Highlights
- China controls nearly 90% of global rare earth element processing, creating a strategic chokehold on global manufacturing and military technologies.
- The PRC weaponizes climate transition policies and rare earth supply chains as tools of geopolitical leverage and economic coercion.
- Urgent action is needed to diversify rare earth mineral production and reduce dependence on Chinese processing infrastructure.
In a hard-hitting analysis published in the Spring 2025 edition of the Journal of Advanced Military Studies, authors Ian Murphy (opens in a new tab) (SecuriFense/Old Dominion University) and Kevin Johnston (U.S. Army veteran, PhD candidate, Old Dominion University) lay bare a stark geopolitical reality: China’s dominance in the rare earth mineral supply chain is no longer just an economic risk—it is a strategic, military, and national security emergency for the United States and its allies.
The article, “The Winds of Change: How China’s Focus on Rare Earth Minerals Reshapes the World (opens in a new tab),” delivers a sober diagnosis: the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has transformed its control over rare earth elements (REEs) into an offensive tool of 21st-century power projection. Murphy and Johnston argue, through a realist theoretical lens, that China is not engaging in climate cooperation with the West in good faith.
Instead, it is using climate transition policy as a Trojan horse for global supply chain domination. At the heart of that strategy is China’s overwhelming control over the world’s rare earth extraction, processing, and patent infrastructure.
Key Premises and Evidence
The authors frame their case through the political realism of E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, asserting that the PRC is guided not by shared international ideals but by hard-edged calculations of power, leverage, and national interest. The PRC, they argue, views the global climate transition not as a cooperative challenge but as an opportunity to undermine Western manufacturing, gain technological hegemony, and increase geopolitical coercive capacity.
Among the most alarming findings:
- Rare Earth Processing Monopoly: While China controls ~60% of global REE production, it controls nearly 90% of global REE processing. This means that even if other nations mine rare earths, they remain dependent on Chinese refining infrastructure.
- Patent Superiority: China has outpaced the U.S. in rare earth patents since 1997. As of 2019, Chinese entities held over 23,000 more REE patents than the United States, giving China significant control over downstream manufacturing and legal frameworks.
- Strategic Export Controls: China’s 2023–2025 restrictions on gallium, germanium, graphite, and rare earth processing technologies are part of what the authors identify as “unrestricted warfare”—a legal and economic toolkit used by the PRC to control key nodes of global industry under the guise of trade regulation.
- Malacca Dilemma and Energy Dual Strategy: The article makes a compelling link between China’s rare earth strategy and its long-standing vulnerability around the Strait of Malacca. To reduce reliance on seaborne petroleum and achieve energy security, China is doubling down on domestic renewable energy technologies, while selling low-cost EVs and solar panels abroad to sabotage Western manufacturing.
- Military Implications: Rare earths are indispensable for laser systems, radar, missile guidance, and stealth tech. The authors warn that Chinese control over rare earths could create catastrophic vulnerabilities in the U.S. defense supply chain, from F-35s to hypersonics.
Any Bias or Blind Spots?
The report delivers a formidable account of China’s strategic playbook. Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) identifies several notable omissions and analytical blind spots:
While The Winds of Change delivers a powerful diagnosis of China’s rare earth dominance, its policy prescriptions fall short. The authors advocate strategic stockpiles, supply chain diversification, and reshoring—but fail to confront the harsh reality of U.S. permitting paralysis and environmental red tape that has stalled mineral development for decades. True, President Trump’s executive orders in the first 100 days of his second presidency help alleviate some of the red tape, but industrial policy will be necessary.
Nor do they acknowledge that allied nations like Australia, Canada, and Europe face similar constraints, often trapped in their own bureaucracies or reluctant to sever processing ties with China. The call for allied cooperation is sound in principle, but hollow in practice without acknowledging these systemic barriers.
Equally problematic is the lack of an actionable industrial strategy. The report calls for U.S. reshoring and defense-aligned production, yet offers no specifics on how to finance or de-risk these efforts. Absent are critical tools like offtake guarantees, public-private capital models, or federal loan backing—without which these goals remain aspirational.
Worse, the authors give Congress a pass for more than a decade of inaction since the 2012 CRS warning, focusing solely on China while overlooking America’s own strategic negligence. We need to get real. While the piece rightly emphasizes China's patent leverage, it glosses over the broader threat: Beijing’s sprawling dual-use industrial base, cyber-espionage operations, and targeted technology theft across aerospace, drone systems, and magnetics—realities that can’t be ignored in any credible national security strategy.
Strategic Implications
REEx agrees with the authors' core conclusion: China’s dominance over rare earths is a calculated act of state power, not an economic accident.
The West’s delay in recognizing this threat has allowed Beijing to build vertically integrated, militarily relevant control over minerals that underpin both the green transition and next-gen warfare.
We underscore that China’s April 2025 ban on rare earth magnet production technology exports—following prior bans on gallium and graphite—confirms Murphy and Johnston’s thesis. Beijing’s controls are not isolated retaliations. They are escalating tools in a new form of geo-industrial competition aimed at conditioning U.S. and allied dependence, suppressing independent supply development, and blunting Western strategic mobility.
A Way Forward
Murphy and Johnston offer valuable policy direction, including:
- Expanding the National Defense Stockpile;
- Investing in military logistics innovation (e.g., unmanned resupply, energy-efficient systems);
- Enhancing maritime deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
- Facilitating tech transfer and ITAR exemptions among allies;
- Reshoring rare earth mining and processing;
- And extend DPA waivers to allies like Australia.
Rare Earth Exchanges strongly endorses these actions, but suggests other ideas as well:
- Establish a Critical Minerals Czar, along with the establishment of a National Critical Minerals Development Bank, modeled after the U.S. Ex-Im Bank, to underwrite REE and battery mineral ventures with long-term capital.
- Create a Strategic Offtake Reserve Program, akin to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but focused on neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.
- Reform U.S. mining permit laws by streamlining NEPA timelines and empowering DOD to fast-track critical mineral projects under national security authority. Open up a network of allies, zero tariffs upon entry (Five Eyes, Denmark/Greenland, etc.).
- Develop a Rare Earth NATO, a binding treaty organization between the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the UK with enforceable production, export, and IP protection obligations.
- Stand up REE industrial parks with vertically integrated capabilities, from ore to alloy, in Texas, Quebec, and Western Australia—with federal backing and guaranteed procurement pipelines.
Final Thoughts
The Journal of Advanced Military Studies has delivered a bracing, well-evidenced warning that should ring across every Washington defense agency, White House corridor, and congressional office. China’s rare earth dominance is not just leverage—it’s a latent form of warfare. America and its allies cannot afford another decade of “wait and see.” Strategic paralysis is strategic surrender.
Murphy and Johnston’s work is a must-read, but action, not more analysis, is now the measure of seriousness. The winds of change are blowing, carrying the scent of confrontation, not cooperation. REEx calls on Congress, the Pentagon, and U.S. industry to act _now_—before China shuts the door and locks the world out.
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