Highlights
- China currently dominates 90% of rare earth processing and manufacturing, creating a significant strategic vulnerability for the United States.
- Reclaiming mineral independence requires a comprehensive, multi-billion dollar national strategy similar to Operation Warp Speed.
- The strategy involves capital investment, workforce development, and international collaboration.
- The ultimate goal is to control technological standards, patents, and industrial ecosystems through 2046, not just mining minerals.
It’s easy to mistake momentum for victory. On paper, Donald Trump’s mining revival reads like a modern-day Manhattan Project for minerals: executive orders firing off like artillery, a Section 232 Action to shield domestic producers, the Defense Production Act invoked to crank the gears of industry, and—most visibly—the Pentagon’s $400 million lifeline to MP Materials, plus an additional $1billion plus from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. That deal alone aims to build a magnet factory ten times the size of anything in the U.S., delivering in three years and giving the DoD a 15% equity stake. By any historical measure, no modern president has moved this aggressively to wrest the mineral supply chain back from external hands. And yet, here’s the brutal truth: America is still light years from independence.
China’s grip on the rare earth and critical mineral supply chain isn’t a mere advantage—it’s a state-forged weapon. Decades in the making, honed with relentless precision, and now embedded in three massive state-backed conglomerates, it commands 90% of rare earth processing, over 98% of heavy rare earth production, and about 90% of the world’s magnet manufacturing. This isn’t just market share; it’s leverage, the kind that can make or break entire industries at will.
Trump’s policies have begun to chip at that armor, no doubt. But while we’re drafting project proposals and breaking ceremonial ground, Beijing is doubling down—pouring capital into downstream innovation where monopoly meets market innovative disruption. They’re fusing rare earth dominance with material science, clean energy, and even life sciences, filing orders of magnitude more patents than the United States. They’re moving beyond control of the supply to control of the standards themselves—the rules by which tomorrow’s technology will be judged. From humanoid robotics to EV motors to breakthrough energy technology, the future, to some extent, is being prototyped under Chinese patents, with Chinese metallurgy, in Chinese labs.
Meanwhile, America is relearning how to walk in an industry it abandoned decades ago. Yes, we outsourced the dirty business of mining and refining for the most part. Of course there are exceptions.
But in rare earth processing, the entire U.S. and Europe together can field perhaps a few hundred real, seasoned, intensely coveted experts. China has many thousands cultivated in the rare earth complex. They’ve spent thirty years refining separation, scaling production, and embedding their engineers into a feedback loop of constant improvement. The size and sophistication of their operations are almost unimaginable in the West, because this has not been a collective focus from America to Europe.
This is why Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) has warned: only a holistic, integrated, and enduring industrial policy—one backed not just by executive orders but by the U.S. Treasury, Congress, and the public—can hope to bring America (And for that matter, Western democracies) back on top. And “industrial policy” isn’t a slogan. It’s a web of interlocking pillars: guaranteed price floors to stabilize new producers, direct demand stimulation (“priming the pump”), workforce development, and coordinated multinational collaboration, to name some important ones.
On that last point, nationalism alone will fail. The necessary players are obvious: Australia, Canada, Brazil, and India. And for financing, the beating hearts aren’t necessarily in New York—experts in mining finance tend to congregate in London, Toronto, Perth, and Sydney. That’s where rare earth deals often get made, because that’s where the mining capital and expertise have remained while America outsourced not just the labor but the know-how.
The challenge is compounded by other half-hearted attempts in re-industrialization as a cautionary tale. A half-measure approach—one that funds some mining companies and not markets, and neglects refining, or ramps refining but ignores magnets—will leave America perpetually vulnerable to Chinese price shocks and predatory dumping. Beijing has played this game for decades: lure competitors into the field, undercut prices until they collapse, then buy assets for pennies on the dollar.
If Trump—or any president—wants rare earth element supply chain independence within five, ten, or even fifteen years, the playbook must look less like a standard procurement process and market development (deal here, deal there, etc.) and more like Operation Warp Speed. In the pandemic, vaccines went from concept to mass production in under a year because Washington threw out the rulebook: massive upfront capital, parallel development, guaranteed government purchases, and real-time coordination between private and public sectors. That same urgency must be applied here—but multiplied because this isn’t one or a few vaccines. It’s dozens of metals, each with its own geology, refining process, and end-use industry.
Think about what that means: capital on a scale measured in tens of billions (if not more), mobilizing universities and trade schools to produce metallurgists and chemical engineers, standing up refining plants and magnet factories alongside mines, securing environmental approvals at speed, and negotiating trade deals that link allied production into a coherent, defensible supply chain.
And it can’t just be about volume. It must be about technological leadership. While we debate subsidies and tariffs, China is shaping the metallurgical recipes, the magnet compositions, the alloys that will power the industries of 2040. They’re not just making the parts—they’re writing the future patents. If we fail to contest that ground, even a mined-in-America rare earth will be sent to a Chinese-designed plant to be turned into something worth selling.
That’s the mountain ahead. Yes, Trump is pushing harder than any president in living memory, and for that, REEx gives him a lot of credit. Yes, the DoD’s stake in MP Materials is a rare moment of strategic foresight, and that company is an American treasure trove. But make no mistake: the distance from here to true independence is steep, long, and fraught. And the climb demands something Washington hasn’t mustered in decades—an unorthodox national industrial policy as disciplined, as aggressive, and as patient as China’s.
Because in this economic war, the winner won’t be the one who mines the most dirt in 2026 or 2030, for that matter. It will be the one who controls the standards, the patents, and the industrial ecosystems and supply chains of 2046. And right now, that scoreboard still reads: China—90%. The West—scrambling.
Awesome report! Speaks facts-hard truths-Time to get into HIGH GEAR! Yes, the U.S. is far -far behind. Lets hope PresidentTrump can pull off another MIRACLE!!