WSJ What’s News - Can the U.S. Catch Up in the Critical Minerals Race?

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

The U.S. is already scrambling to catch up with its number-one rival, China, in the race to secure critical materials. But can the Trump administration bring more mining and processing under U.S. control? WSJ senior reporter John Emont and Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Mineral Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discuss the economic and security implications of these minerals, the challenges to scaling up U.S. mining interests and the policies that might unlock both supply and demand for domestically produced critical minerals. Kate Bullivant hosts. Further Reading:  Critical Minerals Supply Risks Mount Amid China’s Grip, Export Curbs  America’s War Machine Runs on Rare-Earth Magnets. China Owns That Market.  Why the U.S. Keeps Losing to China in the Battle Over Critical Minerals  Automakers Race to Find Workaround to China’s Stranglehold on Rare-Earth Magnets  Trump Says He Discussed Trade, Rare Earths in Call With China’s Xi  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Terms and conditions apply. Hey What's News listeners, it's Sunday, June 8th. I'm Kate Bulevant for the Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, the race to secure critical minerals is well underway and the US is scrambling to catch up with its number one rival China in a race with major national security implications. These minerals play a key role in many modern technologies from fighter jets and semiconductors

to smartphones and electric vehicle batteries. Since returning to the White House, President Trump has made securing supply chains for these minerals a top priority. Today, we look at whether Trump's strategy to put the US back in first place is working. Back in 2020, President Trump declared a national emergency over US dependence on foreign critical minerals. Fast forward to today and a recent report from the International Energy Agency shows that China continues to dominate accounting for up to roughly 80% of global supply growth of copper and lithium between 2020 and 2024.

Despite lots of talk from Washington, setting up global supply chains is hard work, especially when doing so isn't necessarily lucrative for businesses. Joining me now to put this all into context is Journal Senior Reporter John Emont and Gracelyn Baskarin, who is the Director of the Critical Mineral Security Program at CSIS, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Gracelyn, could you tell us why is President Trump so eager to procure these critical minerals from a national security standpoint? Critical minerals are the bedrock for almost every form of defence technologies. When we

think about rare earth elements, which are actually the minerals that China most recently restricted, we see that they are in F-35 fighter jets, Virginia and Columbia class submarines, missiles, radar systems, predator unmanned aerial vehicles and the joint direct attack munitions series of smart bombs. Now, the difficulty that we've had in recent years is China has shown that not only are they dominant, right, we know that they have processing capabilities for between 40 and 90 percent of these key critical

mineral supply chains. However, they are also now willing to weaponize this. And we saw it two years ago when they started with germanium and gallium, which are in semiconductors that we use in defense technologies, but rapidly rolled out to things like antimony, tungsten, graphite, and now rare earths. So the US is on the back foot at manufacturing these technologies. And if you say critical minerals to a lot of people, the first thing that might pop into their head is renewable energy. But would I be right in thinking this is an area that President Trump is less focused on? Given the rising geopolitical tension in the world and the always imminent threat of action, whether in the Middle East or

whether in the Indo-Pacific Strait, ensuring that we are able to protect ourselves is a critical priority for President Trump in this administration. And we've seen this because in the recent executive orders on critical minerals, we actually see Department of Defence taking a lead on many of the actions as opposed to the previous administration, where we saw Department of Energy play a leading role. John, this executive order that Trump signed, it uses emergency powers to ramp up investment through rapid permitting and improved financing, does it not? Yeah, it's a multi-pronged strategy. So one of the key things they're trying to do is slash

regulation and fast track permitting, because this has been a huge issue for domestic miners, is just the amount of time it takes to get a mine off the ground. And then at the same time, they're trying to provide a mine off the ground. to use that funding to support domestic mining projects. So it's a new funding instrument. In addition to these measures, they've also struck critical mineral deals with Ukraine and there's also rumors and talk that potentially some deal, there could be a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo, which of course has tons of cobalt and copper. The question is just what it will all add up to. This strategy that you've just spoken about, where does it leave US mining companies and

businesses in this space? I mean, is it that we're about to see a huge pickup in the number of US mines? One of the trickiest things to understand about critical minerals is they are at once extremely important for all the reasons that Grace Lynn laid out. But that doesn't actually mean they're lucrative necessarily to mine. When you're going up against China, which has huge mining companies and huge processing companies that have been at this for decades, that has access to sort of the palm resources

around the globe, and you try to set up a mine in the United States, even if you have some regulations that are removed and you can maybe do it a bit quicker now, you still have much higher labor costs. And just you look at the price of a lot of these minerals, and they're quite low. Things like cobalt, the price has sunk dramatically in recent years. Same with nickel and lithium, because China continues to produce more. And that means that there's just a lot of supply and not necessarily that much demand from companies for it to be domestically produced.

Graceland, I would love to hear your thoughts. How can the Trump administration get this industry scaled up? This administration is all of the above. They're looking at mining at home. They're mining broad, mining on the land and mining under the deep sea. So we're really kind of seeing of like a throwing our darts at every target here and hoping that we will yield minerals. As John said, though, this is a very long term industry globally.

