A Mining.com op-ed published August 7, 2026 makes a compelling case that seaborne chokepoints represent the most underestimated risk in critical mineral supply chains, surpassing mine output and refinery metrics as the decisive variable. With Asia-to-US container rates more than doubling since February, and China's Belt and Road strategy systematically positioning its firms at strategic ports worldwide, the argument is difficult to dismiss. This piece examines the evidence, the freight data, and what Western governments are doing about it.
Introduction
Every few years, the critical minerals debate resets around the same familiar anxiety: we need more mines, faster permitting, and bigger refining capacity. That framing is not wrong, but a Mining.com op-ed published on August 7, 2026 argues it is dangerously incomplete. The piece, written by Nicholas Vafeas, makes a pointed case that the decisive battleground in the global critical minerals competition is not the mine face or the smelter furnace. It is the port, the shipping corridor, and the narrow maritime strait.
The argument matters to a broad audience: policymakers designing supply chain resilience programs, procurement officers at battery manufacturers and defense contractors, ESG analysts tracking operational risk, and anyone who has spent the past six months watching sulfuric acid prices double and container freight rates surge. The chokepoint vulnerability is no longer theoretical. It is priced into commodity markets, driving production guidance revisions, and reshaping geopolitical strategy from Washington to Beijing.
This article unpacks the Vafeas thesis, grounds it in the freight and commodity data from 2023 to mid-2026, and examines whether Western governments are responding with sufficient urgency and coherence.
The Chokepoint Thesis: What the Op-Ed Actually Argues
Vafeas opens his piece with a scene from late 2023 that most supply chain professionals will remember. A cargo vessel approaching the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the narrow passage at the southern end of the Red Sea connecting the Indian Ocean to the Suez Canal, turned around and sailed thousands of kilometres around the Cape of Good Hope instead. Within days, dozens of other ships made the same decision. "It was a vivid reminder," he writes, "of why these narrow passages are called chokepoints: because they can be closed at any time."
The core argument that follows is direct. "The next generation of supply chain competition will not be decided solely by discovering larger deposits or approving more mining permits. It will be decided by who finances the railways, secures the ports, operates the shipping corridors and integrates those assets into processing capacity." That is a significant claim, and it deserves scrutiny against the data.
Vafeas also takes aim at the limits of resource nationalism, the strategy many developing economies use to capture more value from their mineral wealth by imposing export restrictions or mandating local processing. His critique is pointed: "When a government does not control its own trade, local attempts at 'resource nationalism' become painfully fragile." The logic is that a country can own its ore in the ground while remaining entirely dependent on foreign-controlled ports and shipping lanes to move it to market. That dependency hands enormous leverage to whoever controls the infrastructure.
The Freight Data Makes the Case
If you want to test the chokepoint thesis empirically, the freight rate data from 2023 through mid-2026 is a reasonable place to start. The Bab el-Mandeb crisis that Vafeas opens with generated a 55 percent decline in ship transits through the strait between November 2023 and February 2024, according to ITF and OECD data. The World Bank recorded a 90 percent collapse in container ship transits through the Suez Canal between December 2023 and March 2024. Major shipping lines including Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, and Hapag-Lloyd all suspended Red Sea operations and rerouted around Africa's Cape of Good Hope, adding 15 to 22 days to journey times and between $200 and $400 per container in additional fuel and operating costs. Asia-Europe freight rates stabilized at 25 to 35 percent above pre-crisis levels even after initial spikes of 40 to 60 percent.
The Hormuz closure of February 28, 2026 delivered a second, arguably more severe demonstration. Xeneta's shipping analytics data shows that Asia-to-US container spot rates have more than doubled since Middle East tensions escalated at the end of February. In early June 2026, Drewry's World Container Index surged 23 percent in a single week, reaching $3,433 per 40-foot container. The Shanghai-to-Los Angeles rate jumped 31 percent to $4,565 per container. Shanghai-to-New York climbed 20 percent to $5,505. The Freightos Baltic Index recorded a 51 percent single-week spike on Asia-to-US West Coast lanes following June 1 general rate increases, with rates hitting $4,836 per FEU. The East Coast pushed to $6,336 per FEU, a 25 percent weekly increase.
