On 9 October 2025, China's Ministry of Commerce published its second critical minerals export control package of the year. The package extended licensing requirements to five additional rare earth elements (holmium, erbium, thulium, europium, and ytterbium), brought refining and magnet-manufacturing equipment within scope, and codified an extraterritorial dimension that applies Chinese regulatory authority to foreign-made products incorporating Chinese material or processing

When 54 countries gathered in Washington on 4 February 2026 for the inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial, two very different policy architectures arrived in the same room. The European Union came with a Critical Raw Materials Act, a regulatory framework, sixty strategic projects, and a recently launched €3 billion implementation package called RESourceEU. The United States came with a $12 billion strategic minerals stockpile, federal equity stakes in domestic producers, an

When representatives of 54 countries gathered in Washington on 4 February 2026 for the inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial, the scale of ambition was unmistakable. In the space of a single week, the Trump administration launched Project Vault, a public-private strategic minerals stockpile backed by approximately $12 billion in seed funding; unveiled the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE) as successor to the Biden-era Minerals Security Partnership; and annou