The Minerals That Drive Trump’s Global Agenda

But what exactly are critical minerals? Why do they matter so much? Why does China dominate their supply chains and processing, and how long would it take for the United States to catch up? For answers, I turned to Gracelin Baskaran, the director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast for the audio interview. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

What connects the White House’s approach to Pakistan and Panama, with a thread running through Canada, Greenland, and Ukraine? The answer could lie not in a grand theory of international relations but in the Trump administration’s realization that it is lagging behind China in the race for critical minerals—and its clear desire to catch up.

What connects the White House’s approach to Pakistan and Panama, with a thread running through Canada, Greenland, and Ukraine? The answer could lie not in a grand theory of international relations but in the Trump administration’s realization that it is lagging behind China in the race for critical minerals—and its clear desire to catch up.

But what exactly are critical minerals? Why do they matter so much? Why does China dominate their supply chains and processing, and how long would it take for the United States to catch up? For answers, I turned to Gracelin Baskaran, the director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast for the audio interview. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: Let’s start with some basic definitions. What are critical minerals?

Gracelin Baskaran: Critical minerals are the minerals we need for national, economic, and energy security. But they also have a high likelihood of supply chain disruption. Sometimes this means that China controls that mineral. Sometimes it is a mineral produced in a single mine in one country, so if there was a disruption to that mine, it could undermine our supply chain security.

RA: What about “rare earths”—where do they fit into this?

GB: The U.S. Geological Survey has identified a list of about 60 critical minerals. Of those, 17 are what we call “rare earths.” Rare earths are actually everywhere, but the difficulty is finding them in a concentration dense enough to make them economical to extract.

RA: What are the main uses of rare earths and critical minerals? Why are they so important?

GB: Rare earths have entered the discourse because we use them in permanent magnets, which are used in every form of defense technology: fighter jets, warships, tanks, lasers, missiles. If we don’t have access to them, it undermines our ability to protect ourselves, which leaves us really nervous at a time of rising geopolitical tension, particularly in the Indo-Pacific.