Judah Levine, head of research at Freightos, called these "the most pronounced one-week jumps since abrupt tariff changes triggered a demand surge" the prior year. Multiple structural forces converged: Red Sea diversions extending transit times and forcing earlier ordering, frontloading ahead of anticipated tariff deadlines, FIFA World Cup cargo volumes, and an 80 percent increase in fuel surcharges scheduled for July when quarterly Bunker Adjustment Factors are updated. Critically minerals do not travel in their own exclusive shipping lanes. A 23 percent weekly spike in container rates raises the delivered cost of battery-grade lithium hydroxide and copper concentrate shipped on those corridors just as directly as it raises the cost of clothing or electronics.
Building on my analysis of the sulfuric acid crisis in August 2026, the Hormuz closure also stranded more than 600,000 metric tons of sulfur in Gulf vessels by April, according to Kpler vessel tracking data. Sulfuric acid prices surged past $500 per tonne by March 31, and the S&P Global Platts CFR Mejillones benchmark, the standard reference for Chilean copper miners, doubled in less than seven weeks. The single-week spike after China announced its export ban on May 1 reached 26.7 percent. Approximately 20 percent of global copper supply depends on sulfuric acid leaching, and Ivanhoe Mines founder Robert Friedland warned that a prolonged closure would have a "profound" effect on copper production globally.
China's Belt and Road: Infrastructure as Geopolitical Lever
Vafeas frames China's Belt and Road Initiative not as a development finance program but as a strategic infrastructure play designed precisely to control the chokepoints that his op-ed identifies as decisive. "It is for this very reason," he writes, "that China has been strategically building its Belt and Road initiative." The framing is blunt, but the underlying data on Chinese port investments is hard to argue with.
Two Chinese state-owned firms, COSCO and China Merchants Ports, together control 12.6 percent of global port throughput, according to the Jamestown Foundation. China owns or controls 17 overseas ports globally. Notable examples include Piraeus in Greece, where COSCO holds a majority stake, and Chancay in Peru, where COSCO holds a 60 percent stake with exclusive use rights for 60 years following a $1.3 billion initial investment. The Chancay facility is strategically significant: it handles Peru's copper exports and is positioned to serve as Brazil's Pacific gateway, with plans for a Chinese-financed railway connecting the two countries. When Lima briefly attempted to revise COSCO's exclusivity arrangement, COSCO threatened to withdraw entirely. One visit to Beijing by Peru's President Boluarte later, the effort was abandoned, illustrating the leverage that major infrastructure commitments can generate over host governments.
China's outbound FDI infrastructure finance reached a record $213 billion in 2025, a 74 percent year-on-year increase, according to Climate Energy Finance data. The BRI model is also shifting: capital that once concentrated on roads, bridges, and generic ports is now moving toward energy assets and critical mineral resources. Chinese firms are increasingly offering in-country processing facilities, skilled employment, and enabling infrastructure such as railways and power grids in exchange for long-term resource access and offtake agreements.
Vafeas acknowledges the contested nature of this framing. He notes that "China's infrastructure investments are viewed through a very different lens than what Western media portrays," while also observing that "it is difficult to ignore the fact that it has been willing to finance infrastructure on a scale that few others have matched." That measured assessment is appropriate. BRI investments do generate genuine economic value for host countries. The strategic leverage question and the development finance question are not mutually exclusive, but they are distinct, and conflating them does not serve clear analysis. What is harder to dispute is the observation from the Congressional Research Service that control over terminals, logistics platforms, and supply chain data "can shape economic and security relationships over time."
The IEA's 2026 Global Critical Minerals Outlook adds another dimension. China has tripled its implementation of export controls since 2023, applying them to antimony, gallium, germanium, graphite, molybdenum, rare earths, sulfuric acid, tellurium, tungsten, and lithium-related products. For gallium, graphite, manganese, and rare earths, China accounts for over 90 percent of global refining capacity. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol summarizes the exposure plainly: "Vast amounts of economic value depend on relatively small volumes of critical minerals, whose supply chains remain highly concentrated and are therefore vulnerable." If battery-grade graphite trade were fully disrupted, over $300 billion per year of downstream production outside China would be at risk.
