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Geopolitical Jockeying for Mineral Wealth Touches Economies on Three Continents

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he wants Ukraine to supply rare earth to the US in exchange for continued military aid.

Photo of Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility
Photo by Tmy350 via CC BY-SA 4.0

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Soldiers of fortune fight for gold, but superpowers strike mineral deals. 

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he wants Ukraine to supply rare earth minerals to the US in exchange for continued military aid. The stuff would come in handy, as China said it was responding to new US tariffs by curbing the export of five critical minerals. 

It all goes to show that in geopolitics today, you can’t take anything for granite.

A Game of Economic Chicken

Rare earths are a group of 17 elements with important magnetic and electrochemical properties that are used in everything from electric vehicle batteries to wind turbines, smartphones and cancer drugs. This makes them absolutely crucial to industrial supply chains.

Ukraine, as it happens, is sitting on a fortune of natural resources, although a 2022 analysis by risk firm SecDev found Russia occupies territory with roughly $12.4 trillion worth. Still, that only covers roughly one third of Ukraine’s rare earth deposits and 42% of its metals, meaning Kyiv maintains control of significant resources. (Moscow, which launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, had seized 63% of Ukraine’s coal deposits, 11% of oil deposits, and 20% of natural gas deposits, SecDev found.) Trump said Tuesday that he wanted “to do a deal” with Ukraine that would amount to “equalization” in exchange for military aid:

  • The idea may not have actually been his. The Kyiv Independent reported Monday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy floated the idea to American officials as a way of retaining US aid, which totaled $175 billion in emergency support and $53.7 billion in direct military support as of last May. In return, the US would have less exposure to China, which produces 60 percent of the world’s rare earths and processes 90 percent.
  • And speaking of the Middle Kingdom, Beijing took a stab at US mineral supplies Tuesday after Trump escalated the trade war between the two countries by slapping additional 10% tariffs on all imports. China said it will restrict the export of five strategic, though not rare earth, metals — tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, and molybdenum — to “safeguard national security.” The metals are used in armour plating, alloys, medications, memory chips, solar panels, and for dozens of other purposes.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, for what it’s worth, told reporters Tuesday that the US should “not provide assistance [to Ukraine] at all.”

The Art of the Deal: Trump, a longtime real estate mogul, is of course still angling for his biggest deal of all time: Greenland. Both the autonomous Danish territory and Denmark’s government have told him the island, where 100 permits have been granted for companies to search for viable mineral deposits, is not for sale.