China is the world's rare earths superpower. It controls roughly 85% of global processing capacity and more than 90% of permanent magnet production — the components embedded in everything from electric motors to missile guidance systems to wind turbine generators. In 2025, Beijing imposed sweeping export controls on most critical minerals and rare earths, an escalation tied to the US-China trade war. The impact landed hard in Europe: several rare earth-dependent production facilities were forced to halt due to supply shortages.
That vulnerability was supposed to be the catalyst for change. The US and European Union reached an agreement on 24 April 2026 to coordinate critical minerals policy — a rare moment of transatlantic alignment in an otherwise fractious relationship. The deal was designed to reduce China's chokehold by building shared supply chains, joint strategic reserves, and coordinated partnerships with resource-rich third countries. The EU unveiled roughly $3.5 billion in funding to strengthen its domestic minerals sector.
What followed made the April agreement look less secure. As the Trump-Xi summit approached, analysts and European officials began asking an uncomfortable question: if Washington and Beijing start normalising their trade relationship, does Europe's access to US-brokered minerals supply chains become a negotiating variable? The precedent is not hypothetical. After the first Trump-Xi trade thaw, the EU found itself facing bilateral decisions made entirely without its input.
Foreign Policy noted in May 2026 that European policymakers were "fretting about being left out of any deal Trump might cut with his Chinese counterpart." Rare earth and critical minerals export controls are among Beijing's most potent trade tools — and also the ones China would most plausibly relax in exchange for US concessions rather than European ones. Europe's leverage in that bilateral conversation is limited.
The structural problem runs deeper than any single summit. The Trump administration has executed an aggressive global campaign to lock in critical minerals partnerships: pumping billions into the sector, unveiling Project Vault as a strategic minerals stockpile, taking equity stakes in mining firms, signing dozens of supply deals worldwide, and building what amounts to a US-first global minerals trading bloc. Europe's response has been slower and more cautious. Its procurement machinery is less agile, its political appetite for large-scale resource investment is constrained, and many resource-rich nations increasingly prefer direct bilateral deals with major powers over multilateral EU frameworks.
Mining Weekly summed up the situation plainly in May 2026: the race for critical minerals is leaving the EU struggling to keep up.
Critical minerals are not an abstract supply chain question. They are the physical inputs on which Europe's green industrial strategy depends — for electric vehicles, wind turbines, heat pumps, and the defence electronics that European governments are now rushing to produce. If Europe cannot secure reliable, affordable access to rare earths independent of Chinese goodwill or US deal-making, its twin ambitions of clean-energy transition and defence autonomy both hit the same hard constraint.
The April agreement with Washington matters, but a coordination mechanism is not the same as control. If Trump ultimately reaches his own accommodation with Xi on minerals — trading tariff concessions for supply chain openings structured around US-first access — Europe will once again find itself holding an agreement and not a seat at the table that shapes it. The critical minerals race is moving faster than Brussels's capacity to respond.
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