What Governments Are Doing: Energetic but Fragmented
The Western policy response to chokepoint vulnerability has accelerated in 2025 and 2026, but the assessment from most analysts is that it remains disjointed relative to the scale and coherence of China's position. The US State Department's Critical Minerals Ministerial in February 2026 set out an explicit ambition to "build new sources of supply, foster secure and reliable transport and logistics networks, and transform the global market into one that is secure, diversified, and resilient, end-to-end." The inclusion of transport and logistics networks in that mandate represents a genuine evolution in how Washington frames supply chain security.
Executive Order 14415, signed by President Trump on July 20, 2026, directed the Department of War to tighten sourcing waivers, mandate supply chain mapping, and accelerate domestic qualification of critical minerals used in defense production. The US also now imposes fees of up to $140 per net ton by 2028 on Chinese-built or Chinese-operated vessels, a measure designed to reduce dependency on Chinese-controlled maritime logistics. Under US pressure, Panama's President Mulino announced his government would not renew its memorandum of understanding with Beijing on the Maritime Silk Road. A House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing in February 2025 examined Chinese port investments in the Western Hemisphere specifically for their national security implications.
The European Union has launched a joint procurement platform for critical minerals, representing a meaningful attempt to coordinate member-state demand and avoid bidding wars that benefit dominant suppliers. Canada and Mexico are preparing a joint action plan on minerals, infrastructure, and supply chains expected in the second half of 2026, focused on reducing logistical and regulatory bottlenecks rather than just announcing new mines. These are serious policy instruments.
The honest assessment, however, is that the US has no state-backed firms among the world's leading terminal operators. In terms of global port influence, Washington would rank behind not only China but also the UAE through DP World, France through CMA CGM and Terminal Link, and Singapore through PSA International. That asymmetry reflects decades of policy that treated port operations as a commercial rather than a strategic question. Correcting it requires either supporting the development of US-aligned terminal operators or financing alternative port infrastructure in regions where China currently holds dominant positions. Neither is fast, cheap, or politically straightforward.
The IEA estimates that stockpiling the 11 highest-risk critical minerals would cost less than $900 million per year globally, a modest figure relative to the economic disruption a concentrated supply shock can cause. That framing is useful for policymakers trying to make the case for investment in resilience before a crisis, rather than after.
Conclusion: The Invisible Variable
The Vafeas thesis, at its core, is a call to make the invisible visible. Mine output, refinery throughput, and spot commodity prices are tracked obsessively. Maritime chokepoints, port ownership structures, and the geopolitical vulnerability of shipping corridors receive far less systematic attention, even though the past three years have provided a series of vivid demonstrations of what happens when those variables shift suddenly.
The 2023 to 2024 Red Sea crisis, the February 2026 Hormuz closure, the sulfuric acid shock across the Copperbelt and Chilean mining districts, and the container freight rate surges of mid-2026 are not isolated episodes. They are expressions of a structural feature of global commodity supply chains: physical geography, infrastructure ownership, and geopolitical relationships determine how minerals actually move from the ground to the factory floor, and those factors can change faster than mine permitting timelines or refinery construction schedules.
The export control clock adds urgency. China's temporary suspension covering broader controls on rare earths, lithium batteries, and superhard materials is scheduled to expire in November 2026. Whether those controls snap back, are extended, or are renegotiated will depend in part on the broader trajectory of US-China trade relations. In the meantime, the window for Western governments and industry to build genuine logistics and infrastructure alternatives is narrow.
The most likely near-term development is continued fragmentation: a patchwork of national policy experiments, bilateral infrastructure deals, and carrier routing decisions that collectively move in the right direction but fall well short of the strategic coherence that China's BRI investment record represents. The gap may narrow over time as chokepoint risk becomes better understood by boards, procurement teams, and policymakers alike. For now, Vafeas is right that the conversation needs to shift. Approving more mining permits is necessary. It is not sufficient. The race is also being run in port terminals, shipping lanes, and the infrastructure corridors that connect them.