Critical minerals

Friday

Merlin Marr-Johnson

Why China has the edge in mining

From our US edition

Donald Trump wants to bring back mining and mineral processing to the US – and he needs to do this if he’s to continue fighting wars. “You cannot claim to have a military strategy without a clear idea of your supply chains,” says economic journalist Wolfgang Münchau. “The specific advantage that both Russia and China have over the West is not simply their wealth of metals and minerals – it’s the fact that they can also process them. China’s expertise in processing its raw material is unparalleled.” Trump has exhorted America’s traditional allies to take responsibility for their own mineral supplies as well as their own defense, and to ditch economically ruinous energy policies. But will it work?

mining

Thursday

William Moore

Why Ukraine’s minerals matter, the NHS’s sterilisation problem & remembering the worst poet in history

42 min listen

This week: the carve-up of Ukraine’s natural resources From the success of Keir Starmer’s visit to Washington to the squabbling we saw in the Oval Office and the breakdown of security guarantees for Ukraine – we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly of geopolitics in the last week, say Niall Ferguson and Nicholas Kulish in this week’s cover piece. They argue that what Donald Trump is really concerned with when it comes to Ukraine is rare earth minerals – which Ukraine has in abundance under its soil. The conventional wisdom is that the US is desperately short of these crucial minerals and, as Niall and Nicholas point out, the dealmaking president is driven by a nagging sense of inferiority in comparison to rare earth minerals powerhouse China.

Monday

Steerpike

Does Britain lack the minerals for green fight?

Amid all her remarks about tax cuts, freedom and, er, Don Revie, some of Liz Truss's comments were overlooked on Thursday evening. Speaking at the LBC hustings, the Foreign Secretary was asked by Nick Ferrari as to what she had learned from her four years at Shell. Truss paused and then replied: What I learned was how important the security of our energy is, and how we shouldn't take it for granted, and I think that it's very important in the future that we never again become dependent on regimes that we can't trust. That is what's happened with Russia, less so for the UK than other European countries, but we need to learn that lesson from China as well.