Trump administration presses efforts to ensure supply of critical minerals outside of China

The Trump administration is expected to unveil its grandest plan yet to rebuild supply chains of critical minerals needed for everything from jet engines to smartphones, likely through purchase agreements with partners on top of creating a $12 billion US Strategic reserve to help counter China’s dominance.

Vice President JD Vance is set to deliver a keynote address Wednesday at a meeting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is hosting with officials from several dozen European, Asian and African nations. The US is expected to sign deals on supply chain logistics, though details have not yet been revealed. Rubio met Tuesday with foreign ministers from South Korea and India to discuss critical minerals mining and processing. The meeting and expected agreements will come just two days after President Donald Trump announced “Project Vault,” or a stockpile of critical minerals to be funded with a $10 billion loan from the US Export and Import Bank and nearly $1.67 billion in private capital.

The Trump administration is making such bold moves after China, which controls 70% of the world’s rare earths mining and 90% of the processing, choked off the flow of the elements in response to Trump’s tariff war. The two superpowers are in a one-year truce after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in October and agreed to pull back on high tariffs and stepped up rare earth restrictions. But China’s limits remain tighter than they were before Trump took office. “We don’t want to ever go through what we went through a year ago,” Trump said on Monday when announcing Project Vault.             (AP)