Every piece of technology you touched today- your phone, your laptop, your car- depends on 17 metals most people have never heard of. The F-35 fighter jet needs them. Tesla’s motors need them. A single offshore wind turbine requires 300 kilograms of neodymium. And right now, one country controls 90 percent of the world’s ability to process all of them.
On April 4, 2025, China proved what that monopoly means. It imposed export controls on 7 heavy rare earth elements used in permanent magnets. Within one month, exports dropped 74 percent. Car factories in Europe started shutting down. The price of dysprosium in Europe hit 6 times the Chinese domestic price. US yttrium imports collapsed from 333 tonnes to just 17 tonnes in 8 months. China gave Europe selective licenses and strangled US imports. This was not a trade dispute. It was precision targeting.
The rare earth elements aren’t actually rare in the ground- cerium is more common than copper, neodymium is 1,000 times more abundant than gold. They are rare where it counts: in the refinery. Processing rare earth ore produces radioactive thorium waste and toxic acid byproducts. Western countries decided decades ago they wouldn’t pay that environmental price. China did. And Deng Xiaoping warned the world in 1992: “The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths.” The West didn’t listen for 30 years.
The secret war is now being fought on multiple fronts. In southern Greenland, Kvanefjeld holds 11 million tonnes of rare earths, including 370,000 tonnes of heavy rare earths- but it’s blocked by a uranium mining ban. Trump tried to buy Greenland. The US lobbied Greenland directly not to sell the Tanbreez deposit to China. In January 2026, Japan drilled to 6,000 meters in the Pacific and found a deposit of 16 million tonnes- potentially the third largest on Earth. The Metals Company applied for US deep-sea mining permits in March 2025, bypassing the International Seabed Authority entirely. Over 700 scientists signed a moratorium. In California, Mountain Pass restarted and produced 1,000 tonnes of magnets in trial production — against a US defense need in the tens of thousands. Australia attracted 45 percent of global rare earth exploration investment in 2024 with 89 active projects.
The honest verdict: even under optimistic projections, China will still control 78 percent of rare earth refining in 2040. The West woke up to this crisis about 20 years too late. Who controls these metals controls the future. The war has already begun.