How the US Is Trying to Challenge China's Critical Mineral Dominance

The China and Africa podcast is supported in part by our subscribers and Patreon supporters. If you'd like to join a global community of readers for daily news and exclusive analysis about Chinese engagement in Asia, Africa and throughout the developing world, go to China global south.com/subscribe. China in Africa podcast, a proud member of the Cynica podcast network, America, Lander. And as always, I'm joined by CGSP Africa editor Jiro Nima coming to us today from the beautiful island of Mauritius, a very good afternoon to you Jiro. Good afternoon, good evening, Eric. Jiro, earlier this week, we published an infographic that served as a very sobering reminder of the current state of the global competition for critical minerals. The problem is when you listen to the news and hear what politicians have to say in the US and even to some extent in Europe and Japan, it's easy to feel like there's actually a competition, a race. But this graphic that we published tells a very different story. And the fact is, at this point in time in 2026, there really isn't much of a competition. Let me read you a few things and Jiro, I'm not telling you anything here that you don't already know. But for the refined critical minerals that go into AI data centers and various high tech, China controls 99% of the process, gallium market, 85% of the processed silicon market. We get down to intimini 74% and then you go down all of these other minerals that I can't even pronounce to be honest with you, but they are in the high 70%. In the aerospace industry and defense, malibden, 81%, titanium, 69%, tungsten, and this is an interesting one of the Chinese control 44% of the tungsten market for refined tungsten. And that's our key issue right now in the United States because tungsten goes into tomahawk missiles and the supply of tomahawk missiles has run low because of the Iran war. So where they need to turn to for refined tungsten, China, which is kind of an odd thing there. And then let's turn to battery metals, grids and renewables. 96% of the refined processed graphite comes out of China. 95% of manganese, 91% of rare earths, 78% of coalbolts, 70% of lithium, 44% of the refined copper market. So this gives you a sense of just how dominant China is today. And we've heard a lot about the Trump administration moving very quickly to try and catch up. And it seems like every week there's word of a new critical mineral deal that's been signed somewhere around the world. And of course, there's been a lot of movement, Jiro and your country in the DRC. And it's a huge focus of US engagement also in Latin America and even out here in Asia. But the US only seems to be focusing on one part of the critical mineral equation right now with deals primarily focused on extraction. But if you're going to catch up to the Chinese for control of these resources and bring down those numbers that I went through, there's a lot more to it than just pulling stuff out of the ground and putting it on a boat. It needs massive investments in supply chain infrastructure that ports, rail, all of that that the Chinese have spent the past 30, 40 years building. It needs the refineries and the processing plants. And maybe in some ways, this is most important. It needs a skilled workforce that can run all of this. And on that last front, the US is also very far behind. Bloomberg recently produced a short 12 minute documentary on what the US is doing to catch up with the Chinese in critical minerals. And they interviewed the CEO of Australian mining firm Linus. Her name is Amanda LeCaze, who's running the US's only refining facility for rare earths that's based in Malaysia. And in the documentary in which you'll hear from the host and then Amanda, she lays out the challenge that's facing the US in terms of human resources. Using a supply chain, this specialised also means rebuilding skills, experience and industrial muscle. Last year in the US, they graduated 35,000 lawyers. They graduated 350 mining engineers. Meanwhile, China has a dedicated mining and engineering university with 25,000 undergraduate students. China has invested in developing competence in the rare earth market and getting better and being more efficient every day. Well, that's actually understating the situation. Let me just give you a few numbers on this part. China has 15 to 25 major universities with strong specialisation in mining, mineral processing, metallurgy, rare earths, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and battery, metal, engineering. In all, there are about 45 mining engineering programs that produce about 3,000 graduates a year. And as you heard in the show, that's about 10 times more than what the US is producing. So the point here is that if Donald Trump said that he was going to not only secure new sources of raw materials and critical minerals, but also fund a massive investment in US infrastructure and provide billions of dollars to American universities to develop the engineers that it needs to run that infrastructure, I'd take the US a lot more seriously. Of course, they're not doing any of that. As they've cut infrastructure spending and they've slashed federally funded research universities, they're going in the opposite direction. So Jiro, that is the state of union as I see it in this supposed competition. Tell me a little bit about what you think particularly about this competition between the US and China in places like Africa for these critical minerals. It's not really surprising what we see right now on the continent, but on overall context and the things that you've mentioned. The early thing is to catch up with China, you're going to need to build a whole ecosystem, a ecosystem that goes far beyond the simple extraction as you mentioned. Far beyond the simple logistic hub that you need to get minerals from one country and to get them to your country. You also have to build refining and processing your own country. You need to have the political, the