What happened
Reuters reports that the U.S., EU, Australia, Japan, and partners are pouring support into critical-minerals projects and stockpiles to reduce reliance on China. The warning from executives and analysts is sharp: if every government subsidizes the same capacity in isolation, security policy can become oversupply policy.
That is the strategic tension. Rare earths, cobalt, nickel, gallium, and antimony are not just rocks in a trade war. They are market systems with price signals, substitution risk, processing bottlenecks, and national security overlays. Coordination matters because uncoordinated resilience can destroy the economics of the very suppliers countries want to preserve.
The useful question is not "who can spend the most?" It is "who can build durable supply without crushing the producers needed for durability?"
Source
Reported by A warning to critical minerals buyers: avoid butter mountains, aluminium floods via reuters.com, published May 26, 2026.