The Missing Part of Trump’s Minerals Math

Resources have always determined power. The British empire’s command over coal helped expand the realm to the ends of the earth. The United States entered World War II as a dominant oil power and for decades consolidated control over global supply. This century, power could be built on batteries, solar panels, and artificial intelligence. And China has a grip on the minerals—rare-earth elements, lithium, graphite—needed to make them.

Both parties in Washington seem to agree that breaking Beijing’s near monopoly over such materials would benefit the United States. “Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production,” President Donald Trump wrote in an executive order in March designed to speed up permitting for mineral production. The administration has already green-lighted a new rare-earths mine in California next to the only active one in the United States, and today added 10 more mines to a list of projects whose permits the federal government is fast-tracking. It has also proposed flashy and controversial ideas to secure America’s supply of minerals, including seizing dubiously accessible deposits in Ukraine and Greenland, clearing the way for creating the first mines on the deep-ocean floor, and investing federal money directly in U.S. mining companies.

At the same time, Trump is breaking what experts say are the federal government’s best tools for returning mining to the United States. Creating demand for minerals “is best done by ensuring clean-tech manufacturing markets are here,” says Milo McBride, a fellow researching the geopolitics of mineral supply chains at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Yet we’re cutting demand for the manufacturing of these technologies.” At some point, he told me, the administration will have to face the paradox of mineral security it’s creating: The country is now smoothing the path for production while closing off its main destinations.