environmental regulation and the political will to get those costs of the environmental cost of processing refining your own country, which many US state do not have and that's why the US also lagging on those kinds of issues. And you also have to have the other part of it, the human skills of it, the expertise of it. And the numbers that she was mentioning was really interesting because it revealing how braverity was set for a long time ago. For China, braverity was set into technological development because that was the way forward to development, to stability, to get people out of poverty. The US already reached a level of development to the way they felt that we could leave the hard sciences side and focus on lawyers, focus on social. I have nothing against lawyer, I myself, I, or person and I, the person. Just to say that it's about a economic stage where countries say, you know, we reach the level where we think that hard science, all of that are not needed anymore. But green transition came and they realized that, wow, we are really far behind in that debate and we don't know where to exist. They realized that we did not build the whole infrastructure, they almost even say infrastructure, the whole required a system to be able to be competitive against China. But now what we see, we are seeing now, they're trying to catch up. The US trying to catch up with different bilateral, did this being signed here and there? How is it looking like in Africa? In Africa, it looks like having the US signing a baritone with the DRC where we try, where they try as much as possible to leverage their political support for Chisekidi against privileged access to critical minerals. We are seeing that in Guinea where a US, a US American company is trying to leverage its access to the Trump administration to prove itself that, you know, I'm closer to Trump, that's why you need to allow me to move forward in my Liberty Corridor in Ligini and Liberia. We're seeing that in Mozambique where we saw small project here and there where you have investment taking place in Rare Earth project. We are seeing that in Lobito where they're also trying to invest in logistic project. Those are the small signs where we cannot deny there is a political will now in Washington where they say we want to get things done. We want to move forward. But the thing is when you look at the overall project, you see that you have a short term goal they want to reach right now and do not think on the longer term. The longer term requires what you've mentioned, the whole ecosystem. And I think there is a sense of like, it's kind of fear that I've lost the game so much that if we try to think of it a long term, we won't be able to attain our short terms right now. That's why the case, let's have access right now. Let's accumulate right now and let's run. We're not going to start thinking of like how we build a long term. And I think that's now the difficulty they have to deal with because when you have election coming up, when you have internal politics coming up, you don't always have the political will and the ability to juggle between short term goals and long term strategy that you do not control. Okay, well, let's get a perspective from one of the world's top analysts on this subject and someone who has a front row seat to what's happening in Washington DC. Our old friend Zainab Busman is a senior research scholar and managing director of international programs at the center on global energy policy. policy at Columbia University, and also the author of a new paper, the international trade dimensions of the United States critical mineral security strategy, which came out earlier about I think last month, published by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research. She's joining us very early this morning from Washington, DC, a very good morning sign-up. Thank you for taking the time to join us. Hi, Eric. Hi, Cheryl. Very nice to be back. I'd like to have you back. The paper that you wrote was a fascinating one. We're going to put a link to it in the show notes. It examines how the US is increasingly using trade policy tools as part of its industrial policy toolkit, which is again a new concept in the US that long resisted industrial policy. But here we are. And they're doing this to secure critical mineral supply chains. But based on what Jiro and I have laid out in terms of some of the gaps in those supply chains, will it be enough for the US to both fulfill its resource needs and to end its reliance on China? Great. So as you know, since the current administration got into the White House, there has been an emphasis on basically reviewing and overhauling US trade relations, basically with the entire world. And minerals have been kind of quite central in many ways to this deployment of trade policy tools. And I'll come to industrial policy in a bit. So in 2025, last year in April was in April 3rd or April 4th was a famous or infamous liberation day in which a wide range of tariffs were announced for nearly all of US trade and partners. And the objective of doing a couple of things. So with all of these big issues that the US is increasingly concerned with, critical minerals are somehow at the center. So that for me is one of the reasons why I decided to write this paper that when it comes to these big issues, critical minerals are at the center, but also to understand US critical mineral security strategies. So I'm going to let you make the presentation of it, but you mentioned the trade tools, the trade policy tools that the Trump administration is using to leverage its access to US consumer market for hits to have access to critical minerals. Can you tell us how those tools are deployed across the globe or across the global south and how the US is approaching that? Yes, great. So that's good because then I can answer the main part of Eric's question. Well, the critical minerals sector, if I call it that or critical minerals industries, are increasingly the domain in which when you think of this resurgence of