Washington and Beijing’s bitter trade spat over rare earths—the powerful elements that are crucial to defense and other advanced technologies—has left vulnerable European leaders worried that they could be next.
Decades of Chinese government investment in the country’s domestic industry have allowed China to command the global supply chains for rare earths, with Beijing establishing a chokehold over 85 percent of processing and more than 90 percent of magnet production. When U.S. President Donald Trump launched his trade war in April, China fired back by leveraging that dominance and restricting rare-earth exports—delivering a sharp warning not only to the White House but to all of Beijing’s trade partners.
Like Washington, Europe remains highly vulnerable to Beijing’s rare-earth grip. “If China can do this to the United States, it can do it to anyone,” said Ilaria Mazzocco, an expert in economic security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There’s nothing stopping China from doing this again.”
Europe’s fears are certain to come to the fore this week as top officials descend on Beijing for a European Union-China summit, which kicks off on Thursday. While in China, European Council President António Costa and European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen are expected to push for stronger rare-earth access in high-level talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang.
Europe wants a “more reliable rare-earth supply coming from China,” said Tom Moerenhout, who heads the Critical Materials Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “They don’t want to be dragged into the boxing match that [the] U.S. and China are having today.”
This week’s summit may be celebrating 50 years of bilateral ties between Beijing and Brussels, but the mood heading into the high-stakes event is anything but rosy. Rare-earth access is just one in a long list of foreign policy and trade challenges currently straining the relationship, including divisions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an influx of Chinese electric vehicles that has riled Brussels.
It’s not only China that’s vexing European officials, either. The summit is coming during a fraught time in European politics, as Brussels simultaneously grapples with the Trump administration’s painful trade war and a breakdown in trans-Atlantic ties. “Europe feels pressured on all sides,” Mazzocco said.
Those tensions have been thrown into sharp relief in recent weeks, as both Beijing and Brussels trade barbs over EU sanctions, Ukraine, and China’s industrial overcapacity and trade measures.
“Let me be clear: If our partnership is to move forward, we need a genuine rebalancing—fewer market distortions, less overcapacity exported from China, and fair, reciprocal access for European businesses in China,” von der Leyen declared in a fiery speech this month.
Beijing sees things differently. China believes that Europe needs to “come to terms with reality” and recalculate its relationship with both Washington and Beijing, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center.
From Beijing’s perspective, Europe “cannot afford to treat China as [the] enemy,” Sun added.
Looming over all of these frictions are Europe’s rare-earth vulnerabilities. European lawmakers have long been eager to secure new supply chains for rare earths and other critical minerals and have in recent years scrambled to boost domestic projects, forge new global partnerships, and unveil new legislation to boost domestic industry. One of Brussels’s biggest legislative pushes, the Critical Raw Materials Act, sets key targets for extraction, processing, and recycling that are aimed at slashing the continent’s dependence on Chinese supply chains.
For European officials, the U.S.-China trade war and Beijing’s punishing rare-earth countermeasures—which roiled the U.S. market and triggered disruptions in Europe—have only underscored the importance of diversifying away from China.
Brussels may now be accelerating its efforts as well. This week, von der Leyen—who is currently in Japan—announced the launching of a “competitiveness alliance” with Tokyo, including to mine rare earths.
But challenging China on rare earths might not be so easy, in large part because Beijing’s decades-long lead in the industry has given it a sweeping grip over market supply, allowing it to influence global prices and push out competitors.
The rare-earth market is highly opaque, and companies are contending with big expertise gaps and financial challenges. Forging new supply chains, too, isn’t just a question of finding a new mine; it requires a whole ecosystem of processing and manufacturing capabilities.
Unlike the United States, the EU also has the added challenge of coordinating among its member states, all of which have their own interests and priorities. Back in 2022, it took the war in Ukraine and punishing Russian natural gas cutoffs to finally force European countries to begin to wean themselves off Moscow’s supply, which had long been a lifeline for the continent.
“My fear is, as we have often seen with Europe, is Europe moves extraordinarily slow until they have to move fast—and then they move fast,” Moerenhout said. The “cancer of raw material dependence is not something, unfortunately, that makes Europe move fast.”
Still, after watching Washington reel from China’s rare-earth restrictions, Europe may choose to sprint forward this time around.
“The message is clear: that China could hurt European companies significantly,” Mazzocco said. “There’s been a clear economic security message that’s been transmitted.”
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