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

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

The public conversation about critical raw materials is dominated by mines. New projects make headlines, permitting disputes attract political attention, and strategic ambitions are routinely expressed in terms of where new extraction will happen. This is understandable. Mining is visible, tangible, and politically consequential in a way that the rest of the value chain rarely is. It is also a distraction from the binding constraint. For most critical raw materials, the most

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