industrial policy, this is the domain in which the kind of deployment and the experimentation in the use of these industrial policy tools has gone the furthest. Perhaps it's that and they're like semi-conductors and maybe even pharmaceuticals, but I think critical minerals specifically, that's where we're seeing these policy tools being deployed, being really fine tune in very specific ways. And this is coming from the realization that of course these minerals are important, as Eric mentioned earlier, but also that there's a, I suppose the US has a dependence on imports for 32 of the 60 minerals identified by the US Geological Survey as critical. So that's more than 50 percent for which the US is between 50 percent to 100 percent import reliant. It doesn't have the endowments geologically here at home and in where it has them, just it cannot mine or process them, it needs to import them. So out of those 13 minerals for which the US is important dependent, it relies heavily on China for 14 of them. It's the rare earths, it's also graphite nickel, etc. And specifically, it relies on China for the import of not the raw ors, but the processed derivatives. And these are a whole range of things. There could be oxides, there could be like a precursor or all kinds of derivatives along the value chain for which the US is relied on imports from China. So it's based on this realization that there's a need to use public policy tools. The state needs to intervene in commodity markets. Basically, it cannot just rely on a market orientation to address this gap or this challenge. And this is the crux of the industrial policies that are being deployed. So what are the policy tools? I would divide them in three. The first set of tools are regulatory in nature. And in fact, some of them predate the Trump administration, even right from the Biden administration, with heard constantly of government officials talk about how it's very difficult to get a mining project up and running from anything from the licensing process to actually getting the project underway. It's extremely difficult. And there are a whole range of reasons. There's a fantastic book written by I think it's Ernest Schreider, the Reuters journalist who goes into detail does very interesting case studies about how and why mining is difficult domestically in the US. There are places where there's like Nevada or South Carolina, Arizona where there are plant species, there's native tribal land, there are people who have farmlands, water supplies that could be impacted. There's a whole range of reasons why it's very difficult to get a mine up and running. I could take up to 30 years actually. And when you get your license, do you can start actual production? So it's trying to fast track that permittime process to get projects up and running is one. So that's a regulatory aspect of the industrial policy. But just on that, there's a problem though, because the federal government only controls part of that regulatory process. States also have a role in this and coordinating among states is very difficult. So you can have the Trump administration say, we're going to cut all the regulatory kind of red tape. And yet the states may come up and say, well, no, we're going to keep this and there's going to be court cases and whatnot. So it's very difficult to actually get this done in the US system. Absolutely. I agree. No, Eric, the way sometimes the narratives and the discourse surrounding policy decision making happened in the US, particularly in DC, can be very interesting because there are narratives in DC that may not be aligned with realities on the ground domestically here in the US, but also in other parts of the world. So that tends to be my experience. But there's a sense that there's an effort to cut red tape to basically reduce regulations to fast track the process of getting projects underway. So there's that the second aspect of the industrial policies is financial in nature. And we have seen the deployment of public finance, federal public finance, specifically to support US mining companies in particular. So perhaps this is the difference between this current administration and the Biden administration, for example, where in the previous administration, the use of public finance was broadly to support companies that are domiciled in countries that can be considered as allies. It might be G7 countries, countries as part of the NATO alliance or companies in countries in the European Union. This time around, the emphasis is on US companies trying to get US mining companies to be more competitive. So we've seen the deployment of federal loans, grants by the departments of energy, department of commerce, department of defense. Well, it's now called department of war and the DFC specifically to take equity actually. So the fact that this time around, there's such an America first sentiment and orientation. Then these industrial policy tools are meant to, in theory, support American investors. If I let's use the word investors here because not every company is a mining company. Exactly. This is what I wanted to kind of get to you and that because when I look in the list of those American companies, we see the emergence of kind of new, some would say startups junior company in the mining industry. We don't see the new mountain, the list. We don't see the Alba Mali. We don't see the Freport MacMuran. We don't see Dozo remaining of US mining companies being out there. We don't see them in those recipient of the FC kind of funding and support and all of that. Some would argue that the risk assessment of those markets is still too high. They are not willing to follow the administration through that. That's why we see new startup job junior companies. You know what? We are willing to go to take the risk, the cobalt, the Syracuse, the Virtus, the Orion, as you've mentioned. Not all of them are mining companies. Some of them are investors in the mining industry, not without being mining companies. So this is kind of the thing where people when they