L’Europa è il più grande perdente nella guerra delle terre rare tra Stati Uniti e Cina

Its dual dependence on America’s digital services and Beijing’s critical mineral processing industry leaves it highly vulnerable

The writer is rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna

Tech wars between west and east are nothing new. During the cold war, the US and its allies competed fiercely with the Soviet Union in space exploration and weapons systems. More recently, competition between the US and China has been heating up. Ironically, this time Europe stands to be the biggest loser.

The US and its allies founded the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls in 1949 to prevent the eastern bloc gaining access to western technology that might enhance its military and economic capability. The committee’s impact increased significantly under President Ronald Reagan with a ban on the sale of microprocessors, computers and oil extraction technology to Warsaw Pact countries. From the late 1970s, western technological advances created an unbridgeable strategic gap, helping to speed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The last three US administrations have followed a similar strategy against China, curbing the export of high-end microchips and the machines that make them. But unlike the Soviet Union, China can fight back by imposing controls on rare earths and mineral processing technology. Last week, Beijing expanded controls to 12 of the 17 rare earth metals, claiming this was “to safeguard national security interests”.

Until the inauguration of President Donald Trump, both Europe and the US emphasised the importance of critical minerals for promoting the green energy transition. Now, another sector is expressing concern at the Chinese move; defence industries in the west are fretting. Whether in drone, tank, submarine or missile technology, China has a firm grip on the supply of many key components necessary for their production.

In the first week of the Iran-Israel conflict in June this year, approximately 800 missiles were exchanged. Each contained anywhere between two and 20 kilogrammes of rare earth elements, including two, dysprosium and terbium, now subject to Chinese export controls. Based on conservative estimates from the limited data, this means anywhere between 1.6 and 16 metric tonnes of rare earth elements were vaporised in that conflict in seven days.

Ukraine’s extraordinary recent performance in its drone war against the Russian invasion is almost entirely dependent on electronics and magnets imported from China. Ukraine is now less concerned about whether European arms deliveries will arrive on time and more worried about the flow of tech imports from China.

In the past 30 years, China has become the world leader in the processing of most of the 54 raw minerals that the US Geological Survey classifies as critical for US industry, including the defence sector. Currently the Chinese can process virtually any mineral 30 per cent more cheaply than its competitors. To compete with this, western governments would need to offer subsidies to their own industry. While China leverages its rare earth monopoly, Washington is using its influence to limit China’s access to the most powerful microprocessors (although the great majority are physically produced by TSMC in Taiwan).

Didn’t Norway discover a massive deposit a few years ago? One so large that it was guaranteed to end any European dependence on foreign rare earth materials?

What happened with that?

Not really, my fellow ikea vikings have fund alot of rare earth up in northern Sweden.
We have some big mines up there.

But at least we got to protect our forests, fair trade.

Europe has access to deposits of many of these things but extracting them is often an ugly, dirty, messy business. We’ve gotten very used to importing cheap mineral resources often at very high environmental and human rights costs, from developing countries, while pushing uglier industries out of our own backyard. Politically we’re not really prepared to look at that. We just like the products and turn a blind eye to the supply chain. Ultimately that has a cost.

We’ve also done the same with things like the chemical industries. A lot of the riskier and more polluting operations were encouraged to move elsewhere, while we didn’t really clean up or place any obligations on supply chains to really respect environmental standards. So the costs were kept down by just moving to avoid the regulations and find lower costs.

The net result of that is that we’ve not got dependencies on China and India for large swathes of manufacturing, while we were cherry picking high end stuff, assuming that they wouldn’t compete. They are now competing and often outcompeting in areas like automotive and advanced engineering and technology products.

The U.S. is taking the approach of trying to roll back the clock and the regulations, which will do them huge damage – brining back terrible industrial practices and so on.

The alternative is to do a lot of these things, but do them cleaner, greener and more heavily automated. Europe could do more of this but hasn’t been doing so.