A vast range of modern devices function because of 17 metals collectively known as rare earth elements. The scientists who named the group in 1794 created a misnomer: cerium alone is about as common in the Earth's crust as copper. Separating rare earth minerals from one another, and from raw ore, is nonetheless intensely difficult — and that difficulty hands enormous political leverage to whichever countries control processing.

China processes most of the rare earth minerals used around the world, and the dependence extends well beyond consumer electronics. The U.S. military's F-35 fighter jets and Virginia-class submarines need rare earths too. That military dependence is a large part of why rare earth policy in Washington is treated as a national security question rather than a purely commercial one.

Charles Edward Gehrke, a Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), spent years adjudicating war games for the U.S. Navy. In his experience, war games force players to identify the hidden constraints that render a beautiful plan untenable — and rare earth processing is exactly such a constraint.

China showcased the power of its rare earths leverage with a series of export controls issued in 2025, which it agreed to suspend — at least until Nov 10, 2026. Controlling the supply enables a government to slow a rival's growth, or halt it. Beijing's ability to extend the suspension or let the controls go into effect gives it leverage on the geopolitical stage. In Theodore Roosevelt's parlance, it is a very big stick.

How China took the lead

California's Mountain Pass mine led world production of rare earths until the late 1980s. Repeated spills of radioactive wastewater from the mine into the Mojave Desert made it hard to keep domestic production running. When China expanded its own mining and sold processed materials at lower prices, the logic of switching rare earth suppliers was easy.

Mountain Pass's separation plant closed in 1998, and the mine itself stopped operating in 2002. MP Materials restarted mining there in 2017 as concern about access to rare earth minerals rose, but the United States still imported more than two-thirds of the rare earth elements it used as recently as 2025.

China, which mined about 60% of the world's rare earth elements used in magnets in 2024, handled roughly 91% of separation and refining. Buyers using processing in China got material below the cost of making it themselves, along with none of the cleanup bills or the bad press. In exchange, however, they ceded leverage to the processor. The trade was understood. It simply did not look as threatening coming from a China that was still rising.

Why rebuilding is slow

The U.S. Government Accountability Office cited estimates in 2010 that rebuilding a domestic supply chain — spanning mining, separation and magnet manufacturing — would take as long as 15 years. Counted from 2010, that window would have closed around 2025. The actual rebuild has been slow for several reasons.

China runs its plants with thousands of experienced engineers; the United States has far fewer experts. Today's industrial-scale, cutting-edge technologies were developed in China, and the government there has no reason to share them. Beijing also banned exports of the separation technology itself in December 2023.

Washington has begun to respond. The Pentagon bought $400 million of preferred stock in rare earth producer MP Materials in 2025, giving it 15% ownership of the company, and MP Materials expects its next magnet plant to begin testing equipment in 2028. The Commerce Department also signed a letter of intent in 2026 to give magnet maker USA Rare Earth $277 million in direct funding and a $1.3 billion loan, both aimed at developing facilities in Texas and Oklahoma.

China's export roadblocks, however, are making the rebuild more difficult.

What happens on Nov. 10

On Oct. 9, 2025, China's Ministry of Commerce announced six wide-ranging export control measures. One of them, Announcement No. 61, affects what even factories abroad can export: a plant in Germany or Japan would need a Chinese license to ship a product if Chinese-origin rare earths made up 0.1% or more of its value, or if it used Chinese rare earth technology. With China handling roughly 91% of global separation and refining, a threshold that low could pull products made far from Chinese soil into Beijing's licensing system.

After President Donald Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping later that month, Beijing suspended the six export controls until Nov. 10, 2026, in exchange for Washington pausing its "affiliates rule," which imposes restrictions on companies majority-owned by certain blacklisted firms, for one year.

Both sets of controls snap back into place automatically unless both governments extend their pauses.

What stays in place

Some export rules were never suspended, including licensing requirements China imposed in April 2025 on exports of seven of the heavier rare earths.

Automaker Ford saw how the controls can hit a company when it had to idle its Chicago assembly plant for a week in May 2025 for want of magnets — critical to speakers and electrical motors — because of the export rules. Ford CEO Jim Farley described his supply as "day to day" because he had no alternate source. The company was able to resume production only with Beijing's approval.

On June 22, 2026, China's Ministry of Commerce placed 10 U.S. companies on its export control list. Neither Chinese nor foreign firms can sell those companies goods that have both civilian and military uses. Most of them build drones, radar, aerospace systems and military vehicles. Two of them — MP Materials and USA Rare Earth — are the federally backed American companies furthest along in building a mine-to-magnet chain. Beijing said its move was a response to a similar move by the Pentagon. In Gehrke's interpretation, China picked MP Materials and USA Rare Earth because they are best placed to reduce America's need for Chinese processing.

An extension of the pause on Nov. 10 would honor the truce, but the heavy rare earth licenses and the June 22 ban on the targeted firms would still apply. The truce means both parties get to play nice. It does not mean they are being nice.

Three paths

For the United States, leaving processing in China is the fastest and cheapest solution, but it leaves the country exposed to Beijing's restrictions.

Rebuilding a domestic rare earths supply chain would remove most U.S. dependence on China for the materials and the political leverage it implies. But it would take longer, startup costs run into the billions of dollars, and separation produces acidic, and sometimes radioactive, residues.

Building a supply chain with allies such as Australia or Japan, both of which have started to build capacity, would lower the risk of the U.S. being cut off unilaterally. Japan has run this play with some success, but the suspended Chinese rules affect any use of their technology abroad.

President Xi's Sept. 24, 2026, meeting with Trump, coming about seven weeks before the suspension lapses, may help determine the status of the Nov. 10 restrictions, but the larger conflict over leverage will continue.

This article by Charles Edward Gehrke, Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, as carried by Alternet.