On average, it takes 18 years to build a mine from the time I identify a deposit to the time it is producing. That is four and a half presidential administrations. A lot of things can change in that time. Now, when we look at a lot of this administration, if we zoom over to the foreign policy angle, we see totally different mining worlds that they're pursuing.

We've got Greenland, which is buried between minerals and surface, there's a lot of ice. We have the DRC, which is an incredibly rich mining jurisdiction, even though only 20% of the Congo has been geologically mapped. When you look at the 20 biggest copper deposits in the world, the top two in terms of quality are in the Congo, 70% of cobalt, we have nickel, we have lithium, we have more shovel ready. But I also want to raise another country that, you know, I just came back from Saudi Arabia.

And what we saw is President Trump's first state visit was to Saudi Arabia. And as part of that, we saw minerals cooperation feature very strongly. Now they've discovered a very large rare earth deposit. And in partnering with a US company, Modena Saudi Arabian and MP Materials is California based, they're our rare earth miner, they're looking to build the entire mine to permanent magnet supply chain. And these are the kinds of things where I'm a little bit more optimistic in terms of speed, because we have a totally different regulatory landscape. The Gulf is emerging as this place that wants to reduce reliance on oil, has capital at scale, turns out some of them have really good resources and want

to partner with the US. But the whole kind of foreign policy that we're looking at is being redrawn around minerals and I expect to see that expand in Africa and Latin America. And then the final point here is ultimately the reason China was successful is they did this, right? They sourced minerals from Africa and Latin America and Asia but then they brought it back home for processing. And that's where they've exerted their dominance. Coming up, where does Trump's strategy to secure critical minerals leave U.S. businesses? And can we tell yet if this strategy is working? Stay with us.

When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard if this strategy is working. Stay with us. Welcome back. As we've been discussing, the Trump administration is trying to boost domestic production of critical minerals as part of its multi-pronged approach to catch up to China. So how optimistic are US businesses feeling about the hurdles facing them as they look to compete with foreign players? Here's senior reporter John Emont. I think these hurdles still seem pretty, pretty great. One interesting thing is that China has, as Graceland mentioned, started restricting exports of key minerals and that really terrifies companies in the US that rely on them. For example, car companies like General Motors, they need rare earth magnets and if they can't get them it risks real

production slowdowns. So then companies like General Motors will be willing to pay more for domestically produced or at least ally produced rare earth magnets. What might start happening as China throws its weight around more with minerals is that you will start seeing that there will be a real price premium for domestically produced minerals or for ally produced minerals. And that's what's kind of necessary to get these infant industries started is a real sign from the end users that they're actually willing to pay a lot of extra money to get these minerals from someplace other than China. So given the current levels of defense spending, I imagine the defense industry is better able

to stomach more expensive minerals than say car makers or smartphone makers. That could, for instance, set back the clean energy transition, even if weapon makers can keep sourcing these products. You're right, Kate. But, you know, the defense industry is not necessarily enough to support a really economically viable, big, rare earth processing plant or magnet making facility. So you do often need buy-in from civilian companies who might not always have the same national security concerns It might not be as regulated They might be tempted especially in a hyper competitive industry like the car industry to just go with the cheapest minerals possible You know the defense industry is a bespoke off taker

of minerals. They might build 50 satellites. They're not building 5,000. So at the end of the day, they are not going to be the industry that drives $500 million investments in minerals. First of all, we have to look at energy, economic security, and defense as deeply interwoven industries that together

are going to propel demand. The second thing we have to look at is what incentives this administration is going to put into place to support these industries. President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the goal of it was to stimulate electric vehicle demand. By stimulating EV demand, we saw some of the largest mineral investment figures emerge. So when I'm a lithium nickel copper producer looking at whether there will be sufficient demand, three decades from now, I'm looking at the EV market. I'm not looking

at a relatively stable defense industry. So, Gracelyn, what do you think we should be watching for in the near term to help determine how this strategy is working? So because of the lag in the industry, the first thing I want to see is how many permits are going out. Permits are one of those things that are going to determine how many mines we have in the future. The second is how much money are we spending not only domestically but internationally on

mineral exploration, which is something we don't talk about very often. But mineral exploration is like the oxygen of the mining sector. If I don't explore, I will not find assets for future production. And a lot of existing mines are already locked up with Chinese offtake. And then the third thing I want to look at is processing capabilities, not just in the US because we won't do it all here. The Department of Interior list has 50 minerals and then President Trump has added about another five or so onto his list. We can't process 55 minerals in the next five years here.

So how do we build processing here, but how do we also lean into which countries are allies that are willing to help with that? Those are going to be the things I'm looking for and I think things that this administration is prioritizing. Gracelyn, John, thanks so much for your time. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And that's it for What's News Sunday for June 8th. Today's show was produced by Charlotte Gartenberg

with supervising producer Sandra Kilhoff and deputy editor Chris Sinzley. I'm Kate Bullivant and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.