Critical Mineral Policy
Government policies, trade regulations, and strategic initiatives shaping critical mineral supply chains
The New Gatekeepers: How the Global South Learned to Weaponise Its Minerals
Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia have each imposed sweeping export restrictions on lithium, cobalt, and nickel in the past eighteen months, signalling that resource nationalism is no longer a Chinese monopoly. Producer nations across the Global South are now deploying export quotas, mining caps, and processing mandates as deliberate instruments of geopolitical leverage, complicating Western de-risking strategies and forcing a fundamental rethink of who holds power in the critical minerals economy.
Stockpiles, Secretariats, and the Shadow of Beijing: How the G7's New Minerals Architecture Is Taking Shape
At the Évian summit in June 2026, G7 leaders launched the Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance, agreed to align national stockpiling reserves, and expanded the IEA's mandate to coordinate member-nation reserve policies. The moves came two days after Beijing tightened its own state control over mineral resources and represent the most structured Western response yet to China's layered export control regime. Whether the architecture can outpace the dependency is the harder question.
Five Months to Midnight: How Three Converging Deadlines Are Forcing America's Reckoning With Critical Mineral Dependence
A Section 232 negotiation window that expires in mid-July, a USMCA review that formally opened on July 1, and a Trump-Xi minerals truce that sunsets on November 10 have placed American critical mineral policy at an extraordinary inflection point. Together, they compress years of structural vulnerability into a single five-month corridor, forcing decisions that Washington has spent decades deferring. The question is no longer whether the United States needs a coherent minerals strategy; it is whether the machinery now assembling can move fast enough to matter.
The 1974 Playbook: How the G7 Handed the IEA a New Mission and What It Will Take to Make It Work
At their June 2026 summit in Évian-les-Bains, G7 leaders formally expanded the International Energy Agency's mandate to encompass critical minerals supply security, modelling the new framework on the oil-crisis emergency stock system built in 1974. With China refining 70 percent of 19 out of 20 strategic minerals and European rare earth prices running at up to six times Chinese domestic levels, the urgency is real. Whether the architecture can match it is a harder question.
Sixty Projects and a Gulf Detour: How the EU's Critical Minerals Push Is Running Ahead of Its Own Reality
The European Union has designated 60 Strategic Projects under its Critical Raw Materials Act, spanning lithium fields in Portugal to graphite deposits in Kazakhstan, and has opened a new investment dialogue with Saudi Arabia at the Future Minerals Forum. But a sobering audit from the European Court of Auditors and fresh ODI projections showing China will still supply over 60 percent of refined lithium by 2035 are forcing a harder question: is the architecture of ambition outpacing the machinery of delivery?
FORGE Ahead: How Washington's New Critical Minerals Alliance Inherited the World's Most Complicated Job, and Left Its Own Leadership Question Unanswered
On February 4, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced FORGE, the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, as the successor to the Biden-era Minerals Security Partnership, at a ministerial attended by 54 countries and the European Commission. The new body promised sharper teeth than its predecessor: price floors enforced by adjustable tariffs, a preferential trade zone for critical minerals, and the most concentrated burst of bilateral diplomacy in American history. But as South Korea's founding chairmanship expires in June 2026, the alliance faces a governance vacuum, a credibility problem, and questions that no MOU can resolve.
Architecture of Control: How China's Layered Mineral Statecraft Is Outpacing the West's Stockpile Strategy
Three regulatory actions across a single quarter, State Council Order No. 834 in March, the Mineral Resources Law implementation regulations on June 15, and MOFCOM's civilian whistleblower mechanism effective July 1, reveal a unified Chinese mineral governance architecture designed for sustained geopolitical rivalry. Against this, the CFR's June 2026 critique of Project Vault exposes a structural mismatch: the United States is building raw material reserves while China is cementing vertically integrated control from geology to export documentation. With a November 2026 bilateral suspension deadline approaching, the gap between these two strategic postures has measurable consequences.
