with the United States," he told Foreign Policy in a May 5 analysis, "there's developing this patchwork of critical minerals agreements that have nothing to do with either" country. The list of participants in this patchwork is growing. Japan, France, and Canada are working on alternative frameworks to the US-led minerals trading bloc. India and Brazil signed a mining investment pact in February. Botswana and Oman secured mineral exploration and energy infrastructure deals. Brazilian President Lula put it plainly in April: "We will not repeat the role of mere exporters of mineral commodities. We are open to international partnerships that include stages of higher value added and technology transfer."
The credibility problem for Washington is real and specific. Hendrix also noted that allied nations have "pretty reasonable and understandable reasons to believe that the United States could turn around and engage in precisely the same kind of mineral coercion that China has engaged in." On-again, off-again tariff policies, the unilateral restructuring of trade frameworks, and the Trump administration's explicit use of economic pressure against allies have all contributed to an environment in which committing to a US-anchored supply chain feels less like resilience-building and more like trading one dependency for another. South Korea, despite hosting alliance discussions, was simultaneously pursuing a dual-track strategy by establishing a critical minerals hotline with Beijing to ensure continued Chinese imports. The hedging is rational, even if it is corrosive to collective action.
The Japan-France Caremag facility in southern France, scheduled to begin operations in late 2026 with Japanese state backing from JOGMEC and Iwatani, represents the kind of concrete industrial outcome that multilateral rhetoric has struggled to produce. Japan's strategic objective is to source roughly twenty percent of its future dysprosium and terbium demand from a single facility on allied European soil. It is a real answer to a real problem, but it emerged from a bilateral relationship, not from FORGE, not from Project Vault, and not from the G7 joint statement. That distinction matters.
What Évian Must Confront
There is a version of the June leaders' summit in Évian that produces something durable: a confirmed secretariat, a credible stockpiling coordination mechanism, a shared timeline for the November reckoning with Beijing, and a framework flexible enough to accommodate allied nations who are hedging without alienating them entirely. There is also a version, more consistent with recent precedent, in which the summit produces a communiqué of considerable ambition and limited mechanism, and the hard institutional questions are deferred once more to the next rotating presidency.
The structural problem underlying all three of the May developments is that the West's minerals strategy is being designed at the speed of diplomacy while China's permanent architecture was constructed at the speed of industrial policy, over decades, at every stage of the supply chain simultaneously. Order No. 834 did not appear from nowhere. It is the capstone of a system that began with the Export Control Law in 2020, built through successive commodity-specific control packages, and now integrates every relevant lever, including export controls, investment screening, countermeasures, and data security, under a single national security mandate. The G7 is debating where to house a secretariat. Beijing has already built the house.
The patchwork of bilateral deals accumulating outside both superpowers' preferred architectures is, in a sense, the market's answer to this gap. Nations that cannot wait for Washington's credibility problem to resolve itself and cannot accept Beijing's permanent leverage are building whatever redundancy they can, wherever they can find it. That is not irrational, but it is insufficient. Processing capacity, the true chokepoint, cannot be replicated through a network of bilateral investment agreements signed over two years. It requires the kind of coordinated industrial commitment that only a functioning multilateral architecture can sustain.
Nicolas Forissier promised "concrete progress" when he walked into the Palais des Congrès on May 5. What emerged was the strongest multilateral language on mineral weaponisation ever produced by the G7, paired with an unresolved implementation divergence, a rejected stockpile proposal, an unconfirmed secretariat, and no binding timeline for anything. The language moved the problem into the security category. The architecture has not yet followed. In Paris, ministers pledged that attempts to weaponise economic dependencies would fail. In November, the clock will test whether they meant it.