hear that they say, "Okay, do we see the big names?" Or we see just the new players coming into the conversation. That's why I wanted to have you take. Why don't we see those big names in the list? Are not they part of the conversation? Well, you know, for now I can only speculate and honestly I try not to speculate publicly because you know, you don't want to say something. It turns out not to be correct. Maybe the immediate answer to you. directly is I don't know. However, what I suspect might be happening is, you know, typically the way it works in the mining industry is the smaller companies, whether they are juniors, right, that actually do maybe mining or even if they don't mind, like they prospect. Yeah, exploration and all of that. They open the markets, they open the way for the big names. Yeah, they tend to be more risk tolerant. They're ready to go into like riskier's dictions and plunge into uncertainty and now when they find something, they sell the assets or even the company itself to a bigger player, the major. So, I think there's an element of that. There's also the reality that at the end of the day, what the US is dominant in is basically the deep and liquid capital market. So, there's just a lot of money in this country and you have now venture capitalists, you have a whole range of private investors and actors that are getting into the space. So, they may not have necessarily the technology, but they have the money. So, they deploy the money and they create some kind of, you know, vehicle and then at some point they acquire the technology, right. So, there's also an element of that that we're seeing. So, there's more research that I'm doing in this space, but I suspect there are elements of these different dynamics at play, you know, the risk tolerance and, you know, just the way the US private sector operates. That may be part of the problem though, because going back to the first part of our discussion, the money for investors is in the extraction side. The money for investors is not in the refining side because as you've talked about, it can take 30 years to get a permit. Also, the infrastructure side, it's very difficult to make money off of infrastructure, ports, rail, things like that. That's usually done by the government, the public sector. So, I come back to the original question that I have, which is if the United States wants to reduce its dependency and wants to introduce all these new industrial and trade policies, but doesn't do the human resource side and the infrastructure side and the refining side, are they really going to close the gap? Because right now what we hear is they say, people, we're going to refine in Malaysia with Linus, for example, and they have one plant in Malaysia that does rare earths. That is not going to be enough to sustain the US economy. I guess I'm just missing a big part of this conversation about understanding when you see the work that the Chinese have done to build up the entire ecosystem. Infrastructure, refining, education, and extraction. And we are focusing so much only on extraction, I just don't understand how this gets done. Yeah, that's a very multifaceted question. Let me answer it this way. I'm going to answer it indirectly. By the way, I don't mean to put the burden on you to answer this. This is a bigger question for the United States. We're just trying to tap into your expertise about what you think is going on. Do you know what I mean? So, I'll answer it by doing two things. One is I want to address something you said specifically about basically the commercial viability and the profitability of processing and refining projects. And I would argue that maybe we actually don't know. And at the end of the day, yes, there might be a lot of haphazardness in what the Trump administration is doing. But I think that there are some people that might be on to something and let me explain. There's a growing body of work. A few analysts and scholars are making the case that when it comes to critical minerals, and when it comes to certain new industries of our global economy today, China already has an unassailable lead over the US. And therefore, it does not make sense to try to catch up to China. It's going to be very difficult if not impossible in DC right now. One area where there's almost a near consensus that the US is already far behind is solar energy, solar energy technologies. Many people, they might not say public increasingly more say any public. There's just no point. Just give up on solar. China is far ahead. When it comes to minerals too, there are some who make the case that, you know, the extraction side, just forget it. But actually maybe the refining and processing side, the US and US companies might be able to have an edge because there are companies with new, at least they claim to have new technologies around refining and processing that are less environmentally devastating. They use less chemicals. They're just more nimble. They use like modular systems and processes. And therefore, maybe the focus should be on scaling the technologies of those companies to make them even more commercially viable or to like commercialize new technologies. So there's a report from the Council on Foreign Relations on leapfrogging. I mean, one or two other analysts have also made this case. And therefore, the conversation also happens in India as well, by the way. Interesting. Okay. So there's something there. And, you know, personally, I'm doing some research on this front. Maybe there are new technologies that can be commercialized, including actually around recycling of already used metals as well as like harvesting minerals from mining waste. The US has these technologies and maybe makes sense to devote only public finance and but also private finance, you know, get the investors in, give them public financial support and make sure that these technologies are more deployed at scale. The other element is all all of this even make a difference, particularly in I guess the global South, the region we all work