The Sulfur Dividend: How a Versailles Dinner, a Signed MOU, and Four Months of Blocked Shipping Are Reshaping the Economics of Critical Mineral Processing
When President Trump signed a preliminary ceasefire agreement with Iran on the sidelines of the G7 summit in June 2026, the immediate headlines focused on nuclear timelines and frozen assets. But buried in the 14-point memorandum was a provision with profound consequences for the global critical minerals industry: the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly half of the world's seaborne sulfur trade flows. For mineral processors from Chile to Indonesia who had spent four months rationing their most essential chemical input, the deal's significance had little to do with uranium enrichment.
Sixty Percent and Falling: How the G7's Évian Declaration Took Aim at China's Mineral Grip, and Why the Hard Work Has Barely Begun
At the June 15-17 G7 Summit in Évian-les-Bains, leaders agreed that no single country should supply more than 60 percent of their rare earth imports by 2030, established a new Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance, and pledged harmonized traceability systems starting with lithium and nickel. The declaration arrived against a backdrop of geopolitical turbulence: a US-Iran peace deal signed on the summit's second day threatened to scramble the very supply dynamics the G7 was trying to reorder, while expert skepticism over the feasibility of the 2030 target ran as a persistent undercurrent through every corridor in Évian.
The Stockpile Gap: How a $12 Billion Reserve Built to Break China's Grip May Still Depend on Beijing to Fill Its Shelves
A June 2 Council on Foreign Relations report finds that Project Vault, the Trump administration's landmark $12 billion critical minerals reserve, is insufficient on its own and harbours a structural paradox: in the near term, filling its shelves with processed materials would likely require purchasing from the very Chinese suppliers the programme is designed to render irrelevant. CFR authors Jonathan Hillman and Ishaan Thakker call for expanding the National Defense Stockpile, establishing a separate Strategic Resilience Reserve, and building plurilateral supply agreements through the FORGE framework.
Blueprint for a Reserve: How the SECURE Minerals Act, a New CRS Guide, and a Legislative Race Against the Clock Could Reshape America's Critical Minerals Architecture
On June 8, the Congressional Research Service released a sweeping resource guide to help lawmakers navigate US critical minerals policy, arriving just as Congress accelerates toward a defining choice: whether to embed a $2.5 billion Strategic Resilience Reserve into the National Defense Authorization Act or advance it separately through committee markup. The bipartisan SECURE Minerals Act, modelled on both the Federal Reserve and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, represents the most architecturally ambitious stockpiling proposal Washington has seen in a generation, and the legislative window to pass it may be narrowing fast.
The Architecture of Division: How China's July 1 Deadline, a Leadership Vacuum in the West, and Nearly 100 Export Measures Are Redrawing the Map of Global Minerals Trade
On July 1, 2026, China's State Council Order No. 837 takes effect, completing a regulatory architecture that governs Chinese investment abroad with the same security logic Beijing applies to imports. Meanwhile, South Korea's chairmanship of FORGE expires, leaving the West's most ambitious minerals alliance at a governance inflection point. A new UNCTAD report documents the cumulative damage: nearly 100 export measures on critical minerals since 2020, and a global market fragmenting into competing blocs faster than any coordinating mechanism can contain it.
The New Expropriation: How Export Controls and Processing Mandates Became the Weapon of Choice in the Global Minerals War
Governments from Kinshasa to Hanoi to Washington are rewriting the rules of mineral ownership without touching the deed. A June 2026 Gibson Dunn analysis warns that export bans, production quotas, and processing mandates have supplanted outright nationalisation as the defining legal risk for critical mineral investors, and that the stabilisation clauses and force majeure provisions that protected capital during the last commodities cycle are no longer fit for purpose.
The Vault and the Gap: Why $12 Billion in Stockpiled Minerals May Not Be Enough to Break China's Hold on American Industry
When the Trump administration unveiled Project Vault in February 2026, a $12 billion public-private minerals reserve backed by a record $10 billion EXIM Bank loan, it was hailed as the most aggressive US strategic stockpiling initiative since the Korean War. But a June 2 analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations asks the harder question: what good is a warehouse full of raw materials if the factories needed to turn them into defence products do not exist? Ron Terre investigates the structural gaps that Project Vault's architects have yet to answer.
