As European commissioners gathered in Leuven, Belgium, on Wednesday for a pre-summit competitiveness huddle, industry chief Stéphane Séjourné was in Washington tending to one of the deepest sources of Europe’s economic malaise.
A U.S.-led summit — drawing representatives from 54 countries including the U.K., Japan, Australia and India, plus the EU — sought to gather momentum for a critical minerals trade bloc to lock down supplies vital to everything from iPhones to fighter jets.
The unspoken aim is to loosen China’s grip on the critical raw materials supply chain — a task every major economy wants done, and none can do alone. As Vice President JD Vance put it to foreign ministers: "What is before all of us is an opportunity at self-reliance that we never have to rely on anybody else except for each other, for the critical minerals necessary to sustain our industries and to sustain growth.”
The Trump administration's blueprint sets out non-binding pledges on permitting, mining, processing and financing, alongside a proposed price floor to shield producers from market flooding by dominant players.
Self-reliance, however, remains a fantasy. In Brussels, critical minerals strategies have long been dressed up as “decoupling” from China. That might have been conceivable 20 years ago, when Beijing was only beginning to pour state-backed capital into overseas mineral projects. Today, China is the leading refiner of many of the minerals considered critical. For rare earths, it controls more than half of global production and nearly 90% of processing and refining. Any claim that it can be cleanly cut out of the system is wishful thinking.
Still, the summit turnout suggests the danger of dependence is finally sinking in. If the U.S. and the EU have been stunningly slow to grasp the risk, the lesson was comprehensively rammed home in October when China halted rare earth exports in its trade war with the U.S. — leaving Europe, which imports all its rare earths from China, a bruised bystander.
Washington’s answer arrived this week with Project Vault, a public-private critical minerals reserve designed to hedge against a repeat of Beijing’s October maneuver.
More broadly, countries are beginning to copy China’s playbook. State-backed equity enabled Beijing to offer countries bundled deals — mines, power, ports and roads wrapped into a single package.
Gulf countries are now deploying cash and state guarantees to lock down mineral access across Africa, with Turkey, India and others close behind. In November, the U.S. Export-Import Bank pledged $100 billion to secure supply chains for critical minerals, nuclear energy and LNG.
Meanwhile, the EU’s RESourceEU Action Plan, unveiled in December, mobilizes €3 billion over 12 months and includes plans to stockpile critical minerals.
For now, the results speak for themselves. A recent EU audit warned the bloc is on track to miss its own 2030 targets of mining 10% of its critical minerals and processing 40% domestically.
As the EU announced on Wednesday its intention to ink a minerals partnership with Washington, Beijing was quick to object. Its foreign ministry warned against small groups imposing rules that undermine the international economic and trade order.
That’s rich, as it was precisely Western faith in self-restraint and open markets norms — and China’s refusal to commit to them — that allowed Beijing to lock down the minerals supply chain in the first place.
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