on or regions we all work on without infrastructure, without a whole range of things. What I'll say is that, you know, for now, we don't know. And again, there are reasons to be even more interested in addressing this question. Because at the end of the day, if the focus is not just on extraction, which a lot of countries have not had a great experience with whether it's, you know, your Indonesia, whether it's many countries in Latin America, which is why they have very strong like indigenous and community-based movements against mining or in Africa, where yes, the miners we're going on for decades, but many countries have just not seen the benefits. So many countries have not had a great experience with extraction actually. It's been very exploitative, they would argue, but when it comes to refining and processing, the honest truth is I don't know if we know enough yet because there isn't even enough refining or processing going on in a lot of these countries. And then depending on certain companies, for example, that some companies are entirely vertically integrated. So they do the extraction themselves and they could do the refining and processing. And these are some of the big majors. But then, increasingly, what we are realizing is that you could have separate companies and investors who do the refining and the processing and maybe they could co-locate their factories and their projects where the actual mining is happening. And the energy requirements, the water requirements might not be as intensive as the actual process of extraction. So that's something to also keep in mind. What I would argue is a major debilitating factor in a lot of countries, particularly in African countries, is actually transportation and logistics. Because if mining is happening in some hinterland region somewhere, you do need a good road that is not like frequently washed up by floods to be able to transport the commodity itself. So like roads and logistics, energy is a debilitating factor, but I think there are new technologies and water too. So that's what I would say to that. Speaking to the challenge as you've mentioned, and I'm going to get back to your paper, in your paper you've presented a different the bilateral approach of the Trump administration being the way forward into how to negotiate with different countries to have access to that. And you highlighted few interesting points about the key commonalities of those bilateral agreements that we see here and there. When you look in those commonalities that we see in those bilateral agreements, do we see some in those bilateral agreements in general? Do we see anything that allows, for example, to address the challenges that you've highlighted? The challenges are in global South country or even not a country because the bilateral agreements have been also sandwiched country like Australia, with Japan as well. So do we see any forms of like solution to those issues that we've mentioned in those highlights? And at the same time, if we can also tell us more about what are the common features that we see in those different bilateral agreements that the USS sign. If you remember, under the Biden administration, there was the Inflation Reduction Act, which was this big climate legislation, but it had specific clauses and components that imposed restrictions on electric vehicle companies and a renewable energy companies as well in terms of where they can source minerals and inputs from. To be able to benefit from generous tax credits provided by the U.S. government, these companies needed to source inputs from countries that have a free trade agreement with the U.S. That was a huge debate at the time. Europe did not have a free trade agreement with the U.S. and then there were all these processes of trying to negotiate a critical minerals trade agreement. And one was actually successfully negotiated with Japan in 2023. more countries lined up, but then there are political complications because the US Congress decided it wanted to claw back its power over negotiating trade agreements and those negotiations told. So it started under the Biden administration and interestingly as a side note, I think this is going to be important to this podcast and to the audience. China basically to use a crude language reported the US to the World Trade Organization over the Social Requirements in the Inflation Reduction Act that they were discriminatory and in fact just a couple of weeks ago, the World Trade Organization ruled in favor of China. Somehow this has not made the headlines because of everything else going on in the world. Yeah, so it's something that might be interesting to your audience. Another reason for the United States to hate the World Trade Organization. Yeah, exactly. I thought that was interesting. So anyways, this is the context and then when the Liberation Day reciprocal tariffs were announced last year, we saw that minerals and metals were some of the kind of basically product lines that were exempt from the tariffs and they still are. Although now increasingly one by one, the administration is announcing specific product tariffs. So under section two, three, two tariffs on certain items of copper, steel, aluminum, and there's also the plan to have specific tariffs on derivatives of critical minerals. Although those have not really been announced yet, but I know they're under consideration. But anyways, minerals were exempt from those Liberation Day tariffs. So and then parallel, the administration started negotiating these bilateral mineral steels alongside also bilateral trade deals that they are negotiating with some of these countries. In the case of Malaysia, for example, Malaysia negotiated both an agreement on reciprocal trade. I think that's what they're called now, those bilateral trade agreements with the administration and then they have the MOU on minerals. So that's they have a mineral steel and then they have a trade deal which are in parallel. So that's something important that I wanted to lay out as to the thinking around