The Compliance Trap: How State Council Order No. 834 Turns Western Due Diligence Into a Legal Liability
On March 31, 2026, Premier Li Qiang signed State Council Order No. 834, China's first unified supply-chain security framework, integrating export controls, investment screening, countermeasures, and data security under a single national security mandate. For Western multinationals, the regulation creates a structural compliance trap: US and EU law requires supply-chain investigations inside China that Chinese law now restricts. The result is not an accidental collision of regulatory systems but, analysts say, a deliberate architecture designed to raise the cost of decoupling while remaining below the threshold of direct confrontation.
Project Vault Under Scrutiny: Can a $12 Billion Public-Private Stockpile Actually Shield U.S. Industry from Supply Shocks?
On February 2, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order establishing Project Vault, a $12 billion public-private partnership backed by the largest single loan in EXIM Bank's 92-year history. The program targets all 60 minerals on the USGS 2025 Critical Minerals List specifically for civilian manufacturers. The Peterson Institute has since published a structural critique identifying three design flaws that could cause the program to fail precisely when it is needed most.
The November 10 Clock: What Happens When the Trump-Xi Rare Earths Suspension Expires and No Replacement Deal Exists
The October 2025 Busan Summit produced a one-year suspension of China's expanded rare earth export controls, with a hard expiration date of November 10, 2026. Five months remain, no formal extension has been concluded, and the underlying control architecture has grown more sophisticated with every passing quarter. This briefing examines what the deadline actually governs, what remains enforced regardless of the truce, and what the data reveal about supply chain exposure that diplomatic language has consistently obscured.
Ghost of 2010: How China's Rare Earth Squeeze on Japan Exposed the Fault Lines Running Through Washington's Minerals Strategy
In late May 2026, China's selective re-activation of rare earth export controls against Japan drew immediate parallels to the Senkaku Islands crisis of 2010, when Beijing first demonstrated its willingness to weaponise mineral access for diplomatic ends. But this time, the episode did not merely unsettle Tokyo. It landed in the middle of a widening internal clash between the Pentagon and the White House over whether America's own rare earth strategy is built on solid industrial ground or political ambition.
The Permanent Architecture: How State Council Order No. 834 Converts China's Mineral Controls Into an Enduring Geopolitical Weapon
On March 31, 2026, Premier Li Qiang signed State Council Order No. 834, China's first dedicated supply-chain security framework, integrating export controls, investment screening, data security, and counter-sanctions under a single national-security mandate. The Andersen Institute concludes the resulting architecture is now permanent: even if trade tensions ease, Beijing will not dismantle its whitelist system. For multinational companies, the compliance calculus has fundamentally changed, with switching costs running into the billions and first-year operating-profit losses in decoupling simulations reaching as high as fifty percent.
The Magnet Trap: How the Pentagon's Rare Earth Reckoning Is Tearing Washington Apart
A clash between the Pentagon and the White House over a proposed ban on Chinese rare earth magnets has exposed the foundational contradiction at the heart of US critical mineral policy: the national security imperative to decouple from China is colliding with the defense industrial base's near-total reliance on Chinese-sourced permanent magnets. With a statutory deadline arriving January 1, 2027 and Beijing's export control suspension expiring just weeks before, the window to resolve that contradiction is closing fast.
The Stockpile Paradox: How China's June 15 Mining Controls, the EU's Rotterdam Strategy, and Project Vault's Structural Flaws Define the New Architecture of Critical Mineral Competition
On the same day the European Union shortlisted tungsten, rare earths, and gallium for its first coordinated strategic mineral reserve, China published implementation regulations under its revised Mineral Resources Law that will take effect June 15, 2026, empowering Beijing to control total mineral output, restrict mining entities, and mandate five-year in-situ reserves. The simultaneity was not coincidence: it was a precise illustration of the structural trap now confronting Western industrial policy. Both the EU and the United States are racing to warehouse materials they can currently only source from the country they are trying to hedge against.
The Illusion of Control: How the West's Fractured Response Is Letting Beijing Set the Terms of the Minerals Endgame
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.
The Architecture of Ambition: How FORGE and America's Bilateral Blitz Are Rewriting the Global Minerals Order
On February 4, 2026, the United States launched FORGE, a successor to the Minerals Security Partnership, and signed eleven new bilateral frameworks in a single day, bringing the total to over twenty-one deals in five months and mobilizing more than thirty billion dollars in commitments. But as Washington builds what it hopes will become a preferential trading bloc covering two-thirds of the global economy, its own partners are quietly hedging their bets, signing deals with each other that conspicuously exclude the United States. The result is a minerals diplomacy landscape of remarkable complexity: ambitious, energetic, and shadowed by a deep credibility problem.
