Uncle Sam’s Aggressive Rare Earth Dealmaking Strikes A Chord Overseas
In June of 2021, President Joe Biden announced that his administration would mount a "whole of government" effort to secure U.S. supplies and supply chains related to a raft of critical energy minerals.
In June of 2021, President Joe Biden announced that his administration would mount a “whole of government” effort to secure U.S. supplies and supply chains related to a raft of critical energy minerals.
Biden was responding to the then-dawning reality that the glorious “energy transition” from fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal to wind, solar and electric vehicles he hoped to force could possibly take place without massive new supplies of minerals like lithium, cobalt, antimony, copper, silver and the array of rare earths that are integral to the manufacture of batteries, solar arrays and wind turbines and towers.
In his speech that June, Biden, reading from his ever-present teleprompter, detailed the need for the U.S. and other western nations to free supply chains for these important minerals from Chinese dominance. His assessment of the situation and the dangers it presented to U.S. national security was spot on. Unfortunately, his administration made very little progress over the final 3 1/2 years of his autopen presidency to do much about it.
That has all changed since Donald Trump took the oath of office for his second term in office in January 2025. Instead of the afterthought treatment throughout Biden’s term, the Trump cabinet has made the reshoring and friendshoring of these crucial supply chains one of the administration’s top energy-related priorities. The scope of that progress is beginning to gain recognition even at some of the most prominent pro-energy transition media platforms.
In an Aug. 21 article, the Financial Times details how the United States under Trump is far outpacing similar, though flagging efforts by the European Union. The piece quotes an unnamed lawyer who is advising various European rare earth projects as saying, “Whether you agree or disagree with the way in which the Trump administration is going about securing their critical raw materials supply chains, in 18 months, they’ve certainly done more deals than Europe has done in the past decade.”