Critical Minerals: the Scramble for Oil 2.0

Overview

If the twentieth century's defining geo-economic contest was over oil, the twenty-first century's is being fought over the inputs to electrification, defence, and digital infrastructure: lithium, cobalt, copper, the rare earths, and the processing capacity that turns them into usable material. The contest is already under way; what's missing in most analysis is the realism about where the actual chokepoints sit.

This Strategic Review reframes the critical-minerals contest as the resource competition that will define the next twenty years of US–China relations. We trace the processing bottlenecks, allied positioning, and the specific policy levers (from IRA Section 30D to EU CRMA) that will determine which alliances actually secure resource access and which only announce it.