why trade tools where and are being used in this space, which then leads us into talking about the by lateral minerals deals. So in my paper, I've been able to identify six of these minerals deals that have been negotiated and announced publicly between the US and partner countries. And these mineral trade deals take a variety of forms. They're not all the same. So out of the six, there are two that are somewhat security related and those are the deals with Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two are MOUs. These are the deals with Thailand and Malaysia. And then two are framework. I don't know what a framework is by the way, but it's a framework. It's the next closest thing to toilet paper that we have in diplomacy. It's worth nothing. I mean, it's just an MOU of some kind. I mean, there's no there's no weight behind a framework, right? So that's why I said I don't know what a framework is because it's not an MOU. It's not a trade agreement. It's not a partnership. I don't know what it is, but it's something. And these are the deals with Japan and Australia. However, Eric, I'd like to pick up on something you said, the analogy with certain type of paper on a more serious. So this is the one of the reasons why I wrote the paper because there's this sentiment there was and still is this notion that these deals or these initiatives are, as you say, worth nothing, they might not mean much because they are often announced as executive orders. And also, the fact that many of them are subject to litigation, right? Basically, the administration's entire trade agenda is subject to a lot of litigation. I'm trying to make the case very clearly that some of these initiatives are here to stay. I'm really blunt and disagree with people, but I completely disagree with Eric in saying that these things are nothing. No, they are actually something at their elements that are going to endure. No, no, no, I'm not saying they're nothing. I'm saying they're not enough. Got it. That is the that is that we're not serious because we're not making the other investments. Everything that we have that you've outlined was part of a bigger package of a five billion dollar investment in the university system for research, another ten billion dollar infrastructure package and getting all the governors together to sync up and harmonize regulatory issues. I would be like, there we go. But remember, the administrations at war with half the governors is canceling federal research and is trim back infrastructure spending. I'm just saying it's not enough. It's not going to achieve the objectives of what they want to do, which is to reduce their reliance on China. Because at the end of the day, they're not going to produce enough refined critical minerals to satisfy industry and the Department of War. And you and I heard the same thing where we're hearing that they're they're hoping for a moonshot on technology. Moonshots take a decade and this is part of the problem of the American spirit here. We have this ability to be so optimistic because we were told we have to do the Manhattan Project and we did it in two years. We had to do Sputnik and we got it done. Elon Musk, he's going to get us to Mars. Somehow gosh darn it, we're going to do it. I don't know how we're going to do it, but we're going to do it. That's hope. That's not really a plan. That's where I'm coming from. So I don't disagree with you. I just say it's not enough. For my side, it's not about not being enough or beyond that, beyond the fact that it's done meaning that may not being enough. For me, it's more of on the how long these initiatives are going to survive beyond and after the Trump administration. In a context where the way we know how those those bilateral dreams have been negotiated, some of them have been harm strong. I've been really kind of someone say bullied by the Trump administration. What is the likelihood for this instrument to survive after Trump? That's for me would be one of the most important questions. In a sense, especially when we know that many of them are non-binding. They're non-binding. So any pot can just leave the agreement after Trump leaves power. So what's the when you in DC? How do you see this initiative surviving after Trump himself? To make it very clear that from my perspective as an analyst, I would argue that, in fact, there are elements that are going to endure precisely because certain aspects of this approach kind of carry forward things that were maybe put in place by the Biden administration. I mean, the language might be different, but there are certain continuities or there are certain trends that we see and I discuss this extensively in the paper where I argue that in fact we see certain bipartisan trends in the shifts in U.S. trade policy, right? Without going into too much detail into all of them, the first is that increasingly trade is viewed through a national security lens because of the fact that the U.S. wants to reshore manufacturing as a sector, but also wants to reshore and create and expand manufacturing jobs. Both the Biden administration officials, the Trump administration officials have made this very clearly. So that kind of consensus of the 1990s of the early 2000s in which there was a clear separation between the state and the market. The market would be left to its own devices and it would decide to locate manufacturing production in areas jurisdiction of the world that it deemed more competitive in exchange that Americans would get access to cheaper goods. That consensus is over. Now you've heard from Janet Yellen from Jake Sullivan and then from various Trump administration officials whether it's Jameson Grere or all of the others, Peter Navarro and others. So there's that and another element is that there's just this shift away from multilateral trade frameworks and initiatives and emphasis on bilateral approaches and initiatives. So if you take something like the African Growth and Opportunity Act, I know it's a trade program that has been discussed extensively on