The Architecture of Anxiety: How the West Is Building Mineral Fortresses Against a Clock That Is Already Running
With China's Busan truce set to expire in November and Beijing quietly expanding its control architecture even during the ceasefire, the United States and European Union are racing to construct rival stockpiling and emergency-powers regimes. But as Project Vault faces scrutiny over market distortion and IMERA enters force with uncertain implementation, the harder question is whether either bloc is building fast enough, or smart enough, to matter before the clock runs out.
The Patchwork Effect: How US and Chinese Unreliability Are Quietly Redrawing the Global Critical Minerals Map
As the Trump administration pursues an ambitious preferential trading bloc for critical minerals, something unexpected is happening on the diplomatic periphery: its closest allies are quietly building their own networks that exclude both Washington and Beijing. From Canberra to Nuuk, a proliferation of bilateral and minilateral deals is creating a structurally novel patchwork of supply chain agreements, raising serious questions about whether the US-led minerals governance architecture can hold together when its own partners are hedging against it.
Six Months to Midnight: How the Busan Countdown Is Forcing a Reckoning Over the West's Critical Mineral Dependency
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.
The Commission's New Fist: How IMERA Gives Brussels Emergency Powers Over Europe's Critical Mineral Arteries
On 29 May 2026, the EU's Internal Market Emergency and Resilience Act comes into force, handing the European Commission sweeping new powers to mandate stockpile releases, issue compulsory information requests, and coordinate priority deliveries of critical raw materials. Launching in parallel with a €3 billion investment drive and a new Critical Raw Materials Centre, IMERA represents Brussels' most assertive industrial sovereignty move since the pandemic, and a direct answer to Beijing's tightening grip on the minerals that underpin European industry.
The Costco for Critical Minerals: How Project Vault Is Rewriting America's Industrial Security Doctrine
On February 2, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order creating a $12 billion public-private reserve for critical minerals, explicitly designed not for the Pentagon but for American industry. The initiative, backed by the largest loan in the Export-Import Bank's 92-year history and anchored by companies from Boeing to General Motors, signals a fundamental doctrinal shift: mineral supply security is now a civilian economic continuity problem, not just a defense one. With Congress moving in parallel on a separate Strategic Resilience Reserve, the United States is constructing the most ambitious layered stockpile architecture since the Korean War.
The Price of Sovereignty: How the West Is Betting on a New Financial Architecture to Break China's Grip on Critical Minerals
In the ten weeks before a July 13 deadline that could reshape global trade, the United States and its allies are racing to construct an unprecedented system of price floors, coordinated subsidies, and bilateral agreements designed to make Western critical mineral supply chains economically viable without Chinese processing dominance. A new US-EU memorandum, a landmark OECD report, and an approaching Section 232 reckoning reveal the ambition, the fragility, and the enormous stakes of this gamble.
Project Vault: How a $12 Billion Insurance Scheme Became America's Most Ambitious Minerals Gamble Since the Korean War
On February 2, 2026, the Trump administration unveiled Project Vault, a $12 billion public-private reserve backed by the largest loan in the Export-Import Bank's 92-year history, designed to shield American manufacturers from the kind of mineral supply shocks that forced Ford to halt Explorer production in 2025. The initiative pairs a novel insurance-style financing model with a sweeping congressional proposal for a parallel Strategic Resilience Reserve, while the Democratic Republic of Congo has simultaneously moved to assert its own stockpile control over cobalt, coltan, and germanium. Together, these moves signal that the age of critical minerals as open commodities is ending.
Architecture Under Pressure: How the Section 232 Deadline, the US-EU MOU, and China's Licence Delays Are Building a New Critical Minerals Order
Three developments in the spring of 2026 are reshaping the architecture of global critical minerals trade: a binding Section 232 negotiating deadline set for July 13, a landmark US-EU MOU signed April 25 that points toward a plurilateral trade agreement, and persistent Chinese export licence delays that are turning theoretical supply chain risk into operational disruption. Together, they reveal a policy system under construction against a geopolitical clock that is already running.
