Copyright Baltimore News
President Donald Trump is in a race to shore up America's access to rare earth minerals–required to make everything from missiles to smartphones–in the face of China's recent moves to withhold its dominant supply from the global economy. While in Asia this week, Trump signed frameworks and memorandums of understanding with Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand aimed at streamlining and diversifying U.S. access to rare earths. Though experts predict these will likely take years to bear fruit, the agreements send a clear signal to China ahead of Trump's in South Korea on Thursday. “We’ll have so much critical minerals and rare earths that you won't know what to do with them. They’ll be worth about $2," Trump said last week after inking a separate deal with Australia. The push follows China's rollout of global export controls on its rare earths, products containing even trace amounts of them, processing equipment and technologies. Among other criticisms from Trump administration officials, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer called it a "power grab by the Chinese that won't be tolerated." In response, Trump threatened to impose on Chinese imports, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that is now effectively off the table after he and his Chinese counterparts agreed on a framework for a U.S.-China trade deal over the weekend. Bessent said he hopes to see China grant the U.S. a deferral on the export controls. With these export controls, Xi's leverage over the U.S. ahead of Thursday's meeting is significant, but not airtight due to the difficulty of enforcing these barriers, according to Steven Lewis, founder of the China Studies Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “It would be really hard for China to actually do this, but it might disrupt, you know, some of our critical efforts to update our military technology and so my sense is it’s more of a bargaining ploy. And especially since they’ve played this card in the past with Japan and they usually back down," Lewis said. None of this changes the fact that China has an effective monopoly, not just on rare earth minerals, but on the all-important refinement process, too. This reality is particularly frustrating for the U.S. because it used to produce much of its own rare earths, Lewis said. "A lot of the American companies that used to do this sold their technology and their ability to China, you know, like 15, 20 years ago. And the Chinese have scooped it up and improved on it," Lewis said. “They’ve also really advanced the technology such that, for now, we lost that ability to catch up.” Trump will walk into the meeting with leverage of his own; his have done a number on China's manufacturing sector. Like China with its export controls, Trump has a history of backing down from threats to hit trading partners with stifling tariffs. A trade détente between the world's two largest economies will require both leaders to lay down their economic arms.
