In the high-stakes world of geoeconomics, natural resources have defined international competition for hundreds of years. In the 19th century, as coal powered the Industrial Revolution, regions like Alsace-Lorraine became flashpoints for interstate conflict. In the 20th and early 21st centuries, the economic dependence of every nation on hydrocarbon-based resources has contributed to the Middle East’s position as a tinderbox to be influenced and fought over by the great powers of the world. And, in the current era of advanced manufacturing, digital infrastructure, and energy transitions, critical minerals have emerged as a central driver of geopolitical competition.
Critical minerals, as per the US Energy Act 2020 can be defined as natural resources which all developed, high-tech modern economies require to function, but whose supply may be vulnerable to constraints and disruptions. Today, critical minerals are required for a whole host of industries, including defense, heavy manufacturing, and semiconductors. Apart from these examples, critical minerals are the driving force behind clean energy production, highlighting in the process how the global demand for these natural resources is expected to triple by 2040.
In the realm of international relations, the growing strategic significance of such natural resources is fueling competition between the United States and China. This great power competition, therefore, necessitates an assessment of the present strategic situation. In pursuing a long-term strategy of systematically reducing Western leverage while increasing its own, China has emerged as the most potent threat to the United States’ economic security.
China leads in the raw ore production of two-thirds of the fifty minerals identified under the U.S. Geological Survey’s critical minerals list. In addition to this, Beijing accounted for more than 60% of the extraction of raw ore of the world’s Rare earth elements (REEs). While China’s share of the production of raw is in the range of 10-30%, it also dominates the supply chains that process these minerals, possessing the industrial capacity to refine them at a scale that no other country can match. China refines more than 90% of Rare earth elements (REEs) minerals and accounts for more than 70% of the market share of some of the leading energy-related minerals.
China’s dominance in critical minerals must be seen as a part of a calculated meta-narrative perpetuated by Beijing in order to win a civilizational competition with the United States-led West and establish a China-centered world order. The roots of this competition date back to Beijing’s vision of the Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo). In this vision, Chinese civilization rests at the center of a global order surrounded by subordinate nations, with Beijing serving as the cultural-economic core.
In order to achieve this civilizational vision, the Chinese Communist Party has embraced the doctrine of unrestricted warfare, believing that Beijing must attack the United States through every available means, including information warfare, narrative warfare, cognitive warfare, lawfare, influence operations, diplomatic warfare, and economic warfare, among others. Among these methods, China most aggressively wages economic warfare through the weaponization of critical minerals, using supply-chain dominance as an instrument of strategic dependence.
China weaponizes critical minerals in a multiplicity of ways. First, China imposed export controls on selective minerals that constitute the backbone of the U.S. military-industrial complex, as in 2024 when China suspended the export of gallium and germanium that are critical for manufacturing 5G devices, night vision goggles and high frequency chips; China also suspended the supply of antimony, used in the manufacturing of armor-piercing rounds and infrared sensors. Second, China has restricted the export of rare-earth processing technology while maintaining overwhelming dominance in mineral refining, limiting the ability of other countries to build their own processing capacity. Third, China has adopted rules similar to the “Foreign Direct Product Rule,” enabling Beijing to impose export licensing requirements on products manufactured abroad if they rely on Chinese rare earth materials or processing technologies.
The challenge therefore confronting the United States is both moral and strategic. How should the world’s oldest democracy respond to an authoritarian regime like China? Reinhold Niebuhr argued that like individuals, nation-states are driven by ego and vanity. Attainment of perfect justice is therefore impossible in international politics. And yet, the U.S. thus faces a situation of tragic responsibility where it must exercise its power in ways that compromise its innocence, not out of vanity but to ensure that China does not achieve hegemonic status. In this context, the morally responsible course lies in seeking proximate justice—the use of power in a prudential manner to avoid worse outcomes while acknowledging one’s own moral limitations. If the United States and its democratic allies decline to secure their own access to critical minerals through sharp-elbowed foreign policy and concerted efforts to form the domestic industries necessary to utilize those minerals, China and its dependents will surely weaponize their hegemony over global supply chains. The tragic reality of international politics is that responsible nations must sometimes pursue power not out of vanity, but to prevent worse actors from dominating.
Proximate justice, when it comes to rare earth minerals, entails neither embracing economic nationalism by completely economic decoupling from China and the global economy nor in allowing Beijing’s monopoly to go uncontested. Instead, a Niebuhrian strategy oriented towards the achievement of proximate justice would seek the cultivation of prudential economic statecraft that puts the U.S. in a position to compete globally.
First, the U.S. must formulate a strategy where, in addition to traditional mining, the government must funnel resources towards developing materials science, extraction and processing technology. Second, the U.S. must promote the creation of a circular economy that recovers and reuses critical minerals from waste generated during the extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes, thereby turning environmental liabilities into valuable inputs for future production. Third, the U.S. must formulate a national critical minerals policy which articulates the need to prioritize research and development (R&D) and promote synergy among all the stakeholders in the interrelated processes of ore extraction, refining, and processing so as to develop a coherent policy-oriented framework. Fourth, like-minded partnerships with allies must be forged so as to secure the vital supply chain, this partnership currently manifests itself in initiatives like FORGE and Pax Silica.
In a morally fallen world where authoritarian actors weaponize access to resources, the United States must act as a steward that prioritizes order over chaos, restraint over overreach, and as an anchor of stability. While capitalism has been the dominant economic framework of the West for several centuries, the rise of China as an authoritarian power determined to leverage international trade toward its own nefarious ends has reintroduced a distinctly early-modern mercantilist framework into global economics. Niebuhr’s thought, which takes the necessity of democracies competing for power with authoritarian states as its starting point, is well-positioned to advise policy makers in a world where the freedom of “free” markets is increasingly undermined by bad actors.
