Critical Minerals and the New Geopolitics

Oct 2, 2020SOPHIA KALANTZAKOS

The tension between the geographic concentration of vital metallic elements and the increasing scramble to secure them will further unsettle geopolitics in the twenty-first century. Rich-country governments must now follow China's lead and build new avenues of trust and cooperation with developing countries

ABU DHABI – The climate crisis and the Fourth Industrial Revolution – with its breakthrough technologies such as artificial intelligence and 5G networks – are setting the world on a geopolitical collision course. Both the drive to decarbonize and the battle for global technological supremacy depend on critical minerals like rare earths, lithium, and cobalt – all of which are highly concentrated in a few locations, including China.

China’s resource domination is reshaping geopolitics. In 2010, China halved its export quotas for rare earths, and also reportedly banned their sale to Japan following a trawler incident near Japan’s Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyu Islands and claims as its own. The episode awakened other leading economies to the fact that a major competitor and rival controlled 97% of the global supply of these vital inputs for magnets, glass, electronics, defense systems, wind turbines, and hybrid and electric vehicles.

The US, the EU, and Japan reacted in a piecemeal manner at best, and ten years later still haven’t produced effective strategies to free themselves from China’s resource grip. Rare earths made headlines again in 2019, when China indicated that it might “weaponize” them in its trade dispute with the US. Meanwhile, breathless media reports of rare-earth discoveries in Afghanistan, Greenland’s melting glaciers, the abyssal sea, asteroids, and planets demonstrate that magical thinking continues to trump effective policymaking.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-critical-minerals-new-geopolitics-by-sophia-kalantzakos-2020-10?