The Periodic Table as Battleground: How Beijing's Rare-Earth Truce Conceals a Tightening Grip on Silver, Antimony, and Tungsten
When Donald Trump and Xi Jinping shook hands in Busan last October, the White House declared a victory: China would pause its sweeping rare-earth export controls for a year. But buried in the fine print was a different story. Beijing simultaneously introduced binding new export restrictions on silver, antimony, and tungsten, materials just as critical to American defence and industry, in a move analysts are characterising as a deliberate long-game strategy to trade short-term concessions for lasting leverage over the minerals that underpin modern civilisation.
Five Billion Reasons: How Australia and the United States Are Building a Rival to China's Mineral Empire
Six months after signing a landmark framework agreement at the White House, Australia and the United States have more than doubled their joint commitment to critical mineral projects, pledging over A$5 billion to develop rare earths, nickel, cobalt, and gallium supply chains that bypass Chinese processing dominance. The announcement, coordinated through Export Finance Australia and the U.S. Export-Import Bank, operationalises a sweeping bilateral architecture designed to break Beijing's grip on the materials that underpin modern defence systems, clean energy infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing.
The Gallium Gap: How Washington, Canberra, and Six Development Banks Are Racing to Rewire the World's Most Vulnerable Supply Chains
In April 2026, three separate but deeply connected initiatives revealed the scale of the West's effort to rebuild critical mineral supply chains from scratch: the U.S. Department of Energy funded a restart of domestic gallium production absent since 1987, Australia's critical minerals reserve entered its operational phase backed by a doubling of U.S.-Australian investment, and six multilateral development banks pledged coordinated financing for value-chain development across the developing world. Together, they expose both the ambition and the fragility of the West's answer to China's mineral dominance.
The Geology of Urgency: Mongolia's Rare Earth Promise and the Race to Build Supply Chains Beyond China
China's sweeping 2025 rare earth export controls — covering seven elements in April and expanding to twelve by November — exposed the structural fragility of supply chains built around a single dominant refiner. The policy and investment responses that followed, from the U.S. Department of Defense's $400 million commitment to MP Materials to the advancement of Mongolia's Khalzan Buregtei project into definitive feasibility, are not independent bets. They are two halves of the same supply chain logic, and understanding how they connect defines the shape of the rare earth market now being built.
The Architecture of Urgency: How Washington Built a Global Critical Minerals Framework in 60 Days
In the span of sixty days, the Trump administration signed executive orders, launched a $12 billion reserve, convened 54 nations, and opened formal negotiations on a legally binding plurilateral trade agreement covering processed critical minerals. With a USTR comment deadline passing March 19 and a 180-day tariff clock already running, the architecture Washington has constructed is either the most consequential industrial policy intervention of the century or an ambitious bet that allies will follow where the United States leads.
From Diplomacy to Architecture: FORGE, Project Vault, and the Emerging Critical Minerals Trading Bloc
"In the span of a single week in early February, the United States launched a $12 billion strategic mineral reserve, signed framework agreements with eleven countries, and unveiled a 54-nation forum designed to reshape how critical minerals are priced, traded, and secured. Taken together, the announcements represent the most consequential shift in U.S. industrial policy for strategic materials since the creation of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve."
Canada's Critical Minerals Offensive: $18.5 Billion Mobilized as Ottawa Moves From Strategy to Industrial Execution
"At the 2026 PDAC convention in Toronto, Canada unveiled the most aggressive week of critical minerals dealmaking in the country's history. A $2 billion sovereign fund, 30 new international partnerships unlocking $12.1 billion in project capital, a $1.5 billion infrastructure fund, a $2.6 billion uranium deal with India, and bilateral agreements with the EU, Greenland, and Italy represent a comprehensive attempt to convert geological wealth into functioning supply chains before the geopolitical window closes."
