China Hits Pause on Mineral Controls — The U.S. Doesn’t Buy It
Washington keeps cutting minerals deals, assuming China’s pause won’t last
China surprised a lot of people this month by suspending several of the mineral export controls it had rolled out earlier in the year. The New York Times framed it as a step back from economic coercion, but no one in Washington is taking it that way.
The Trump administration’s view is simple: this pause could end tomorrow. So the U.S. is still moving ahead with its own backup plans, signing bilateral minerals agreements at a steady pace. This fits the administration’s style, which is transactional and built around one-off bilateral deals.
There’s a reason the U.S. won’t slow down just because Beijing eased up. The disruptions earlier in the year exposed something everyone already knew but tended to downplay: almost no matter where you get the ore, the processing runs through China.
Refining and separation are the real chokepoints, and China still dominates both. Manufacturers and federal agencies expect those controls could snap back on with very little notice. So instead of chasing full independence, the U.S. is trying to spread out the risk with more partners, more places to refine, and more options if something goes wrong.
One of the most interesting pieces of this patchwork is the minerals agreement with Ukraine. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has a good overview of it, and the timing still feels remarkable, finalized in the middle of a war with some deposits sitting near contested territory.
Ukraine has significant reserves of lithium, titanium, and rare earths, but this deal isn’t about production next year. It’s a long-term bet that once the war stabilizes, Ukraine’s resource base will matter a lot more. New surveys will need to be done, since the numbers on Ukraine’s mineral wealth are still based on late-Soviet era data.
Australia fills a very different role. It’s an anchor supplier: the country you can depend on for magnet metals and heavy rare earths without worrying about political volatility. The CSIS breakdown of the U.S.–Australia framework makes clear that both sides have leaned into this relationship. Trump’s recent funding for rare-earth magnet companies relies heavily on Australian feedstock. If Ukraine is the long-term upside, Australia is the present-day stability.
Malaysia enters the picture further downstream. During Trump’s Asia swing ahead of APEC, the U.S. signed a cluster of agreements focused specifically on processing and midstream capacity. This is where China’s dominance is most entrenched, and Malaysia is one of the few places in the region positioned to stand up refining facilities at scale.
It doesn’t have Australia’s mining base or Ukraine’s future potential, but it has the industrial ecosystem to handle the messy, chemistry-heavy part of the supply chain. An interesting note on this deal is that it requires Malaysia to align some aspects of its trade policy with the United States, something that critics have noted as a quasi-imperialism.
Africa brings sheer scale, and a different kind of competition. One of the largest new metal refining projects in the world is now breaking ground in Guinea, financed by China. Several other African states are experimenting with moving beyond extraction into refining.
The U.S. role here has been quieter, built around smaller bilateral deals for metals such as cobalt, nickel, and graphite, plus technical support. It’s less dramatic than China’s investments, but it fills another gap in the U.S. strategy: securing access to metals that aren’t produced in large quantities anywhere else.
Step back from all of this, and the pattern is pretty straightforward. There’s no doctrine guiding these decisions. It’s a collection of targeted deals, each aimed at a different problem: future reserves in Ukraine, reliable production in Australia, processing capacity in Malaysia, and new supply opportunities in parts of Africa. And none of it slows down just because China eased export controls for a moment. The assumption in Washington is that the pause won’t last, so the diversification has to continue.
The U.S. isn’t trying to build a single replacement for China. It’s trying to avoid having a single point of failure. Different countries bring different strengths, and the U.S. needs all of them. What you get on the other side is a minerals network that’s less centralized and more resilient: a patchwork built out of practical necessity rather than a neat, unified strategy.