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Over 10 days, Trump cemented deals with Australia, Malaysia, Cambodia and most recently, Japan, to bolster the supply of rare earths and other critical minerals that are crucial for the making of batteries, automobiles, defense systems and computing chips.
The flurry of deals — part of Washington’s bid to counter Beijing’s chokehold on the sector — comes ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan on Thursday.
The deals may “benefit immensely from being linked together in a plurilateral agreement with strong commitments, financing and pooling of resources,” said Wendy Cutler, senior vice president at Asia Society Policy Institute. She expects more of such deals to follow under the Trump administration.
Trump and Xi are expected to address several contentious issues that have stalled the long-running trade talks, including Beijing’s rare earth export controls and Washington’s tariff threats and technology restrictions.
In the medium term, we will get off the Chinese supply chain, but in the short term, there’s still a great deal of dependency on China.
Dennis Wilder
Senior fellow at Georgetown University
The most recent win for Trump was an agreement with Japan aimed at securing the supply of raw and processed critical minerals while also pledging funding for selected projects within the next six months. Earlier pacts with Australia, Malaysia and Thailand also outlined multibillion-dollar plans, commitments to fair trade practices and to avoid export bans or quotas.
While Trump’s deals will bring much-needed financial support to the industry and may eventually challenge Beijing’s stranglehold over rare earths, experts said the efforts will be costly and take years to bear fruit.
“What we are trying to do now is to get off the Chinese as the primary supply chain, but that will take time,” said Dennis Wilder, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and now a senior fellow at Georgetown University.
“In the medium term, we will get off the Chinese supply chain, but in the short term, there’s still a great deal of dependency on China,” Wilder stressed.
Goldman Sachs estimates new rare earth mines tend to take up to a decade to develop, with known reserves for certain elements “very scarce” outside of Myanmar and China, while building refineries would take about 5 years.
China dominates 69% of the market share for rare earth mining, 92% of refining and 98% of magnet manufacturing, the bank estimates.
Level playing field
These deals are a “game-changer” that could reduce the U.S. vulnerabilities to Beijing’s export controls, stabilize rare earth prices and accelerate domestic innovative refining and recycling, said Brodie Sutherland, CEO of Patriot Critical Minerals Corp, a U.S.-based critical minerals developer.
With assured access to raw materials from friendly nations, American firms can focus on efficient extraction, ethical mining and value-added processing, said Sutherland.
He also cited longer-term benefits such as lower risk premiums on financing, faster permitting for new sites and a “level playing field against subsidized foreign competitors.”
China has allowed rare earth prices to swing in very “strategic” ways to make projects in other countries unprofitable, said Mike Rosenberg, a professor of strategic management at IESE Business School.
By using public funds to back these projects, global miners and refiners ought to be able to make investments that guarantee a reasonable return, Rosenberg added.
Efforts to diversify and reshore production, however, will inevitably mean accepting some environmental tradeoffs, experts said.
Mining and refining rare earth materials in an ecologically friendly way is “very, very expensive,” Rosenberg noted, while China kept costs low by limiting environmental controls.
“Consumers may need to accept higher prices for electronics and green technologies that reflect their true material and environmental cost,” said Patrick Schröder, a senior research fellow at the Environment and Society Center at Chatham House.
The policy push has also fueled a rally in several U.S.-listed rare earth miners this year. New York-listed shares of MP Materials and Trilogy Metals have each more than quadrupled, Energy Fuels has tripled, while Critical Metals is up nearly 90% and USA Rare Earth about 75%, according to LSEG data.
Wake-up call
Trump likely rushed to sign these deals to gain leverage ahead of his meeting with Xi in Seoul this week, analysts said.
U.S. officials said earlier this week that they expected China to delay imposing export controls on critical minerals for a year as part of a broader trade deal, briefly cooling a rally in mining stocks.
“Beijing’s latest threat on sweeping extraterritorial export restrictions in this sector has served as a needed wake-up call to partners around the world,” said Asia Society Policy Institute’s Cutler.
China may have miscalculated with the export controls that rattled the global economy and widened the trade war to include other nations, said Wilder of Georgetown University, noting that “it wasn’t in China’s interest.”
“It was a useful weapon when it was targeted at the U.S., but it becomes less useful when you try and expand that to the rest of the world,” Wilder said. “Because then you bring the rest of the world over to the U.S. in many ways.”
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