Pentagon Seeks Emergency Supply of 13 Critical Minerals as Iran Strikes Underscore Defense Vulnerabilities
"The U.S. Department of Defense asked mining companies to submit proposals for projects that could mine, process, or recycle 13 critical minerals used in semiconductors, weapons systems, and advanced defense technologies. The request, issued through the Defense Industrial Base Consortium on the eve of coordinated U.S.-Israeli military strikes against Iran, marks an escalation in Washington's campaign to rebuild domestic mineral supply chains under active wartime conditions."
Indonesia Announces New Nickel Export Restrictions Effective March 2026
Indonesia has announced its most restrictive nickel export controls yet, extending downstream processing requirements to intermediate products and cutting permitted production volumes by roughly 25 percent. The restrictions, which take effect in stages beginning March 2026, will reshape global nickel supply chains, squeeze stainless steel and battery manufacturers outside Southeast Asia, and test whether resource nationalism can deliver lasting economic value without destroying the environmental foundations on which it depends.
From Ministerial to Market: How the Trump Administration's February Blitz Is Rebuilding the Architecture of Allied Critical Mineral Trade
In the first two weeks of February 2026, the United States convened 54 nations at a landmark Critical Minerals Ministerial, launched the FORGE trading framework, signed eleven bilateral MOUs, and proposed the most ambitious set of price-stabilization mechanisms in the history of American commodity policy. Together, these initiatives represent a structural bet that statecraft, not markets alone, can dislodge China's grip on the global critical minerals supply chain. This report assesses the architecture, the instruments, and the distance still to be traveled.
Architecture of Ambition: How the Trump Administration's FORGE Initiative, Project Vault, and Bilateral Blitz Are Redrawing the Critical Minerals Map
In the span of ten days straddling late January and early February 2026, the Trump administration unveiled the most architecturally ambitious U.S. critical minerals policy package in the country's history, combining a $12 billion strategic reserve, a new plurilateral trade bloc, and twenty-one bilateral framework agreements. The initiative represents a deliberate attempt to practice statecraft through markets rather than around them, though the distance between framework agreements and operational mines remains the central challenge facing policymakers.
FORGE, Project Vault, and the Remaking of the Global Critical Minerals Market
"In the span of 72 hours, the Trump administration launched a $12 billion strategic minerals reserve, convened the largest critical minerals diplomatic gathering in years, and proposed a preferential trading bloc with enforceable price floors designed to break China's pricing power. The February 2-4 announcements represent the most consequential U.S. industrial policy intervention in the critical minerals space since the Cold War, and the architecture they establish will shape the global supply chain for a generation."
EU Critical Raw Materials Act: Implementation Guidelines Released
The European Commission has published detailed implementation guidelines for the Critical Raw Materials Act, accompanied by the launch of ReSourceEU, a three-billion-euro initiative to accelerate strategic project development. With 47 projects approved and 2030 benchmarks for domestic extraction, processing, and recycling now legally binding, Europe is moving from policy ambition to industrial execution.
US Department of Defense Expands Critical Mineral Stockpile Program
The Pentagon has launched its most aggressive critical mineral stockpiling campaign in decades, backed by $7.5 billion in new funding. With contracts already awarded for antimony, cobalt, tantalum, and scandium, and a landmark $400 million equity stake in MP Materials, the initiative marks a fundamental shift in how the U.S. military secures access to the materials underpinning modern defense systems.
Australia-Japan Critical Minerals Partnership: New Framework Agreement Signed
Australia and Japan have formalized a comprehensive critical minerals partnership covering lithium, rare earths, and battery metals, building on decades of strategic investment by JOGMEC and Japanese trading houses. The agreement takes on new urgency following China's January 2026 ban on rare earth exports to Japan, which has accelerated both countries' efforts to build supply chains outside Chinese control.
Rare Earth Export Controls Tighten: China's Strategic Dominance in Critical Materials
Beijing's deployment of increasingly sophisticated export controls has transformed rare earths from an obscure commodity concern into one of the defining flashpoints of great-power competition.
Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy: C$1.5 Billion Funding Announced
Canada has unveiled a comprehensive critical minerals strategy backed by approximately C$4 billion in cumulative federal funding across exploration, processing, recycling, and infrastructure. The strategy positions Canada as a preferred supplier to Western allies while building domestic value-added capacity, anchored by the Saskatchewan Research Council's rare earth processing facility, the first operation in North America to produce commercial-scale NdPr metal.