Since coming into office on January 20, Trump has launched an aggressive campaign to gain access and control over land and minerals in regions across the world. This includes Trump’s proposal to use military force to seize Greenland, which is rich in mineral resources, its volte-face in US strategy regarding Ukraine to demand the country agree to a critical minerals deal in exchange for military aid, and the pursuit of a similar minerals deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The mineral deal with Ukraine comes after months of tense negotiations, which gives the US preferential rights into mineral extraction in Ukraine, as well as other natural resources, including oil and gas.
Domestically, Trump has taken executive action to boost the US’s domestic mineral production, including resuming mining at the Colosseum Mine in California and announcing more critical mineral production projects.
What is behind these policy shifts and ambitions?
Some analysts suggest that Trump’s recent foreign and domestic policy moves concerning critical mineral wealth seem to be driven by growing competition with China’s control of key industries.
“There is a method to Trump’s foreign policy madness,” according to journalist Amanda Yee, host of “The China Report” on BreakThrough News. “That throughline across all the chaos is China, and the wish to decouple from China and weaken it economically.”
Greenland, the Congo, and Ukraine are all sources of mineral wealth, which the US desperately wants global dominance over in direct competition with China.
“Ukraine has trillions of dollars worth of minerals and other strategic natural resources, although it is not known if it has significant deposits of rare earths,” Ben Norton, journalist and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report, told Peoples Dispatch. “Greenland also has major reserves of critical minerals, including 25 of 34 minerals that the European Commission considers ‘critical raw materials.’ The DRC produces the majority of the world’s supply of cobalt, which is needed for lithium-ion batteries in technologies like electric vehicles. The Trump administration hopes it can use aggressive policies to assert control over these resources to remove China from the supply chain.”
Critical minerals have traditionally referred to metals that are vital to the defense industry, including tin, nickel and cobalt. But increasingly, critical minerals have come to include metals vital to the growing tech industry. Rare earths are a smaller subset of the critical minerals trade, mostly used for catalysts and magnets. From the 1960s until the 1980s, the bulk of the world’s rare earths were sources from the Mountain Pass mine in California, but Chinese production has since dwarfed US production. Currently, the vast majority of the world’s rare earth elements are produced in China, mostly in Inner Mongolia.
China has a large supply of rare earths and currently produces around 70% of the world’s rare earth elements, and is also the world’s largest processor of them. 94% of permanent magnets, which use rare earth metals, are produced in China, a key industrial product used as a component of wind turbines and electric vehicles (EVs).
“Why does Trump want to annex Greenland? In order to access their reserve of rare earth minerals. What was a major condition of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine? Access to its minerals,” said Yee.
Only a few days after Trump’s infamous announcement of tariffs on what he dubbed “Liberation Day,” China halted exports of some critical minerals and magnets to the US. This revealed “a major strategic vulnerability” of the Trump administration, according to Yee.
“These rare earth minerals are vital to modern technology and military systems. The US’s technological and military dominance all are completely dependent on the sourcing of these minerals.”
“The Pentagon is preparing for potential war with China, and US policymakers are very concerned that they could not produce the weapons and ammunition needed to wage war on China when China is at the center of the supply chain for critical minerals,” said Ben Norton. “Therefore, the US government is looking for alternative sources of critical minerals, as well as foreign territories where US companies can mine and process these resources. The processing of rare earths in particular is very environmentally destructive and toxic, so the Trump administration would rather poison people in foreign nations.”
US pursuit of mineral wealth undermines sovereignty
As the US seeks global dominance over critical mineral wealth, those in mineral-rich areas are decrying the violations of their sovereignty.
Activists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have denounced their government’s pursuit of mineral deals with the US. At the center of the negotiations of these mineral deals is Erik Prince, close Trump ally and founder of private military contractor Blackwater, raising concerns that the deal will open doors for private industry to plunder the DRC’s mineral wealth.
“Congolese are not enthusiastic about this deal. We are pessimistic. Foreign interventions have done nothing for years,” Stewart Muhindo, a member of the civil society movement LUCHA, told Peoples Dispatch in April.
Trump’s actions raise environmental concerns
Trump’s ruthless pursuit of mineral wealth domestically has also raised alarms. On April 8, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced the resumption of mining operations at the Colosseum Mine in California, to be conducted by private Australian mining company Dateline Resources Ltd. “For too long, the United States has depended on foreign adversaries like China for rare earth elements for technologies that are vital to our national security,” read the BLM press release. “By recognizing the mine’s continued right to extract and explore rare earth elements, Interior continues to support industries that boost the nation’s economy and protect national security.”
The Colosseum Mine however, sits right next to a national park. “Mojave National Preserve is a national park, and the Trump administration is blatantly ignoring its protected status,” said Chance Wilcox, the National Parks Conservation Association’s California Desert Program Manager, in a press release issued by the NPCA. “The Bureau of Land Management can’t authorize this foreign owned mine in a national park. This makes no sense any way you read it.”
“This action puts us on a path towards destruction of America’s treasured landscapes and weakening the integrity of the Park Service in favor of the possibility of critical minerals,” said Wilcox.
