• United States
• China
• Ukraine
• Christina Lu

February 26, 2025, 5:29 PM View Comments ()

Absorbing Canada into the United States. Taking over Greenland. Seizing the Panama Canal. Controlling Ukraine’s natural resources. 

In the whirlwind that has been U.S. President Donald Trump’s first month back in the Oval Office, analysts, officials, and diplomats have scrambled to understand the returning U.S. leader’s scattered—and often outlandish—foreign-policy fixations. After all, what do Canada, Greenland, Panama, and Ukraine really have in common? 

One answer could be potential access to China-free supply chains for critical minerals, the resources underpinning everything from advanced weapons systems to green energy technologies. Ottawa is a mining hub, while Greenland boasts reserves of rare earths—though developing them is another story. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, too, has hyped up his country’s rare-earths potential, even though Ukraine has no commercial rare-earth deposits. 

“When we look at a lot of the foreign-policy decisions that have come out in the first 30 days: Canada? Resource-rich. Greenland? Resource-rich. Ukraine? Resource-rich. Panama Canal? Vital for moving resources,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a critical minerals security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who noted that Panama is home to one of the world’s biggest copper assets. 

“We’re seeing resources play a much larger role, which is what China’s been doing for decades,” Baskaran said.

Critical minerals may not seem like an obvious U.S. foreign-policy priority, but they’re more important than you might think. The broad grouping includes 50 raw materials that are the building blocks of the U.S. defense and energy sectors, including lithium, cobalt, gallium, germanium, nickel, and rare-earth elements. 

Of all the critical minerals, rare-earth elements—a group of 17 metallic elements that you’ve likely never heard of, such as lanthanum and neodymium—are the ones that most often dominate headlines. Despite their name, they are not actually that rare, though finding them in commercially significant concentrations can be challenging. Once mined and processed, they have crucial military applications: Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets, for instance, are each built with 920 pounds of rare earths.

The problem for the United States is that China, after a decades-long push, now commands the supply chains for many of these critical minerals, particularly for rare earths. Beijing has proved willing to wield that supply chain dominance in the past, sparking a race in Washington to diversify away from China’s grip. 

Boosting the domestic U.S. critical minerals industry was a key focus of both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, the latter of which dangled hefty tax incentives over the sector through the Inflation Reduction Act and stressed the importance of joining forces with U.S. allies to forge new supply chains. With Trump 2.0, critical minerals have yet again emerged as a prominent feature of the U.S. leader’s agenda. 

This “is one of the only areas of sort of rough bipartisan agreement—that is that these minerals and metals are crucial for energy, but also national security and consumer goods and the overall economy,” said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. “They feature heavily in the economic war between China and the United States.” 

U.S. lawmakers, for example, touted Greenland’s rare earths as Trump ramped up his calls for the United States to acquire the strategically situated island, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark. As part of the effort, some House Republicans last month even floated a “Make Greenland Great Again Act” that would authorize the president to enter negotiations with Denmark to acquire Greenland. 

“Greenland sits atop vast reserves of rare earth elements,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said at a hearing this month. “If the U.S. were to gain access to Greenland’s resources, it could significantly reduce our dependence on foreign suppliers, particularly China, which currently operates a virtual monopoly on the rare earth market.”

This month, as tensions between Ottawa and Washington flared over Trump’s calls to annex Canada, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also pointed to the country’s mineral riches as a possible reason for Trump’s fixation. 

“I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have, but that may be even why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state,” he reportedly told a group of business leaders and company executives in Toronto.

“They’re very aware of our resources,” Trudeau added, “of what we have, and they very much want to be able to benefit from those.”

And minerals have emerged at the heart of the United States and Ukraine’s souring ties after Zelensky proposed a deal that would swap Ukrainian rare earths for continued U.S. support for Kyiv’s war effort against Russia. 

Kyiv and Washington now appear to be inching closer to a deal, but the very idea has baffled analysts and industry experts since Ukraine has no commercial rare-earth deposits, does not currently produce rare earths, and has not produced rare earths in recent decades. There is scant geological data, and key territories are inaccessible as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war. 

“I have heard nothing about rare earths in Ukraine, and, you know, I’ve been doing rare earths for 15 years,” said Christopher Ecclestone, a mining strategist at the financial advisory firm Hallgarten & Company. 

Even if Ukraine was brimming with economically recoverable concentrations of rare earths—which there thus far does not appear to be any evidence of—it would likely take years of immense investment to make any headway.

On average globally, it takes 15 years to develop a mine, Baskaran told Foreign Policy earlier this month. Such projects require tens of millions of dollars of capital, and there is not a lot of private-sector appetite to enter Ukraine with the ongoing war, she added. 

“Trump may have better relations with Russia, but you can’t develop a mine from scratch and extract resources in three or four years,” she said. “It’s a decades-long undertaking.”

And mining is just one part of the equation. Forging new supply chains requires a whole ecosystem of refining, processing, and manufacturing capabilities—and with rare earths in particular, those systems are overwhelmingly dominated by China. 

Bazilian likened the current hype around Ukraine’s resources to when the United States announced it had identified $1 trillion worth of untapped mineral riches in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. That, of course, never amounted to anything. 

“We had an almost identical, sort of hyperbolic discussion in the media about the minerals and metals under the ground in Afghanistan,” Bazilian said, describing the Ukraine hype as “largely a red herring.” 

“The reality is that mining is complex and difficult and not just getting minerals out of the earth, but processing them, getting them to market, and becoming part of supply chains,” he said. That’s a “multi-decadal situation, even in countries that are not at war.”