Highlights

• UK and EU face China's 90% rare earth refining dominance with opposite strategies:
  • London bets on capital markets and gradual diversification.
  • Brussels pivots to strategic stockpiles and binding 2030 targets.
• Both approaches rest on fragile assumptions:
  • UK trusts markets can outrun geopolitics.
  • EU believes it can compress decade-long projects into five years.
• Neither strategy can meaningfully escape Chinese dominance before 2035.
• The real question isn't who has the better strategy, but whose illusion breaks first:
  • UK's market-paced plan may crumble under sudden Chinese cutoffs.
  • EU megaprojects risk stalling before stockpiles materialize.

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Tobias Rossi’s (opens in a new tab) Finance vs. Stockpiles: How London and Brussels Are Betting on Different Ways Out of China’s Chokepoint reads like a dispatch from a continent waking up inside someone else’s industrial machine. His thesis is clear, stark, and unsettling: Europe and the United Kingdom face the same dragon—China’s 90% dominance in rare earth refining—but have chosen utterly opposite weapons with which to confront it. One brings spreadsheets. The other brings shovels and statecraft.

The Provocation at the Core

Rossi argues that London’s Vision 2035 is a bet on time: ten years for capital markets, risk guarantees, and polite diversification to gradually wean Britain from Beijing’s metallurgical umbilical cord. Brussels, by contrast, assumes time has already expired. After Chinese export controls halted European factories in 2024 and Northvolt (opens in a new tab) collapsed under supply-chain strain, the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act pivoted from aspiration to triage—47 strategic projects, binding 2030 targets, and now the taboo word whispered only in wartime economies: stockpiles.

The basic split is philosophical. The UK believes markets can outrun geopolitics. The EU believes geopolitics can shut down markets before the opening bell.

Assumptions Built on Sand

Rossi calls out each side’s implicit—and fragile—beliefs:

UK assumptions:

• Capital markets will finance midstream processing in a sector famous for bankruptcies.
• Diversification can substitute for domestic control.
• A 60% dependence cap offers safety, as if geopolitical coercion cares about percentage thresholds.
• Recycling capacity—still embryonic—scales on cue.

EU assumptions:

• Forty-seven strategic projects can survive permitting battles, NIMBY revolts, and seven-to-ten-year build cycles compressed into five.
• Recycling targets (25% by 2030) can be reached despite current rare earth recycling rates hovering near statistical noise.
• Strategic stockpiles will be politically defensible—and actually reachable—if China tightens export valves further.

Rossi’s implicit warning: both strategies lean on optimism disguised as planning.

Biases Between the Lines

Though measured, the paper betrays certain tilts. Rossi appears more skeptical of the UK’s financialized minimalism—calling its production targets “modest by any measure”—but no less wary of Brussels’ dirigiste ambitions. His bias, if one must name it, is toward realism over ideology. He distrusts any plan that fails to reckon with mining timelines, metallurgical talent shortages, and China’s chronic willingness to weaponize processing chokepoints.

The Implication: A Race Neither Can Currently Win

The most provocative insight is Rossi’s conclusion that neither London nor Brussels can meaningfully escape Chinese refining dominance before 2030–2035, and even that assumes no geopolitical shocks. Europe can build mines; Britain can build markets—but refining remains the iron wall. The bottleneck isn’t ore. It’s chemistry, capital, and decades of offshored know-how.

Thus, the real question isn’t who has the better strategy. It’s whose illusion breaks first.

If China triggers a sudden cutoff, the UK’s market-paced plan may crumble before year three. If Europe’s megaprojects stall—as so many already have—the EU may find itself holding empty stockpile warehouses while its industries idle.

Final Verdict

Rossi delivers a cold truth wrapped in elegant prose: Europe is not choosing between two solutions. It is choosing between two gambles—finance versus fortresses—while standing on the same fault line. The next five years will reveal whose bet was merely hopeful, and whose was existentially naive.

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