this show. It expired in last year, 2025, but before it's expiry, the Biden administration had the opportunity to reauthorize it, but that opportunity was just not taken for a variety of domestic reasons that I probably don't want to get into. And then you know, with a lot of advocacy by specific individuals, including people like Rosa Whitaker, who's one of the key champions of a Goa, it finally got authorized for a year under this administration. But with a lot of with the caveat that it has liberation day tariffs still in it. So it's not the free trade that it was under the previous A Goa, it's a Goa plus liberation day. It is, but I would say it's a caveat on your caveat because when you look at the bulk of a goa exports to the US. These are product lines that are exempt, some of which are exempt from liberation deterives, whether it's crude oil, crude oil derivatives, energy fuels, and then the minerals and metals. Maybe the agriculture products are subject to tariffs, but those energy and metal commodities are exempt from liberation deterives. So it's a goa and then there's another trade preference program that generalized system of preferences. There's almost like a goa, but in fact it's more extensive. It covers over 100 low and middle income countries around the world. Over I think 5,000 product lines, a goa covers 1,800 product lines. That expired in 2020 under the first Trump administration. The Biden administration had the opportunity to authorize it, they did not. I don't think it even surfaced in the kind of foreign policy, trade policy discourse. So those are two. I mean, there are other things I discussed in the paper, but in the interest of time, these two trends make it clear that this is a bipartisan shift in how the US sees itself trading with the rest of the world and how the US is increasingly positioning itself in the global economy. So this is the part where to answer your general's question that I would argue that this is going to endure. Even if you have a democratic president in the White House in 2020, what is it, 2029, there are elements that are going to endure. Maybe the language might be different, the frame might be different, but they will endure. Now to Eric's question, will this make a difference? It could make a difference if other things are in place. And you get to some of them, right? There needs to be investment in human resource capacity, increasing the number of mining engineers, and a whole bunch of things. But I would argue that even more immediately for very narrow and specific objectives of, OK, if the objective is, let's get US companies more involved in refining and processing abroad. That narrow and specific objectives, I would argue that US public finance, development finance institutions, whether it's XM, whether it's the DFC, and others need to move more quickly on this front. And even entities like US TD, Trade and Development Agency, so beyond kind of just like throwing money at the companies, which I would argue there's a reason to do that. And there are also reasons not to do that. Other things that need to be done, if you've ever, and I'm sure you've consulted with private companies as to why they don't invest in global South jurisdictions, they would tell you sometimes there isn't like a good pipeline of bankable projects, right? Bankability. So you need an entity like US TDA, maybe even the DFC, to help with project preparation. You know, you need the infrastructure. You need a whole bunch of things happening in those markets and with those governments in those markets. And those development finance institutions, the export credit agencies need to move faster and more effectively on that front to be able to support if the objective is, okay, we're taking an America first approach to support US mining companies and US investors, that those public finance institutions need to move more quickly. I mean, the other thing I would say, having consulted and spoken with a number of industry actors is some of them have actually been, yes, quite supportive of these initiatives. Some have been quite dismissive. I've been told that a lot of these initiatives are launched without consulting certain industry actors. I think this was also the point that maybe Jero was making about where are the big mining majors here. So some of them would argue, not all of them, some of them would argue that these initiatives have been launched without consulting industry. So putting forward a policy and an announcement is not going to cause the private sector to follow suit. There are other considerations that they think about here. And ultimately, this is about making money. If in the short term, they view some of these projects as strategic as they are to not be immediately commercially viable, they are not going to step foot in a particular country or in a particular jurisdiction. So those were kind of a few thoughts on share too. OK. Well, listen, I mean, the paper is really in many ways the definitive kind of outline of the approach that the United States is taking. It's the international trade dimensions of the United States critical mineral security strategy. And as you can hear from Zyna, there are a few people out there as better informed, you lied to us, Zyna. You are a trade expert. Let me just get a put that out there. You are definitely a trade expert. You know more about this than anybody I've ever met. So this is fantastic. Zyna Bussmann is a senior research scholar and managing director of international programs at the Center on Global Energy at Columbia University. And one of the top experts on trade and US Africa relations. So we were thrilled to have you join us today, Zyna. And we'll put a link again to the paper in the show notes and to some of Zyna's other research on these issues. