For years, America treated China’s dominance over critical minerals as a supply-chain problem. But it isn’t. It is strategic leverage — over our defense base, industrial capacity, and the technologies that will shape the next decade.
That is why the Trump administration was justified in recently announcing a hard 180-day deadline to secure binding arrangements with U.S. trading partners to reduce America’s exposure to China’s grip on critical minerals processing. If deals fail to materialize, the White House has signaled that it will act quickly through tariffs, quotas, or the enforcement of minimum import prices.
The urgency is real. China did not “accidentally” become the gatekeeper for rare earths. It built dominance deliberately, through subsidies, market flooding, and control of downstream processing, and reinforced it with export restrictions. Too much concentration is a vulnerability, and Beijing knows how to exploit it.
We have already seen this playbook in action. In 2025, China expanded export controls tied to rare earths and related products, equipment, and technologies — moves that affect everything from defense manufacturing to clean energy. It’s clear that China wants the option to squeeze.
Washington’s old response — speeches, studies, pilot programs — changed little. But the Trump administration’s six-month deadline can alter the equation. It tells allies, investors, and producers that the United States is serious about building capacity outside China’s orbit. It has every intention of locking in offtake, expanding processing, and making it economically viable for non-Chinese supply chains to survive the price pressure that has wiped out competitors before.
The real bottleneck isn’t mining. The world has minerals. The choke point is processing, and the brutal economics of competing against a state-backed system designed to undercut rivals.
When Beijing can flood markets, crash prices, and wait competitors out, abstract appeals to “free trade” are a fool’s errand, as there is nothing free about the current critical minerals market. That is why implementing trade-stabilizing tools and boosting allied processing capacity are so important.
This shift is not happening in isolation. The policy environment is moving in the same direction.
This month, lawmakers proposed a $2.5 billion strategic reserve framework to stabilize critical minerals markets. This was an explicit recognition that the U.S. needs a backstop against manipulation and sudden shocks — and that it needs to treat strategic inputs like strategic assets.
Critics will call this industrial policy. Fine. China has been running an aggressive industrial policy for decades. Ignoring that reality did not preserve American competitiveness; it eroded it. The goal is not to copy Beijing’s model. It is to stop financing our own exposure.
The larger implication is that the China challenge cannot be split neatly between “security” and “economics.” It is one contest. Control the inputs — advanced magnets, sensors, specialty chemicals, networking components — and you gain leverage over the systems built on top of them. Supply chains have become instruments of power.
That same logic applies beyond minerals. China’s gains in telecom infrastructure were built on scale, financing, and state alignment. The U.S. cannot respond with a patchwork of smaller players that lack global reach, either.
This is where the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper merger that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department approved fits. It’s secondary but telling. Viewed through a national security lens, it strengthens U.S. networking capacity at a moment when Huawei has spent years trying to dominate global infrastructure, and when networking increasingly underpins artificial intelligence performance and cloud security. It’s one more sign that Washington is prioritizing competitiveness.
Coherence of resource development and management, industry, technology, and security has always been synergistic. Now, more than ever, the U.S. must implement it effectively. Elements of policy run in isolation will be self-defeating.
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If the administration follows through — locking in credible allied agreements, scaling non-Chinese processing, and stopping Beijing from pricing competitors out of existence — the U.S. will be more resilient and harder to coerce.
If it doesn’t, we’ll be back where we started: Washington talking while Beijing controls the supply chain.
Paula A. DeSutter was the U.S. assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation from 2002 to 2009.