It was a meeting that shocked the world. On 28 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Trump’s aim was “getting some of the rare earth” as payment for US weapons after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Negotiations broke down at the meeting, but later, on 30 April, Trump landed his deal. And he has been seeking other deals since, including signing a joint agreement with Australia on 21 October to secure critical-mineral and rare-earth supply chains.
Climate change is devastating mining of minerals needed to fight it
Access to minerals has long been an undercurrent of international relations, but rarely has it been so openly espoused, or so at odds with what the public thought those minerals were for. Once promoted as the minerals of the energy transition and digital transformations, Trump openly justifies critical minerals as the minerals of war. “We’re going to be… taking it, using it for all the things we do,” Trump said in February, “including … weapons and the military” (see go.nature.com/47by3cn).
Although minerals are at the centre of contemporary discussions on war, renewable energy and technology, they are also of immense relevance to human development, notably ending poverty in all its forms — the first priority of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Here we trace the national-security origins of the term critical minerals and what this implies for global inequality. We then draw lessons from how other natural resources have been reframed to show why a human-centred approach is essential to meet humanity’s needs for these minerals.
Geopolitical origins
Critical minerals have long been a focus of military planning. As early as the First World War, the War Industries Board compiled a list of strategic and critical minerals that were crucial to US industry and in short supply1. In 1921, the US Army General Staff adopted its first official list distinguishing between minerals that were ‘strategic’ for defence and industry; those that were ‘critical’ owing to shortages; and those that were ‘essential’ even if they didn’t meet either criteria. In 1944, the US Army and Navy Munitions Board developed a combined definition of ‘strategic and critical minerals’ as “those materials required for essential uses in a war emergency…the procurement of which [is] sufficiently uncertain for any reason to require prior provision for the supply thereof”1.
Frequent changes to the lists, terminology and policy followed in the United States, but it was the 2010 ‘rare-earth crisis’ that triggered the contemporary interest by a wider array of countries.
Metals are key to the global economy — but three challenges threaten supply chains
On 7 September 2010, a Chinese fishing boat collided with two Japanese Coast Guard vessels off the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. The arrest of the fishing-boat captain caused a diplomatic incident between the two nations. At around the same time, China halted exports of rare-earth elements (REEs), of which Japan was a major importer. This caused prices to skyrocket, revealing the economic vulnerability of countries when mineral supply chains are narrow.
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