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was great to speak with you again. Thank you very much for having me. Good to be back. [MUSIC PLAYING] Jiro Zyna is one of the smartest people in DC on these issues. There are few people who understand US Africa relations better and clearly few people who know the trade systems better. But I don't think if anybody from China was listening to this discussion. I don't think they got anything to worry about. I don't think there's anything that she said. And again, she is not a defender of the system. I want to be very clear here. She is just analyzing it and writing about it the way that she sees it. So I don't want to put this burden on her. I started at the beginning of the show. I mean, I end it. I don't think the US is anywhere near close. This isn't a serious competition. I don't think the US is serious in the least in catching up with China. This is-- I don't know what they're doing. I don't know what this is. But it is not about closing the gap on critical mineral supply chains. Because if they were, they would be focusing more on the other pieces that I talked about, which they're not. I think there is a lot of probably corruption that's involved here, that the money is in the extraction side. That's where the money is. And that's where people are going. But they're not focusing on what needs to be done. And this is where the Chinese system, for all of its flaws, and there are many. But having these five-year plans and having these more well-rounded approaches to education, infrastructure, and also the extraction side, that's what you need. And by the way, I think we get at the same conversation about Europe and Japan. I don't see them doing this any more effectively than the Americans are in closing the gap. Yeah, but the interesting point that you mentioned about the money, the real money in the value chain of critical minerals, is actually in the mid and downstream. That's why the upstream part is really left to China, because explain what that is for people who don't understand with those-- The upstream part is where you have the extraction part. This is where mining companies are going. And midstream and downstream meets where you have the transformation processing and outproducing the derivative of those minerals. And this is the part where there is the bulk of money. You very market share. Yeah, but let me stop you there. But let me stop you there. There's also a very, very high risk, because if you spend a billion dollars to build a cobalt refinery, and it takes five years to build, or four years to build, and by the time you finish building it, the price of cobalt is down. And they move beyond cobalt now to sodium ion batteries, to lithium phosphate batteries. And they're not using cobalt anymore. That risk then is-- well, you lose. This is exactly the point now of the downstream, where you control the technology of which determines which minerals to is important. And this is where you have the bulk of money, actually, market share in terms of a amount of money. This is what's happening over there. But to get back to your point, yes, I don't think there is really competition here. I don't think that what is the spread right now by the US in terms of strategy, in terms of policies, in terms of approach are real tools for real competitions. There are real tools for developing early stage of alternative on starting to decouple if they ever can to decouple from China. But we cannot suppose the word competition in the current stage of situation where we see the tools that are deployed right now. Because as much as we see the leapfrogging that may take place in processing and refining in the US, the same thing is also happening in China where you have hundreds of thousands of engineer working 24/7 with government support, with all the money support to get that done and to move forward. So I don't really think that the competition is there. But for me, at least for now, I'm very critical of the US policies when it comes to those issues. But at least for now I can say, yes, at least they are putting the money where the month is. They're really trying to say we are trying to get something. Are they going to succeed? That's unlikely. But they're trying at least to show that we are trying need something. But in terms of like when you put in the largest scheme or in the largest scale of things. is it effective? Is it going to go somewhere? I don't think they're going to go in the right direction. It's not going to work. Yeah. I don't know what's going to work, but this isn't it. So it's not going to work. So let's leave the conversation there on a pretty pessimistic note for the United States. But again, if you are sitting in Beijing listening to this, you're probably smiling all the way through thinking to yourself, our position at the top of the critical mirrorless pyramid is probably nice and secure for now. Again, this is the kind of stuff that Jiro covers every single day over at CGSP. Go to China GlobalSouth.com and you'll find his work that's there. Also, if you are a French speaker, go to Projet-Afrique-Scheen and Jiro is the editor of that as well. And we also have our Spanish language edition by Maria Cervantes out of Lima, Peru. So we are trying to really cover the entire global south in the languages that are most impacted by this. And if you of course want to get the daily work that all of us are doing at CGSP, go to China GlobalSouth.com/subscribe. Subscription started just $19 a month. And if you are a student or a teacher, email me Eric at China GlobalSouth.com. And I will send you the link for a half off discount. Just $10 a month. Well worth it. Okay, Jiro, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. We'll be back again next week with another episode of the China in Africa podcast. On behalf of the entire team at CGSP around the world. Thank you so much for listening and for watching. The discussion continues online. Follow the China GlobalSouth project on Blue Sky and X, a China GS project or on YouTube, a China GlobalSouth. And share your thoughts on today's show or head over to our website at China GlobalSouth.com where you can subscribe to receive full access to more than 5,000 articles and podcasts. Once again, that's China GlobalSouth.com.