In mid-2025, the United States Department of Defense established a ten-year price floor of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide, a hard-to-substitute input for the high-performance permanent magnets used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, industrial motors, and defence systems. The floor was designed to give a single producer, MP Materials, the revenue certainty it needed to justify building domestic capacity. It was an intervention premised on the assumption

Guns without foundations As European leaders commit to historic levels of defence spending, a structural problem is being systematically underweighted in public debate: the basic materials from which modern weapons are made are, to a remarkable degree, sourced from the very states that European rearmament is designed to deter or hedge against. The immediate catalyst for renewed focus is the conflict environment. Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine has driven sustained demand for