America’s Rare Earth Strategy Won’t Survive the Trade Truce
And it runs through Kinshasa, not California.
For seven months in 2025, the United States learned what economic coercion looks like at industrial scale. In April, Beijing froze the export of seven medium and heavy rare earth elements that almost every modern American weapons platform — the F-35, the Virginia-class submarine, advanced radar and guidance — cannot function without. Chinese magnet shipments to Japan and South Korea collapsed by more than 90 percent within weeks. American automakers throttled production. The signal Beijing wanted to send was unmistakable: it can choke the United States and its allies at the source of the supply chain whenever it chooses.
The November 2025 Trump–Xi trade truce paused those controls but did not dismantle them. Heavy rare earth exports of dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium remain at roughly half their pre-April levels. The licensing architecture China built — including the extraterritorial expansion announced in October 2025 — still exists; Beijing simply agreed not to enforce it. The pause expires on November 10, 2026. The kill switch is, in effect, on a one-year timer.
Washington’s most aggressive response — the Pentagon’s July 2025 partnership with MP Materials, including a $400 million equity stake, a $110-per-kilogram price floor on neodymium-praseodymium, and the first major federal shareholding in a critical-minerals company in a generation — is necessary but insufficient. Mountain Pass produces light rare earths. America’s real chokepoint is in the heavy ones, which Mountain Pass cannot help with this decade. Those materials, and the chemical separation capacity that turns them into magnets, will come from Africa or they will not come at all.
Among African producers, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not first among equals. It is structurally different. The DRC holds more than half of known global cobalt reserves and produces roughly 73 percent of the world’s mined cobalt. It is a top-tier copper producer, holds an estimated 70 percent of world tantalum reserves, and hosts the Manono lithium deposit — one of the largest hard-rock lithium resources on Earth, now under Chinese development by Zijin Mining. Without DRC cooperation, the 1,300-kilometer Lobito Atlantic Railway — Washington’s largest infrastructure commitment on the African continent at roughly $4 billion — is an Angolan rail upgrade with no strategic cargo.
China understood this two decades ago. The 2008 Sicomines agreement — $3 billion in Chinese infrastructure for a 68 percent stake in a copper-cobalt joint venture — established the resource-for-infrastructure playbook Beijing has since extended across 15 of the DRC’s roughly 19 major industrial cobalt mines. Chinese firms now control most of the global midstream as well: roughly 70 to 80 percent of refined cobalt and the vast majority of separated rare earths. The April controls were not improvisation. They were the calculated demonstration of leverage Beijing built mine by mine, refinery by refinery, while Washington was looking elsewhere.
What changed in December 2025 is that the United States, for the first time in a generation, became a credible alternative. The U.S.–DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement, signed on December 4, alongside the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity and a Regional Economic Integration Framework with Rwanda, secured preferential American access to copper, cobalt, zinc, gold, and other strategic minerals. It is the most consequential American diplomatic instrument in central Africa in a generation. It is also a framework, not an outcome.
Critics argue this is the wrong place to deploy American capital. Congo, they note, carries a long record of governance failures, artisanal-mining exposure that produces ESG nightmares, and a Chinese commercial presence that has spent twenty years acquiring assets the United States is only now noticing. Better, they argue, to double down on allied processing in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. Gulf Coast. The critique is partly right. The risks are real. But it misreads the constraint. Allied processing without African feedstock is not a strategy; it is a refinery looking for ore. And that ore will be Chinese controlled by 2030 unless the United States moves now.
The Strategic Partnership Agreement gives Washington 24 months — the term of the trade truce — to turn diplomatic language into financed projects, signed offtake, and physical processing capacity. Three moves matter most. First, the Lobito Corridor’s mandate should be explicitly broadened beyond copper and cobalt to monazite ores and rare earth concentrates from the DRC and Zambia. Second, the MP Materials playbook — federal equity, guaranteed offtake, a multi-year price floor — should be deployed jointly by the DFC, EXIM, and the Defense Department across a portfolio of non-Chinese African projects. Third, and most strategically decisive, heavy rare earth and cobalt midstream refining should be financed inside the DRC, not just at the U.S. Gulf Coast. The chokepoint Beijing exploited in April was chemical separation, not extraction. Replicating that chokepoint exclusively in Texas is a 15-year strategy. Building parallel capacity in Lubumbashi or Kolwezi is a five-year one.
None of this requires new legislation. The Defense Production Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Industrial Base Fund already authorize the financing instruments. The Strategic Partnership Agreement provides the diplomatic foundation. What is missing is institutional ownership: a single senior White House principal with cross-agency budget authority and a 2030 tonnage target — accountable to the president and Congress for measurable non-Chinese supply of heavy rare earths, refined cobalt, and battery-grade lithium. Without that, the agreement will repeat the fate of the 2022 U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa: a document that aged faster than the news cycle that produced it.
The case also has to be made to allies, not only to Washington. Japan and South Korea, the two countries hit hardest by the April controls, have every reason to co-finance African refining capacity rather than watch the next Chinese export license stop their assembly lines. The Quad — the United States, Japan, Australia, and India — and its critical-minerals dialogue, the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, and Japan’s national resource agency JOGMEC, with its long-running offtake programs, are all underused vehicles for blended public capital. A Congolese refinery financed by a U.S.–Japan–EU consortium would be politically harder for Beijing to neutralize than another bilateral deal.
The November truce is the most useful gift Beijing has given Washington in a decade. Not because the threat has receded — it has not — but because it has bought the United States a year of slack to do what it should have done after the first April announcement. When the truce expires and the next shock comes, America will discover whether the December 2025 Strategic Partnership Agreement was the inflection point that finally brought American capital and refining capacity to central Africa — or whether Washington spent its twelve-month reprieve filing memos. The window is open. The clock has started.
Nariman Teymourian is the founder of Copilot Mining and Caspian-Africa, critical-minerals trading and development platforms focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and sub-Saharan Africa.