Council on Foreign Relations Proposes Hemispheric Critical Minerals Strategy as America's Vulnerability Window Widens

Highlights

• CFR senior fellow Heidi Crebo-Rediker proposes linking Western Hemisphere mines, processing, manufacturing, and markets to counter China's rare earth dominance.
• REEx warns of a Transition Vulnerability Window: political decisions take months, but industrial supply chains take years to build.
• A hemisphere is not a supply chain—mining outside China does not guarantee independent separation, metallization, or magnet production.
• REEx calls for targeted stockpiles, binding offtakes, and coordinated industrial qualification to manage the dangerous gap between policy and capacity.
• China's dominance took decades to build; Western governments cannot compress metallurgy and engineering expertise into election cycles.