China is using its control over the supply chain for rare-earth and other critical minerals to dominate global commerce and project state power—and the world is finally waking up to the danger.
For decades, Beijing has pursued industrial dominance through state subsidies, currency manipulation, intellectual-property theft, forced technology transfer, state-directed overcapacity, blocked market access, dumping, forced labor and lax environmental standards. Its economic aggression has advanced across industries—steel and aluminum, shipbuilding, solar panels, batteries, pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, telecommunications equipment, drones, robots, machine tools and advanced electronics.
Beijing’s critical-minerals gambit is a serious escalation. Critical minerals are the foundation of modern military power. They are also important to semiconductor manufacturing, artificial-intelligence infrastructure, aerospace systems, electric vehicles, satellites, fiber optics, advanced sensors and emerging energy technologies—the tools by which free societies defend themselves.
Beijing’s targets now reach across the digital-defense periodic table: Gallium for semiconductors and radar. Germanium for fiber optics, infrared optics, night vision and satellite solar cells. Graphite for battery anodes. Antimony for ammunition and flame retardants. Tungsten for munitions and machine tools. Indium for touch screens and AI data-center photonics. Lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese for batteries in vehicles, drones, grid storage and military electronics.
China uses “starve, not strangle” tactics designed to control the critical-minerals valves without closing them entirely. Its bureaucracy slows licenses, rations access, raises costs and reminds every boardroom that the road to strategic manufacturing runs through Beijing.
In response, the U.S. is mobilizing private capital, engineering talent, entrepreneurial risk-taking and strategic government support.
America’s aim isn’t only to reduce dependence on China. It is also to undercut China’s production advantage by developing cleaner, cheaper and more-flexible technologies that can produce critical minerals at or below China’s prices.
Consider the Pentagon-guided effort involving ReElement Technologies, Vulcan Elements and key leaders in the defense industrial base. The Pentagon has supported Vulcan and ReElement construction projects with hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. The Pentagon on Monday announced an additional $25 million investment in ReElement “to expand domestic refining capacity for rare earth elements and other defense-critical minerals.”
This is the kind of collaboration we at the Trump White House have used before in a national emergency. During the Covid pandemic, America faced an acute ventilator shortage. The White House paired Ventec Life Systems, a small medical-device company, with General Motors, which brought the technology to industrial scale. Within weeks, the GM-Ventec partnership began shipping thousands of ventilators to hospitals.
Critical-minerals supply chains are far more complex than ventilators. Yet the industrial lesson is the same: When government identifies the strategic gap, removes obstacles and matches innovators with industrial partners, America can move quickly.
That is the model here. ReElement uses advanced separation technology to refine domestic and recycled feedstocks into rare-earth oxides. Vulcan converts those oxides into metals and finished magnets. Together they are helping to rebuild a China-free mine-to-magnet supply chain on American soil.
ReElement’s breakthrough is feedstock flexibility—enabling refiners to get raw ingredients from various sources. Its advanced chromatographic separation process is designed to recover critical minerals from several streams: mixed rare-earth carbonate, recycled magnets, mine tailings, industrial residues, zinc byproducts, electronic scrap and other secondary materials. Waste becomes strategic supply.
That technology can outflank China on cost and environmental performance. Beijing’s model relies on cheap coal power, chemical-intensive separation, wastewater and toxic tailings—environmental shortcuts that produce artificially low prices. America can beat China’s predatory pricing without copying its dirty production model.
The strategic analogy is fracking. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing transformed America from an energy-dependent power into an energy superpower. ReElement-style refining innovation can do the same for critical minerals—unlocking domestic and allied supply, lowering costs, reducing waste and breaking China’s choke hold.
Beyond its rare-earth magnet partnership with Vulcan, ReElement is also proving it can produce other critical minerals, including germanium. Germanium is indispensable to fiber optics, infrared optics, night vision, satellite solar cells, advanced semiconductors, aerospace systems, missile guidance, surveillance equipment and AI data-center connectivity. China knows this. That is why Beijing is putting pressure on germanium.
ReElement projects annualized separation capacity of 500 metric tons of germanium dioxide by the end of the year. Current U.S. demand is estimated at roughly 90 to 120 metric tons of germanium dioxide equivalent. That means ReElement could potentially satisfy U.S. germanium demand and support allied supply chains abroad.
As demand rises from data-center construction and expanded defense production, ReElement and its industrial partners can rapidly scale with the market and broaden their reach across different critical minerals.
Beijing has tried to use its control over critical materials to bully the West, but its plan has backfired. It has only managed to encourage the free world’s decoupling from the Chinese economy.
China built its leverage by making the world believe it was the sole supplier. America’s task is to work with our free-world allies to make sure there is an alternative—cleaner, cheaper and faster. America’s formula is to back breakthrough technologies, pair small innovators with large industrial partners and scale China-free strategic supply chains at the Pentagon’s “speed of relevance”—fast enough to gain a competitive advantage.
Mr. Navarro is White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.